We hope that you can join us for this historic event! Fast Food Workers in the Fight for $15, Citizen Action of New York, local clergy, labor leaders and community members will join together in Albany for the 50th Anniversary of the Historic Memphis Sanitation Strike and to announce the Fight for $15 joining the Poor People’s Campaign.
WHEN: Monday, February 12, 2018 at 12 pm at the State St. entrance of the NYS Capitol & 5:30 pm at the McDonalds at 391 Central Ave. in Albany.
Fast food workers in the Fight for $15 will hold a press conference at the State Capitol at 12 noon and a rally and protest at the local McDonald’s on Monday, February 12th joining protests stretching coast to coast on the 50th anniversary of the historic Memphis sanitation strike, which became a rallying cry of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Albany workers will vow to continue the sanitation workers’ fight for higher wages and union rights and show their support for cooks and cashiers across the Mid-South who will be striking Monday for $15 and union rights. Local fast-food workers will also announce Monday they will participate in six weeks of direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience beginning Mother’s Day as part of the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, uniting two of the nation’s most powerful social movements in a common fight for strong unions to lift people of all races out of poverty.
The protests and strikes across the country will culminate in a 1,500-person march in Memphis from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – the same route sanitation workers walked 50 years ago – led by strikers in the Fight for $15 from across the Mid-South, Memphis sanitation workers who participated in the 1968 strike, and prominent labor and civil rights leaders.
The Memphis sanitation strike began on Feb. 12, 1968, when hundreds of Black men went on strike for recognition of their union, a local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and demanded a raise to $2 an hour – the equivalent of $15.73 today.
We look forward to seeing you at one or both events.
In solidarity,
Jamaica
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