Now it was the weekend and he was headed home. He parked his car in the little alley lot behind his house and, passing through the door, he kicked his shoes off, donned a pair of slippers and prepared a mug of tea. He sat down with his television set and ate the box of chicken he had brought back from the restaurant. Within an hour, remote control beside him, still dressed in his uniform, he had drifted off to sleep.
If Mr. Shoy were differently employed, he might have remained that way till morning. But as a fast-food worker paid the minimum wage — $ 7.25 an hour in New York — he didn’t have the luxury. At 10 p.m., he was up again and back in his car, this time driving to his second job, as a forklift operator at Kennedy International Airport, where he makes $ 13 an hour. Having worked all day, he was about to work all night: from 11 p.m. until 7:30 a.m. At 3 that afternoon, he would return to his deliveries at the restaurant. Then, at 11, he would once again drive to the airport.
Altogether, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, Mr. Shoy would sleep for 13 hours and work for 44. “Tired?” he asked, sounding puzzled by the question. “I’m too busy to be tired.”
There are 55,000 fast-food workers in New York — more than the entire population of Harrisburg, Pa. — and most, like Mr. Shoy, are struggling to stitch together a living in an industry where the median wage is $ 8.90 an hour. Last year, fast-food workers in Manhattan earned average pay of $ 19,000 — or about the cost of Mr. Shoy’s Honda. In Brooklyn, it was $ 15,500; on Staten Island, less.
Since 2000, the number of fast-food jobs in New York City has increased by more than 50 percent — 10 times as fast as in any other type of private job. But the conspicuous increase has not received the attention given, say, to the city’s high-tech industry, nor has it lessened the financial insecurities of this growing work force.
According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $ 8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $ 8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.
The classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs after class is sorely out of date. Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry. These days, according to the National Employment Law Project, the average age of fast-food workers is 29. Forty percent are 25 or older; 31 percent have at least attempted college; more than 26 percent are parents raising children. Union organizers say that one-third to one-half of them have more than one job — like Mr. Shoy, who is 58 and supports a wife and children.
The fast-food industry says that what is going on here is a structural anomaly: that its wages were not intended to sustain a permanent work force — especially adults supporting families — and that it is happening because of larger economic forces. “The minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage,” said Steve Caldeira, the president of the International Franchise Association, a trade group for restaurants and other franchised firms. “It was meant, from the start, for entry-level workers and for those with lower skills.”
Traditionally, the fast-food industry has proved resistant to unionization. There is no one central employer against whom to strike, because most of the restaurants are franchised. McDonald’s and Burger King alone have tens of thousands of locations across the country. And until very recently, the demographic nature of the workers themselves was also a problem: many, as the industry said, were youthful transients and proved difficult to organize at job sites they were likely to leave.
But a year ago last week, the largest series of strikes against the fast-food industry in American history began in New York City. The protests started at a McDonald’s at Madison Avenue and 40th Street, where scores of angry workers stood in front of the familiar golden arches, waving signs and chanting rhyming slogans. By the end of the day, workers at dozens of franchised restaurants — Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Wendy’s and the like — had walked off the job, in an action that concluded with a rally outside a McDonald’s in Times Square.
Working under the name Fast Food Forward and funded by a giant labor group, the Service Employees International Union, the organizers set a pair of goals — to unionize the industry and to make demands for a $ 15 minimum wage — and began an unusual campaign of one-day flash strikes. The strategy caught on. Last April, five months after the first strike in New York, the fast-food actions — now with the umbrella name Fight for 15 (for the $ 15 wage demand) — spread to cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle and Kansas City. Over the summer, thousands more fast-food workers took to the streets in nearly 50 municipalities, including Memphis and Raleigh, N.C., in the traditionally union-resistant South.
In New York, the recent elections resulted in the city’s three top positions — mayor, public advocate and comptroller — all being filled by supporters of the campaign, while the incoming City Council could be among the most union-friendly in decades, said Jonathan Westin, an organizer of the movement here. Mr. Westin also said support for a higher minimum wage was slowly growing among state lawmakers in Albany.
There was another sign of the movement’s growth — small, but not insignificant — that went unnoticed in the noisy play of politics.
Eduardo Shoy, a man too busy to sleep for more than four hours a night, made time this summer to attend his first strike.
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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