Fast food workers across the planet strike today

There is a workers' uprising after all, two weeks after May Day.

From New York City to Nigeria and New Zealand, fast food workers will strike and protest on Thursday to demand higher pay and better working conditions — in a global day of action with unprecedented reach for the industry.

Workers and labor organizers across the globe have united in a campaign that aims to advance workers’ specific demands in each country, while also showing solidarity with the US-based push for a $15 hourly wage and workers’ right to unionize without fearing retaliation.

[...]

Rallies and sit-ins will take place in 33 countries and 150 cities — a list that is growing by the day, organizers said. The action is reaching countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, some for the first time, in addition to Europe and the Americas. In some locations, strikes and rallies in solidarity with US workers will continue on Friday.

In the US, thousands of workers are expected to strike in St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City among others — where they will demand the right to organize and a doubling of their wages from the current $7.25, the federal minimum wage.

If I were advising any Democratic politicians who had a goal of expanding the electorate six months from now, I would say: "Get out to the streets in front of a Papa John's or a Mickey D's today".

The global day of protest comes on the same day McDonald’s employees in California, Michigan, and New York filed class-action lawsuits against the hamburger chain – which serves an estimated 68 million customers daily in 119 countries - alleging the company is making employees work off the clock, refusing to pay overtime and even charging employees to have their uniforms cleaned.

“We’ve uncovered several unlawful schemes, but they all share a common purpose – to drive labor costs down by stealing wages from McDonald’s workers,” Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon LLP, the lawyer who filed the California suits, said in a media statement announcing the suits. “These McDonald’s workers have courageously stepped forward to shine a light on these illegal practices, and already we’ve begun to hear from several co-workers with similar wage theft claims.”

Refusing to pay in full the already poverty-level wages of their workers.  Counseling them to apply for public assistance (a cue taken from Walmart).  Record profits, lowest wages in the nation, and the broadest gap between what their employees and their top management earn.

Yeah, I'm not lovin' it.  That's a supersized order of revolution.  Make mine a combo, with some economic and social justice, please.

The gasps turned into shrieks

Conservative extremism is still death-rattling; it's just doing so a little louder than before. This was the scene yesterday in front of City Hall at lunchtime, just before council members convened to move forward on Houston's equal rights legislation.

Mayor Annise Parker and supporters of her proposed nondiscrimination ordinance announced a compromise Tuesday in hopes of deflecting controversy over a small provision that had dominated discussion on the measure.

A paragraph specifying that no business open to the public could deny a transgender person entry to the restroom consistent with his or her gender identity had outraged conservatives. Church and Republican political leaders have used the clause to claim the ordinance "provides an opportunity for sexual predators to have access to our families."

This 'sexual predator' bullshit is a transmogrification of the Xtianist, homophobic paranoia associated with conservatives having to potentially share a urinal or a stall with a TP (not a Tea Partier).  That and swastika cakes dominated the anti-HERO message before city council yesterday, and well into the night.

There may be some wavering, quivering CMs after yesterday's show of force by the local Talibaptists -- in which case you can shore up support by calling or e-mailing yours here, this morning -- but I expect this little fire to die out shortly after the vote is taken.

One more thing: the white face to the left of the bullhorn in the photo above -- white hair, grinning -- is that of Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.  The man who cannot get the county's votes properly counted.  The same man who cannot tally the county's early votes and post them to the website on time, as his predecessor was consistently able to do, is out of the office at a hate rally.

Please remember the name of his worthy challenger, Ann Harris Bennett, in November.

Update: Kuff has a good roundup of developments that include protests from the various caucuses within the Immoral Minority.

Update II: Postponed for two weeks.  Like others, I believe that justice delayed is justice denied.