Thirty Northwestern students joined a crowd of 8,000 in downtown Chicago to rally for a $15 minimum wage, along with protesters in more than 230 cities around the world.
The rally was organized by a union of fast food workers, and ran from University of Illinois at Chicago to a McDonald’s in downtown Chicago. Chicago’s minimum wage is currently $8.25 an hour, but it is slated to rise to $10 in July and to $13 by 2019, after which it will be pegged to inflation.
Many of the students at the march were a part of IIRON Students of Northwestern United (ISNU), a chapter of IIRON (the Illinois Indiana Regional Organizing Network), which is an organizing network for collective action.
Qiddist Hammerly, a SESP junior and core member of Northwestern’s IIRON chapter, saw the day’s protest as an opportunity for the group.
“This is a national day of action, so we as Northwestern’s chapter of the IIRON network wanted to use this opportunity to get students out here and involved in the organization process,” Hammerly said. “To be working full time or working multiple jobs and still not be able to make ends meet is really unconscionable in a country that has as much wealth as America.”
Some student protesters had a personal stake in the fight.
“The neighborhood I call home has an average income of $28,000, and I’ve seen just how hard people in my neighborhood work,” said Carson Brown, a Medill sophomore. “Pundits say that people need to work harder, that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and I find that narrative to be very ignorant. It just displays a lack of understanding of the reality of a huge portion of Americans.”
Maurice Hatch, a Weinberg freshman, has personally experienced the effects of the minimum wage – right at the scene of the protest.
“I worked at McDonald’s and the wage was good for me, but I’m only providing for myself,” Hatch said. “Even the one that I worked at, some of my coworkers are single mothers that have four or five kids. It’s not enough, and that’s why I’m out here.”
The ISNU leaders saw the experience as a success.
SESP junior Emiliano Vera, one of the founding organizers, said he appreciated the “great energy and solidarity.”
“You don’t know what being in crowd of like 10,000 people feels until you’re in it,” Vera said.