Some workers in New York City fast food restaurants had been warned not to take part in the planned action. Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy
Hundreds of fast food industry workers in New York were due to go on strike on Thursday in the largest such action to ever hit the notoriously low-wage industry.
Organisers behind the protest predict that some 400 workers will walk out or stay away from their jobs across the city in a move aimed at impacting at least 70 restaurants from big chains like McDonalds, Wendy's and Burger King.
The workers are calling for wages of $15 an hour and the right to organise without the threat of retaliation or intimidation. It follows a previous protest in New York last November when 200 workers went on strike.
Jonathan Westin, director of the Fast Food Forward Campaign, said that there was a dire need to raise wages in the fast food industry where many workers put in long hours on minimum wages and thus remained in poverty. There are some 50,000 fast food workers in New York who, organisers say, earn between $10,000 and $18,000 a year – making it difficult to get by in a city known for its sky-high rents and high prices. "They can't pay rent. That is exactly the opposite the chief executives of the companies they work for who earn huge profits," he said.
Westin said this second strike was aimed at building on the momentum of the first protest, which had previously been the largest action to hit the industry. That protest added to an already intense media debate over the rise of a low-wage economy in America as the country's economy struggles to recover.
Westin said that some workers in New York City fast food restaurants had been warned by their managers not to take part in any further action. "The corporations know that workers are organising. They have been told that they should not take actions and there is a chance that they could be fired," Westin said.
However, that has not discouraged workers like Naquasia Legrand, a 21-year-old Brooklyn-born worker at fried chicken chain KFC. Legrand, who is joining the strike, said that she was barely able to make enough to get by as her wages were so low. "You have to decide whether to feed your family or get a Metrocard so you can go to work. Or you have to choose between paying your rent or feeding your child," she said.
Legrand, who also took part in last November's action, insisted she was not afraid of retaliation from her employer for walking off work. "We have the right to do this. If anything happens we will retaliate back," she added.
The fast food strike is the latest attempt by workers' rights groups to target low-wage parts of the American economy. In the wake of the recession many of the jobs being created in the US are low-wage. Indeed fast-food restaurants have added jobs more than twice as fast as the average for the rest of the economy since the recovery began in June, 2009. Last year also saw a wave of strikes hit gigantic big box retailer Walmart.
Organisers say that the booming low-wage economy hurts workers and contributes to a growing inequality in the country. They also say many workers in such low-wage restaurants also qualify for state assistance, such as food stamps, and so the government is effectively subsidising the workforce of huge corporations. "Corporations are building a low-wage economy. It is the economy that we have become, but we have to lift these people out of poverty,' said Westin.
The campaign has attracted widespread support among New York's clergy. Various leaders from churches, synagogues and mosques throughout the city are expected to join a series of pickets planned to spring up outside fast food restaurants from Harlem to Midtown. One of them is Imam Abdul Karim Rahim, who serves at a mosque in the Bronx. "These workers need our support. They come and support us in the churches, the mosques and the synagogues. They are part of our congregations. But now we have to support them," he said.
Organisers behind the strike have also sought to draw a link between the protest and the fact it is happening on the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. At the time of his death, King was campaigning on behalf of low-wage sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Last week two of those strikers involved in the 1968 dispute travelled to New York and spoke to workers involved with the current fast food campaign at a series of pep talks in the city.