![]() Fast-food campaigners claim the profitable fast-food industry can comfortably absorb the cost of raising pay, but a study commissioned by the conservative Heritage Foundation claims fast-food restaurants would have to raise prices by 38% while still seeing profits fall by 77% and be forced to speed up the introduction of automation. In a largely symbolic gesture that has none the less given fast-food workers reason for optimism, SeaTac, a small, industrial neighbourhood near Seattle’s international airport, voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 from January. Pay us a wage so that we can take care of our families.” “It’s trickery between the government and the companies. “The companies are more powerful in New York so they’re keeping it down,” he protests. His family still collects food stamps to make ends meet and the modest increase will not keep up with the rise in the cost of living. Fast-food workers in New York, for instance, are seeing the minimum hourly wage raised to $9 over the next two years.īut it’s not enough, Major says. Over the summer, strikes and protests took place in 150 cities across the US and in 33 other countries. It’s unlikely to get through Congress, but there are signs that the Fight for 15 is forcing the hand of fast-food chains to improve compensation for 4.1 million US workers. Barack Obama revived a pledge to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 and then $10.10. Since 29 November 2012, when 200 fast-food workers gathered at dawn outside a McDonald’s on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan, chanting, “Hey, hey, what do you say, we demand fair pay”, the campaign has become what the New York Times calls “the biggest wave of job actions in the history of America’s fast-food industry”.Īs the protests spread to the midwest and the south, the movement began to pick up mainstream political support. These are our brothers and sisters from across the ocean. “The man from the union said, ‘we gotta learn from these guys. “They wanted to know what we’d been doing to start the movement, and what they can do to get it going,” Major says. ![]() The Americans pledged to show the British unions how to organise strikes, sit-ins and protests. The union, sponsor of the corresponding UK campaign that uses the slogan “hungry for justice”, has promised to send a delegation. In London, Major met representatives from the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union. “We can learn from them and they can learn from us.” “The movement in Europe is young but it’s energetic,” Major says after an eight-hour shift at KFC. They fall far short of US workers’ central demand: $15 an hour and union representation without fear of retaliation.Įuropean workers, meanwhile, are learning from their American counterparts. In the two years since the first strikes in New York, the movement has wrested small concessions from fast-food firms. Last week, Major returned from a visit to Denmark, France and the UK, where he met fast-food workers to exchange pledges of solidarity. “And from the first strike we learned how it was done.” He enlightened me.”Įventually, Major recalls, a group of them decided to take action. “I said I never got to see my wife and kids. Planet ‘e’ is about 10% smaller than planet ‘d’, which proves, by the way, that additional observations from TESS help us find smaller and smaller worlds.“He asked me how long I worked there, how much I earned,” Major told the Observer. This makes it an interesting prospect for further follow-up. When interviewed about it, Emily Gilbert, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who led the work, explained: “This is one of the few systems with multiple small habitable zone planets known. The exoplanet was about 100 light years away from Earth when it was spotted. After a year of observation and analysis, TOI 700 e was found. Planet ‘d’ also orbits in the habitable zone. Astronomers had previously discovered three planets in this system – named ‘TOI 700 b’, ‘TOI 700 c’ and ‘TOI 700 d’. NASA’s newly discovered planet and its Earth-sized sister are both in the habitable “Goldilocks” zone, where there could be surface liquid water. ![]() This new world is apparently 95% the size of Earth and probably a rocky world. Everything we know about “TOI 700 e,” the exoplanet NASA discovered in a habitable zone Using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, better known as TESS, NASA scientists have identified a world similar to our own, at least in terms of surface area. NASA has discovered another potentially habitable, Earth-sized planet. ![]()
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