Hospital workers will join Detroit fast-food employees Monday as they protest for a $15 per hour wage and union rights, according to a Detroit Free Press report.
The Detroit workers are among numerous fast-food employees slated to protest across the nation's Mid-South region Monday. The protests will take place on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, where workers lobbied for higher pay and better working conditions.
According to news release cited in the report, fast-food workers will be joined by Service Employees International Union Local 1 members, Detroit City Council President Pro Tem Mary Sheffield, hospital workers and other allies. In addition to better pay and union rights, fast-food employees are also supporting the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival movement.
"We're going to send a message to corporations and politicians that their time of rigging the economy against workers is over," the Rev. W.J. Rideout, one of the local protest organizers, said, according to the Detroit Free Press. "We have to stand up and fight back."
In response to the protests, Michigan Restaurant Association President and CEO Justin Winslow said in a statement to the publication: "These protests, well intentioned as they may be, only serve to limit these opportunities for the very people they are claiming to help. We now have strong, unbiased evidence from a University of Washington study in 2017 that Seattle's recent push for a $15 minimum wage unequivocally resulted in disemployment, unemployment and an aggregate loss of payroll for entry-level workers in the city. In other words, while the $15 mandate helped a few people a little bit, it hurt many others by being scheduled for fewer shifts or actual job loss."
Eight states — Alaska, Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio and South Dakota — have recently implemented increased minimum wages based on the cost of living, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Eleven other states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — increased their minimum wages this year due to previously approved legislation or ballot initiatives.
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