Protests organized by a union front group intended to jam up tourists at Washington, D.C.’s, Air and Space Museum on Thursday failed to curb the appetites of customers or the efficiency of McDonald’s workers.
Change to Win, a coalition of labor unions, told the New York Times that it planned to create a "lunch hour crunch" by staging protests in support of a $15 hourly wage for food service contractors at the Smithsonian. Workers gathered with Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) in front of the Capitol on Thursday.
"The Capitol represents inequality. I’m struggling to survive on $12 an hour while my corporation makes billions in profit," food service worker Reginald Lewis said in a release. "We need the President to help us because this Congress will not."
Change to Win spokesman Paco Fabian said that about 700 people attended the protest. Despite the sizable turnout, business continued as usual at the food courts of the Smithsonian.
From a distance, it looked as though the demonstration was underway. A group of people in red shirts milled about the Jefferson Street entrance of the Air and Space Museum and chants echoed from a loudspeaker, as workers disassembled the scaffolding from HBO’s Veterans Day concert.
However, the red shirts belonged to Honor Flight veterans and the microphone to Falun Gong refugees protesting Chinese oppression.
The McDonalds workers scheduled to be taking to the streets in the fight for higher wages and better benefits were all inside manning the lunch hour procession of school children and tourists eager for $7.99 Big Mac meals.
Eight different employees working the counters and bussing tables were unaware that a protest was supposed to take place.
Nancy B., a McDonalds employee for 13 years who has worked from the bottom to become a manager, said that the company had not received any surprise absences at the time of the protests. The Air and Space Museum location employs about 200 workers and about 40 of them work the rush shift. Nancy was sympathetic to the protesters’ cause.
"Anything they can do to help the workers I’m for," she said.
Other employees were not as sympathetic. Daniel, who has worked at the Smithsonian McDonalds for five years, said that the government should not be interfering with the company’s pay scales.
"It’s not for the government to decide what they pay workers. It’s for the company to decide," he said.
President Obama has been campaigning to raise the national minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, a move that the Congressional Budget Office said could eliminate between 500,000 and 1 million jobs.
He used an executive order to raise federal contractor wages to the $10.10 hourly mark following his State of the Union speech. The Small Business Administration and the U.S. military have both said that this could lead to layoffs at eateries on federal property, such as military bases, because contractors cannot raise prices.
The Change to Win coalition and fellow protesters want Obama to build on his initial executive order by requiring contractors to raise pay beyond the $10.10 mark.
"The President knows when the federal government leads, the private sector follows. We hope he will take more bold action to reward federal contractors who treat their employees fairly and give workers a seat at the table to negotiate wages and benefits," Rep. Ellison said in a release.
McDonalds worker Daniel said that the president’s focus on executive orders, rather than passing legislation for all workers, is inappropriate.
"I wouldn’t so much mind a national minimum wage, but it should be left up to [contractors] how they run their business," he said.