Fast food

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But Marion and Hughes are fighters, figureheads in what some see as the next wave of the civil rights movement. The pair are leading voices in Stand Up Kansas City, the local chapter of the union-backed Fight for $15 movement, which is campaigning for a nationwide increase in the minimum wage. And they are determined to make a difference.

The Fight for $15 movement is probably the most high profile, and successful, labor movement in the US, and has successfully pushed for local raises in the minimum wage across the country, mostly in Democratic strongholds. Trump comfortably won Missouri in 2016, although the major cities Kansas City, St Louis and Columbia voted Democrat. But the pair are confident that by coming together, the millions of Americans working low wage jobs can effect change even now.

Its not just us, its all across America, says Hughes. She says she felt invisible before the Fight for $15 movement.

On 14 April 2015, campaigners held what was then the largest ever protest by low-wage workers in US history. About 60,000 workers took to the streets in cities across the country calling for an increase in the minimum wage.

When protesters came to Marions restaurant, she says most of the staff moved to the back of the restaurant to distance themselves from the activists while her corporate boss smirked and laughed as they read their demands and said what they needed. I looked at him and I thought, You dont have these worries, she says. How can you laugh at someone elses pain? And I am going through the same thing. Thats when I joined the Fight for $15.

wages

There is wave. There is momentum. I think that with all of working together, we will win $15 in the end, she says.

Its been almost a decade since the Great Recession, and America has witnessed a record 82 months of month-on-month jobs growth. The national unemployment rate now stands at a 4.3%, a 16-year low. But month after month, it is the low-wage sectors fast food, retail, healthcare that have added new jobs. Wage growth has barely kept pace with inflation. The national minimum wage ($7.25) was last raised in 2009.

Across the US, 58 million people earn less than $15 an hour; 41 million earn less than $12. In Missouri, Kansas City and St Louis councils recently passed local ordinances that would have increased the minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2023 in Kansas Citys case.

But backed by local and national business interests, Missouris governor, Eric Greitens a bestselling author, former Navy Seal and a rising Republican star has moved to roll back the increases, arguing businesses cant afford raises and will leave. Liberals say these laws help people, Greitens said in a statement. They dont. They hurt them.

Not so, says David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economics Policy Institute. We have decades of research on this and it all concludes that increases in the minimum wage have had negligible impact on jobs growth, he says. The academic debate is currently about whether that impact is a small gain in growth or a small drop. Either way, he says, a small rise in the minimum wage has an outsized impact on low wage workers. A $1 an hour rise from the current minimum of $7.25 would give the average low wage worker $2,000 more a year, says Cooper. That is a huge injection of income, he says.

The intense lobbying against an increase is simply a device to keep wages as low as possible so that employers can capture as much profit as they can, he says. Polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of an increase. At least 40 cities and states around the country will raise their minimum wages in 2017, thanks largely to ballot measures. Those measures will deliver raises of around $4,000 a year for more than one-third of the workforce in states like New York and California, according to the National Employment Law Project.

But Greitens is not alone in fighting back, helped by a study of the impact of Seattles minimum wage hike by the University of Washington, which seemed to suggest higher wages had translated to fewer jobs. That the methodology of that study has been heavily criticized (utter BS, according to Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies ) and stands in contrast to piles of studies that found the opposite hasnt negated its popularity with anti-wage hikers.

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Marion isnt in it for the politics. She is in it for the money, money that means one thing for her: getting her family back together and giving them a secure life. We pick her up at Popeyes and drive to a pleasant Kansas City suburb. Cicadas thrum as she beams strolling from the car to hug her daughter Rayven and goddaughter Shi Ann.

Shi Ann, in her rainbow hued LOVE T-shirt (the O is a butterfly), plays with princess flip-flops and squirms, giggling in Marions arms. Princesses dont put their fingers in their mouths, laughs Marion. I ask Rayven how it is living without her mum. The idyll is over. Tears fill her eyes. Marion goes inside so we cant see her cry.

Later, Marion says Rayven wants to leave school at 16 and get a job in fast food to help out. Ideally, her mum wants her to go to college but nothing is ideal for the Marion family at present.

After the visit, we drive back into the city to All Souls Unitarian church where Marion and Hughes are set to address a panel of academics, union leaders and others. The neighborhood is a world away from their own. A giant Louise Bourgeois spider menaces a manicured lawn at the Kemper art museum close by. The two women are unintimidated. They hold the room with ease as they talk about their fight with humor and a confidence that things will change.

Guests ask why they dont go back to school, get higher paid jobs. Hughes has a college degree but as the daughter of a low wage worker said she could only afford community college. Employers saw her degree as worthless, and she ended up $13,000 in debt. She did have a job in a tax office but lost it only to find that thanks to Missouris business-friendly rules, she was barred from working for another tax office by a non-compete agreement. (Fast food franchisor Jimmy Johns imposed a similar agreement on its workers but dropped it last year after a public backlash.)

Barred from tax office work, Hughes said fast food was all she could find.

Marion says the argument that fast food workers should leave for other, better paid, jobs misses the point. People like fast food. The companies that make it make fortunes. We are the foot soldiers for these billion-dollar companies. We are the ones doing the work and bringing the money, she says.

At the top of America, when it comes to Trump and them, their goal is to keep us down, she says. Between these billion-dollar companies and Trump, its a power trip.

They can afford to pay more and, she believes, eventually they will. We are still coming. No war has been won over night and we are not giving up.

More than that, she likes working in fast food. I love it. Im good at it. Just like Martin Luther King said, If you are going to be a road sweeper, be the best damn sweeper there is, she says. I dont know. Its just this society is all messed up.