After a long fight a victory has been achieved by low wage workers in fast food restaurants.This time in California the activists and workers fighting for a $15 minimum wage just secured their biggest victory to date. Starting in 2017, California will gradually begin raising the statewide minimum wage to $15, marking a huge victory for the populist workers’ movement that began four years ago. This also will mean that more workers from those companies will be fired because companies just like the profit and some of them can't give 15$ to as many workers as they have today. Companies will be closed and moving to a places where the minimum wages are lower. According to the LA Times, Governor Jerry Brown has reached a deal with the state’s labor unions to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour through legislation passed by both the California Assembly and Senate.Under the deal reached by Gov. Brown, legislative leaders, and California’s labor unions, the minimum wage will increase to $10.50 an hour on January 1, $11 an hour in January of 2018, then dollar-per-year increases would follow until 2022. The deal will affect approximately 118,000 California workers. Businesses that employ fewer than 25 workers will have an extra year to pay workers $15 an hour.The deal comes on the heels of California’s two biggest cities — Los Angeles and San Francisco — each passing $15 minimum wage laws through the legislative process and the ballot box, respectively.The only other state that has passed a statewide $15 minimum wage is New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state wage board agreed to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for fast food workers in New York City by 2018, and throughout the rest of the state by 2021. California is the only state to raise the minimum wage to $15 for all workers in all industries across the board.In scoring numerous citywide, countywide, and statewide victories, the Fight for $15 movement has proven itself to be an effective exercise in how demanding radical change is not an impossible task, even in a corrupt and compromised political system. The “Fight for 15” began on November 29, 2012 when over 100 fast food workers in New York City organized and went on strike, walking off the job at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Papa John’s, KFC, and Pizza Hut to demand a $15 an hour wage and the right to form a union.By December of 2013, fast food worker strikes spread to dozens of other major US cities, and the movement had garnered the backing of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).One year later, fast food and retail workers were striking in 190 cities.And by November 2015, Fight for $15 strikes happened in 270 cities nationwide. Tactics had grown to include not just strikes, however, but also civil disobedience, with over 100 low-wage workers willfully getting arrested at the McDonald’s headquarters in Illinois.Workers also organized at the ballot box, electing Occupy activist and Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council. In 2014, Sawant led the effort for Seattle to become the first city to pass a $15 an hour minimum wage.At a time when elected officials and political candidates were calling for piecemeal reforms, like President Obama’s call for a $10.10 an hour minimum wage, the Fight for 15 refused to settle for crumbs and insisted the current $7.25 an hour minimum wage must be more than doubled so that workers could have a decent standard of living. The math is on the side of the workers — for a minimum wage worker earning $15 an hour, working a full-time, 40-hour work week, that would only amount to $31,200 before taxes. That’s $20,000 less than current US median income. While raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour may seem drastic, it’s actually happened before.In 1949, President Truman raised the federal minimum wage from 40 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour. And contrary to the sky-is-falling argument propagated by supply-side economists, employment levels remained steady and demand for goods and services increased, as 1.3 million people received immediate raises and cycled that money back into the economy. Source:http://usuncut.com/news/california-raises-minimum-wage-15-hour/
The deal comes on the heels of California’s two biggest cities — Los Angeles and San Francisco — each passing $15 minimum wage laws through the legislative process and the ballot box, respectively.The only other state that has passed a statewide $15 minimum wage is New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state wage board agreed to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for fast food workers in New York City by 2018, and throughout the rest of the state by 2021. California is the only state to raise the minimum wage to $15 for all workers in all industries across the board.In scoring numerous citywide, countywide, and statewide victories, the Fight for $15 movement has proven itself to be an effective exercise in how demanding radical change is not an impossible task, even in a corrupt and compromised political system.
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