THE GREASE
TRAP
fast-food and retail industries will
follow a similar trajectory.
In January, an organizer with
New York Communities for
Change, the main group behind
the April fast-food strike in New
York, walked into Barrera’s KFC
and asked if he wanted to join a
campaign for a $15 hourly wage. At
first Barrera was skeptical. “I said
you shouldn’t sell people a dream
that they can’t catch,” he recalls.
But he gave the organizer his
phone number and over the following weeks they spoke every few
days. Through his conversations
with that organizer and others,
he began to connect the dots between his personal struggles and
the larger theme of economic injustice. “When I look at my family, it’s like a vision of struggle,” he
said one recent afternoon. “My dad
struggled, my mom struggled, my
grandma struggled, and now I’m
struggling. It’s rigged that way. It’s
rigged that way to keep you down.”
A few weeks ago, Barrera came
to work to learn that his boss had
cut his hours from about 40 to
“You just have you wait
your turn, but that
turn may never come.”
HUFFINGTON
05.12.13
30 a week. The funds in his pocket
dwindled first to $20, then to $10.
He began arriving to work early
and leaving late, so that he could
sneak meals behind the manager’s
back. At one point, a cousin called
and asked for help with his transmission; Barrera fixed it for $20
and a couple of bowls of soup. He
still hopes to become a mechanic,
but until the state reauthorizes his
driver’s license, he’s unlikely to find
a decent-paying job at a dealership.
On the morning of April 4, Barrera was one of five workers who
walked out of his restaurant, leaving a newly hired cook and two
managers to try to fill the void on
their own.
That same day, he appeared on
a cable news show to talk about
the campaign. In the course of the
interview, he learned for the first
time that most new jobs in America pay low wages.
“I didn’t realize that,” he said
a few days later. “If workers get a
little more educated about what’s
going on, that would cause outrage.
It’s not that people don’t want to
fight. It’s that maybe they don’t
think anything better is even out
there. They think fast food is a low
job that isn’t meant to be a career,
and that may have been true a decade ago. But it’s different now.
That may be the only
career people can get.”