CHAPTER ONE WHO ARE THE POOR AIvin Major worked three jobs at fast food restaurants in Brooklyn New York At a salary of 7 25 an hour even his 80 hour workweeks could barely support his four children and his wife who had been diagnosed with cancer In November 2012 Major took action He joined 200 New York City fast food workers in a mass walkout We decided we couldn't remain silent any longer Major said We were going to go on strike The workers demanded 15 an hour and the Fight for 15 soon became a nationwide movement to raise pay for millions of low wage workers Those workers included Dominique McCrae who worked at a fast food restaurant in Durham North Fast food workers in Chicago Illinois protest for a higher minimum wage
Carolina for 7 55 an hour The 23 year old dropped out of college to care for her child and her grandfather We just want to be able to support our families she said Another worker was Kheila Cox a 38 year old mother of seven who earned 10 an hour as a baggage handler in Boston Massachusetts It's not just the financial piece Cox said it's also about the dignity 3 THE FACES OF POVERTY Common images of the poor include homeless men and women transporting everything they own in a bag or a cart sleeping on park benches or in makeshift shelters in the poorest parts of a city They include people lined up at soup kitchens for a meal or begging on a street corner with a sign that reads Will work for food Television documentaries take viewers into impoverished rural areas where families defeated by poverty live in shacks without running water or electricity These are the poor but they are not the only faces of poverty The phrase the poor implies that people who live in poverty are a single group but that is inaccurate Some groups of people and some locations have higher rates of
People living in poverty can include veterans children and disabled people poverty than others but poverty is not limited to one race age group or gender It is not confined to one location it is global Sometimes poverty is obvious and sometimes it is invisible Harley Shaiken a labor expert at the University of California Berkeley commented on the low wage protesters in Los Angeles California For many of us these are workers who we see every day yet they're invisible What the Fight for 15 has done is give faces names and personal stories that many perhaps most working Americans can identify with 4
