And I shouldn’t get zero.”
Just days after the nation honored Martin Luther King’s legacy – and a week before President Obama delivers his State of the Union remarks – low-wage federally contracted food and janitorial workers at the Pentagon and four other U.S. Government buildings walked off their jobs to strike against poverty pay.
“I serve American heroes, and I shouldn’t get zero,” 52 year-old Pentagon food service worker Jerome Hardy told Salon. “I still make $9 an hour. Eight years, I haven’t gotten a quarter raise, a dime, a nickel, nothing. So my bills are falling behind. I need more money.”
Jerome and “more than 100 Pentagon contract workers carrying posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ picketed outside the building Wednesday,” reported the Marine Corps Times.
The strike marks the first time Pentagon workers have walked off their jobs as part of the Good Jobs Nation campaign, and marks the seventh strike in seven months by contract workers at landmark federal buildings, including Union Station, Smithsonian Museums, The Old Post Office, and the Ronald Reagan Building.
“Even as the Obama administration presses for a higher federal minimum wage,” CBS News noted, “the government is facing increasing criticism over the relatively low wages that many federal contractors pay.”
“There are two million low-wage workers who work for federal contractors, and in these contracts, there’s no provisions that a responsible wage be paid to these people,” U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison told NPR’s Morning Edition.
With the President’s efforts to raise the minimum wage blocked by Congress, The Huffington Post reported that the strikers “hoped Obama would make good on a recent promise to use executive action to help workers and fight income inequality.”
The striking contract workers are joined by members of the US House and Senate, as well as the leaders of national religious organizations and the NAACP, who are all calling on President Obama to bypass Congress and lead by example and transform millions of federally-funded low-wage jobs into good-paying jobs with the stroke of a pen.
A recent Demos report revealed that the US Government is now America’s leading low-wage job creator. In Washington D.C., a National Employment Law Project study found that 77% of workers earn under $10 an hour and 4 in 10 rely on public assistance programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid, to survive. To add insult to injury, not only do these taxpayer-supported companies pay poverty wages but they also rank among the worst labor law violators in the country, according to a recent Senate report.
Robert Kuttner, writing in the The American Prospect, urged the President to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King and use his State of the Union speech to “not only issue an executive order on wage standards for federal contractors, but also require that they follow other labor laws or be barred from doing business with the government, just like companies that violate civil rights laws…As Dr. King declared in his last speech, on April 4, 1968,
‘The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.’
The issue is still economic injustice. Today’s victims are the abused workers of federal contractors.”
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