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
FROM THE HEADLINES THE FIGHT FOR 15 The campaign to raise the minimum wage to 15 an hour began in 2012 The Service Employees International Union SEIU supported it Workers from fast food chains such as McDonald's and Taco Bell took part in several protests for higher wages and the right to join a union On November 10 2015 the protest became a daylong strike that involved thousands of workers in cities across the country It included restaurant workers as well as low paid hourly employees in other industries such as home care childcare nursing homes hotels and delivery services Unlike previous rallies the November 10 protest had a political and economic purpose Demonstrators gathered outside the Senate in Washington DC and outside local city halls to influence politicians at the federal and local levels They protested at the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee Wisconsin Workers pledged not to vote for presidential candidates who did not support the Fight for 15 They indicated they would hold voter registration drives to increase the number of workers who would use their influence in the 2016 election Opponents of the 15 minimum wage pointed out that many cities and states already had a minimum wage higher than the federal level of 7 25 They also argued that low wage jobs in industries such as fast food chains are not intended to be a
lifelong career Business owners indicated they could not afford to double the minimum wage to meet the demands of the workers As a result jobs would be cut Supporters of raising the minimum wage marched on November 10 2015
