Fast-food workers stage strike across US

Fast-food workers took to the streets to demand higher minimum wages in hundreds of American cities on Thursday.

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, protesters 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.
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.
The demonstrations come in the wake of Walmart workers protests on Black Friday at about 1,500 US 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.