The Fast Food Rights campaign, organised by the bakers' union BFAWU, Youth Fight for Jobs and others, has been causing a stir with our protests outside McDonalds, KFCs and Burger Kings across the country.

Many worried looking customers have stopped to ask: "Is there something wrong with the food?" Well...probably! But worse than the rumours of 'pink slime', chicken beaks in the nuggets and food that inexplicably refuses to decay, is the rotten way these multi-million pound companies treat their staff. Fast food workers are often on poverty pay, zero-hour contracts and denied basic rights.

Insecurity

I am a temporary hospitality worker and one of the 2.7 million people employed on a zero-hour contract. I know what it's like to worry about whether I will get enough hours to live on each week, to travel miles at my own expense only to find I'm needed for just a few hours, and to fear that speaking out will result in me being dropped completely.

I also know how easy it is to feel powerless against such huge companies. But as experience has shown time and time again, when the workers unionise, organise and fight back, we are incredibly powerful.

Last November, socialist Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant led a successful grassroots campaign to raise her city's minimum wage to the highest in the country - $15 an hour. This movement, whose success will lift 100,000 workers out of poverty, had to take on the same multinationals who are keeping workers on unjustly low pay in England. They won, and so can we.

BFAWU organised its members at the Hovis factory in Wigan in a two-week strike against zero-hour contracts and won. We should look to Wigan, Seattle and countless other towns and regions where victories have been won by the workers. We can defeat the traps of low pay and zero-hours!

Fast Food Rights fights for a minimum wage of £10 an hour and guaranteed hours of work. These companies' obscene profits every year prove that they can more than afford it. The campaign is holding a lobby of parliament over these issues on 21 November. Join us!

Fast Food Rights protest

12. 30pm, 21 November

Old Palace Yard, Westminster, London

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Finance appeal

The coronavirus crisis has laid bare the class character of society in numerous ways. It is making clear to many that it is the working class that keeps society running, not the CEOs of major corporations.

The results of austerity have been graphically demonstrated as public services strain to cope with the crisis.

The government has now ripped up its 'austerity' mantra and turned to policies that not long ago were denounced as socialist. But after the corona crisis, it will try to make the working class pay for it, by trying to claw back what has been given.

The Socialist Party's material is more vital than ever, so we can continue to report from workers who are fighting for better health and safety measures, against layoffs, for adequate staffing levels, etc.
When the health crisis subsides, we must be ready for the stormy events ahead and the need to arm workers' movements with a socialist programme - one which puts the health and needs of humanity before the profits of a few.

Inevitably, during the crisis we have not been able to sell the Socialist and raise funds in the ways we normally would.

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