Fighting for Fast-Food Rights

Click here to watch an interview with Helen Pattison from Youth Fight for Jobs featured on tonight’s Channel 4 News.

For an empowering two hours earlier this evening, McDonald’s in Leicester was host to an international solidarity protest. Invitations had been sent out by the Baker Food and Allied Workers Union and Youth Fight for Jobs, and the activists who came to this feast of resistance were determined and hungry for change, eager to demonstrate their support for all fast-food workers labouring under zero-hour contracts.

After talking to and distributing Fast Food Rights leaflets to workers and staff in most of Leicester’s corporate fast-food chains, a dozen or so protesters then converged upon McDonald’s. Here speakers proceeded to recount stories of hope, along with tales of daily oppression, and outlined a much-needed strategy for change that might bring an end to the continuing abuse of millions of workers under sub-human ‘contracts.’

The inspiring example set by Hovis workers providing but just one ray of hope for change. For further details, see “Bakers rise against Hovis: Victory shows zero-hours can be beaten.”

Critically, Leicester’s defiant protest was just one of dozens taking place across the country, and at the event especial mention was made of workers in Seattle (USA) who have played a key role in helping coordinate today’s global fast-food strike. There in Seattle the rallying slogan today was for $15 dollar a hour as a basic living wage for all workers.

But the progress being made in Seattle provides but one of many rays of resistance from across the Atlantic, with thousands of fast-food workers across 160 cities in the United States walking out of work today to join the biggest US fast food strike yet that our growing movement has seen. Here they were building upon previous successful strike actions that are a vital part of a continuing movement to pressure giant corporations to raise wages and lift workers out of poverty.

Owing to the global nature of the exploitation of workers by fat-cat bosses and the growing organisation of the working-class, simultaneous protests took place in 33 countries around the world with activists using the same twitter hash-tag (#FASTFOODGLOBAL) to link up their actions.

“The Fight for 15 in the US has caught the attention of workers around the world in a global fast-food industry where workers have recently been mobilizing,” said Ron Oswald, general secretary of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations.

“It has added further inspiration and led them to join together internationally in a fight for higher pay and better rights on the job. This is just the beginning of an unprecedented international fast-food worker movement—and this highly profitable global industry better take note.”