The Fight for 15

I’ve been within the fast-food industry since I was sixteen years old (nearly eighteen years now), and I’ve seen the worst and the best of it. When I started, as a school kid just looking for some extra cash, minimum wage was just that here in New York. Minimum money for minimum work. We were only ever asked to do one thing at a time, and even our managers barely did one thing. Everyone had a place or a piece of the puzzle they handled, and the machine worked. Mostly. Sure, you would get that one customer who would come in and scream in your face, and the managers would look away, but it was rare (at least in my experience—guess I might have just been lucky).

But then things changed. The word got out that employees throughout the country were protesting to make more money. That was just fine with us in my little tiny town, but none of us were going to protest. We were getting max hours every week, and sometimes we were even getting overtime (during summer anyway). But with the news covering the story, customers got more and more irritable. If their food wasn’t ready the moment we handed them their change for an order, they snarked back at us.

“And you want to make $15 an hour? You can’t even do this right.” Most kids did not know what these people were talking about and just stared at them blankly, which resulted in more insults and more nasty remarks. If the managers didn’t stand up for the younger employees, then you saw them leaving shortly after. The workplace was no longer a safe place to be, not with customers coming in and insulting them to their face.

That’s the biggest problem with the industry. The quote being: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (women) to do nothing.” I would think about this often and still do. It even affected me just today as a woman showed up at our store before we opened looking for help from a dangerous situation. I knew managers of the past who would have slammed the door in her poor crying face and left her to fend for herself, only concerned with themselves. But that is not how the world should be. We should offer a helping and willing hand to those in need. We should not be turning a blind eye to the suffering of others.

Every time a young crew member left because a manger did not act when a customer threatened said crew member, or taunted them, or called them named… I felt a piece of me being destroyed. I was seeing the youth of our country, who had come to our store to start their future. We were the first place they would see in the job market and this was their first impression.

I vowed those years ago that when I could finally be a manager of my own, I would never allow that to happen. I’ve been lucky since those dark days that I’ve gotten better managers and better support, and have become the manager that I’ve always wanted.

But it doesn’t stop the fight.

Those protested wanted to make a living wage BECAUSE of those taunts. Because every day they came into work and they would have to face those nasty comments, the customers who ‘were always right’, the managers who refused to help them, dangerous working environments around hot oil and grills with little to no protection. When you get injured or sick, you can’t tell anyone for fear that you could lose your job completely. Sure, it would be illegal for them to fire you, but what’s stopping them from finding other reasons? Nothing.

That $15 fight wasn’t just about the money, it was about making the world see that what we workers do is necessary for the rest of you to live your lives.

Think back to the shut-down of the country. To the dark early days of the COVID pandemic.

Restaurants were closed. Stores were out of stock. People were locked away in their homes.

But the essential employees weren’t, and what were they supposed to do? They had to go to work. All of those truck drivers out on the road now had nowhere to stop for a drink or a sandwich on their long drives. They had no stores to buy food because people had cleaned out the ready-made sections in panic. Nurses couldn’t stop and get coffee on the go, and the stores had no easy snacks because again, they were out.

So, what was the solution?

Fast Food.

Places like McDonald’s became essential for the country to continue to move along. They fed the nurses on their way to twelve-to-twenty-hour long shifts. They fed the truckers on their California to New York runs to restock grocery stores and places like Walmart. They fed the emergency servicemen and women who had been out on calls all night and day, who just wanted a hot drink and meal before a nap.

I’m proud to say that I worked nearly every day during that time at a McDonald’s. Was it easy? No. Not at all. It hurt me every single day seeing these people having no choice but to come through the drive through to get some quick food and drink before they were locked away in whatever life-saving job they were doing. They were heroes and all we could do was give them discounts on coffee sometimes.

That fight for $15 made that possible. Without that fight, there would have been no way anyone would have bothered staying and working during that time. They would all have quit and stayed at home. Without McDonald’s feeding all those people, I wonder what would have happened. Would the other chains have stepped up as quickly and hard as they did? I’d like to think they would have. But having worked for a few others, I’m also not so sure either.

It was a long hard road getting to where we are now. It’s still not perfect. Everyday customers are getting worse, throwing it back in our faces that we make “$15 an hour to flip a burger”, but that’s not even part of what we do.

We make that $15 an hour to serve the police officer who just had to tell a wife that her husband was shot.

We make that $15 an hour to serve some old man's coffee so they can sit and chat with their friends, just like old times.

We make that $15 an hour to help a high school student see what the job industry is going to be like.

We make that $15 an hour to bring a smile to the face of someone who’s had the worst day ever.

It isn’t about the food. It isn’t about money. It’s about experience. It’s about the people you meet and interact with. It was a fight to get here and it’ll be a fight to stay here. But as long as we keep fighting for what’s right, we’ll be just fine.

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