Fast Food Strike: Can We Please Speak to the Clown in Charge?

I’ve been looking at the pictures of the national strike by fast-food workers. Seeking higher wages for industry employees, the protests have been held in and around fast food restaurants across the country. (Here’s the photo gallery at Reuters.)

One thing evident from the gallery is how nameless and faceless these corporations really are. For the overwhelming amount of advertising and branding they do in the public square, you would think there would be a more genuine identity — corporations being people these days. Instead however, beyond the logos and the colors and the mascots, the operations remain nameless and faceless.

Well, not completely. There’s the one shot, for example, in which the marchers enter a restaurant and confront the manager on duty.

I can imagine the higher ups having a chuckle, and a free bag of fries, over that. If the marchers are advocating a jump in pay for line workers from the $8 range to $15, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the amount the poor manager behind the counter — the object of the demonstrator’s anger and poor substitute for the face of the company — has worked his own pay up to by now.

(photo 1: David Ryder/Reuters. caption: Stephen Baldwin holds his fist in the air outside a Subway restaurant during a strike aimed at the fast-food industry and the minimum wage in Seattle, August 29, 2013. photo 2 & 3:Lucy Nicholson/Reuters. caption 2: Striking McDonald’s worker Bartolome Perez, 42, (L) protests outside McDonald’s on Hollywood Boulevard as part of a nationwide strike by fast-food workers to call for wages of $15 an hour, in Los Angeles, August 29, 2013. caption 3: Workers and their supporters protest inside McDonald’s on Hollywood Boulevard as part of a nationwide strike by fast-food workers to call for wages of $15 an hour, in Los Angeles, August 29, 2013.)