LOS ANGELES—“Striketober” may be over, but forced worker walkouts continue, with a big one coming on Nov. 9 by fast-food workers in California.
And a mandatory 10-day strike plan announcement by unions representing 32,000 Kaiser workers nationwide will be issued the same day. Another 8,000 may join them the week after; 12,000 more are affected.
The AFL-CIO has christened this next phase of labor uprisings “Strikesgiving,” with Thanksgiving on the horizon and fall carrying into the holiday season.
The first big walk out of the month by McDonald’s workers in Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, and San Diego is over health and safety conditions and especially the burger chain’s refusal to deal with sexual harassment on the job.
The latest horrifying case was in a McDonald’s restaurant in Pittsburgh. Male manager Walter Garner, 42—a registered sex offender whom the firm did not check out—raped a 14-year-old woman worker in a bathroom in February, after harassing two others in prior months. One of her friends told school officials, who called police, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.