Photo by Sean Keenan | The Signal
Droves of picketers, protesters and professors gathered at Clark Atlanta University to oppose the current minimum wage on April 15.
Lane Robbins-Thompson, Fight for $15 member, said the purpose of the rally was to increase awareness of the detriment caused by the minimum wage and to picket for the raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Robbins-Thompson works as a homecare worker for the developmentally disabled.
“It’s a low pay occupation,” he said. “It’s rewarding work, but it won’t make ends meet. So I’m fighting with fast food workers and retail workers and adjunct professors for $15 an hour and a union so we can all make a decent living.”
Alister Rex, member of the Fight for $15 organization, said he has worked for Bed, Bath & Beyond, Macy’s, and Toys-R-Us, and said he believes the benefits were not enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.
“When you’re trying to pay bills and raise a kid, you can’t do anything with $7.25,” he said. “You’d have to have two jobs and you would never be able to enjoy what you’re working for.”
The capacity to implement substantial changes lays in the hands of the government and corporations, according to Robbins-Thompson.
“Right now people are working full time at fast food stores and they’re on food stamps and welfare,” he said. “Then the government is subsidizing these companies that won’t pay these workers enough to live on.”
Senior Field Organizer for Georgia Equality civil rights group Rob Woods said Georgia’s right-to-work law could impede these changes. He said without unions, hourly employees would have no job security.
“What other manner would offer them any bargaining opportunities?” he said.
Such affliction is also faced by college professors, according to Julie Kubala, activist with Faculty Forward, which is an organization pushing for the ethical treatment of university faculty.
“The conditions [adjunct professors] work under are incredibly precarious, especially not knowing semester to semester whether you’re going to have a job or how many classes you’ll teach and the pay is abysmal,” she said.
Kubala also said the minimum wage has not been rising in tandem with the cost of living.
“People use the argument that corporations cannot sustain a $15 minimum wage, however the gap between the profits of CEOs and the profits of workers has widened exponentially in the past 30 or 40 years,” she said. “It seems to me that they can sustain it…but [$10.10] is still not a livable wage in Atlanta.”
Georgia State Senator Donzella James sponsored Senate Bill 15 (SB 15), which would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. She said she supports Fight for $15, but thinks her bill will make a more agreeable compromise with federal government.
“$15 is a very good amount that the minimum should be raised to from the shamefully low $5[.25 for tipped workers],” James said. “I put a bill in to raise it to $10.10 because that’s what the federal government is pushing to change it to.”
Georgia State student Zakia Prinsloo said she was raised by her mother into poverty where she learned how the American dream is not so immediately accessible.
“By luck, [my mother] was able to get a federal grant to go to school, but… a lot of people from a background where they have to work minimum wage jobs don’t have that opportunity to better themselves,” she said.
However, Prinsloo said she believes community outcry is necessary to attract the attention of legislators and lobbyists and that the rally is a step in the right direction.
“Visibility is the driving force to get things done,” she said. “If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist, especially in the big eyes of our government.”
James said she intends to investigate the various effects of minimum wage alterations so she will be prepared to address the Senate Insurance and Labor committees with SB 15.
“I’ve done a lot of research with other states [and determined] this will affect everyone, rich and poor,” she said. “We need to pay fair wages in the state of Georgia. I will [make] a study committee and I would be happy to include students to assess how the minimum wage affects everyone.”
