Fast-food workers took to the streets to demand higher minimum wages in hundreds of American cities on Thursday, Reuters reported.
Citing the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 to be too low and not enough to live on, workers demanded the wage to be raised to $15 an hour. However critics argued that doubling the minimum wage would cost jobs, and have the negative effect of forcing employers to cut back on the number of workers hired.
Organizers said New York and Washington, D.C. were expected to have the largest job actions.
Shortly after dawn on Thursday, protestors were seen picketing at a McDonald's restaurant in New York City, where 57,000 fast-food workers earn an average of $8.89 an hour, Reuters reported.
In Washington, D.C. 150 people gathered to picket outside the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum after federal workers at the McDonald's inside the building walked off the job.
"While McDonald's rakes in tons of money from its contract with the federal government, I have to walk to work because I can't even afford the bus fare," said Alexis Vasquez in a statement issued by organizers of the Smithsonian's McDonald's workers.
According to Reuters, the demonstrations come in the wake of Walmart workers protests on Black Friday at about 1,500 U.S. stores.
Fast-food workers claim today's minimum wages as inadequate and not adjusted to inflation, as Congress has done since the first minimum wage was set in 1938. Instead, they are depending on federal aid for support.
According to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois, between the years of 2007 and 2011, 52 percent of fast-food cooks, cashiers and other staff have been relying on at least one form of public assistance, such as Medicaid, food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit program.
