On top of the customary musical accompaniment to their Happy Meals, customers at the McDonald’s on Williston Road in South Burlington were serenaded on Thursday with a noontime chant of “Hold the burgers, hold the fries, make our wages supersize!”
About two dozen protesters brought their demand for livable wages into the busy fast-food eatery as McDonald’s workers looked on silently — and seemingly stunned. It was unclear how much those workers make; local managers also declined to comment on the local manifestation of a nationwide day of walkouts and solidarity demonstrations at fast-food restaurants in support of a $15-an-hour wage.
The demonstrators weren’t at all reticent. One of them led several others in the “mic check” call-and-response popularized by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“On this day …” the leader shouted.
Her fellow protesters joined in with this chant: ” …Workers in 100 cities/are going on strike/and people like us/are standing with them/to demand McDonald’s respect the right/ to work with dignity.”
A South Burlington police officer rushed into the restaurant at that point and told the protestors they had to leave. They filed out a couple of minutes later, resuming their chant and sign-waving on the sidewalk for half an hour as several passing motorists honked in response.
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Sorry not at all. Two guesses left.
Nonsense, in Vermont there is always money everywhere, just ask the Socialists in Burlington. If we just all pooled our money together and then distributed it back out evenly we would all be super happy, no crime, nobody feels sad and world peace would be achieved.
Hmm. Howbout the stereotyping by the preppie protesters, who just assume that the unsophisticated workers in South Burlington must want or need their help? Who assume that the unsophisticated workers can’t decide or speak for themselves? None of the protesters even talked to the workers on whose supposed behalf they were protesting. No stereotyping there . . .
It’s fair enough to deduce that companies such as McD’s have the revenue stream to increase the minimum wage of their workers to $15 an hour. But for many small businesses who treat their employees well but can only pay a lesser wage (such as my first job out of college with a non-profit, paying about $11/hr), such an increase could lead to the end of their business. Money doesn’t just magically appear in the economy… it has to come from somewhere.
Yeah! bunch of free loading commie rats those people are, the ones who work full time and need the government to subsidize half their living. Damn pinkos.
it’s painfully obvious you don’t stereotype enough
Seems to me, though I’m not prepared to keep up with Kelci, the economist, that the increased income from millions of these workers would go directly into the economy.
While I understand the demand for higher minimum wage, nearly doubling the current minimum at once would create major compression issues within the economy – if fast food workers suddenly make $15 an hour, many jobs currently requiring a college degree would be paying equal to, or less than, your first-day-on-the-job McDonald’s employee. If $15 per hour is the goal, I think it would need to be accomplished over several smaller increases over multiple years.
Holy Smokes. It’s painfully obvious from the photos and the text that none of these preppies who are protesting, with their North Face and L.L. Bean and Carhart clothing, are fast food workers or have anything in common with them.
“The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A…