Teabaggers Mock The Poor As Fast Food Employees Strike For A Liveable Wage

Some restaurant workers are striking today for a liveable wage and teabaggers are responding at the Twitter hashtag #EatFast where they are posting mocking photos of themselves gorging on fast food.

Fast Food Workers Strike Over Wages

Some fast food workers across the nation are striking today in demand of a living wage. It's unknown how many workers will participate.

Employees of McDonald's Corp, Wendy's Restaurants LLC, Burger King Worldwide Inc and others have pledged to walk off their jobs in 50 cities from Boston, Mass, to Alameda, Calif., organizers say. They are expected to be joined by retail employees at stores owned by Macy's Inc, Sears Holdings Corp and Dollar Tree Inc in some cities. The workers want to form unions and bargain higher wages with their employers without facing retaliation from franchisees or their parent companies. They are demanding $15 an hour, up from $7.25, which is the current federal minimum wage. The median wage for front-line fast-food workers is $8.94 per hour, according to an analysis of government data by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for lower-wage workers. Virtually all private-sector fast-food jobs are non-union, and organizers say retaliation against workers who try to organize is common.

Today's action is being organized in part by Fast Food Forward in New York City.

OWS Leads May Day Strike In NYC

As you doubtlessly know by now, Occupy Wall Street protesters are staging May Day strikes across the nation today. But all eyes are on NYC.

Labor groups, immigration advocates, Occupy Wall Street protesters and other activists are planning marches and other events in Manhattan with the aim of bringing daily business to a standstill on International Workers Day, or May Day, today. Leaders of the now-global movement plan events including picketing, marches and other "creative disruptions against the corporations who rule our city," according to a website maintained by Occupy activists. On foot and bicycles, through streets and across bridges, Occupy activists plan to block urban arteries to slow the city's economic engine — from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., according to pamphlets and organizers' word-of-mouth communications. Some say they're willing to get arrested, staging surprise actions to make their point — that financial inequality is destroying our society. The biggest known plan has the support of thousands of union members.

I'll have video as it becomes available.

UK: Two Million Strike Over Pension Cuts

An estimated two million public employees are striking across Britain today in a 24-hour protest over pension cuts. Affected agencies include health care, schools, police and fire protection.

Philly Transit Workers Go On Strike

Hours after the last World Series game to be played there, Philadelphia's transit workers have gone on strike.

The strike by Transport Workers Union Local 234 will all but cripple a transit system that averages more than 928,0000 trips each weekday. The union represents more than 5,000 drivers, operators and mechanics of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. "There will be people waking up this morning needing to commute into work. And unfortunately, there's not going to be service for them," said SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams. The union had threatened to go on strike during the World Series. But over the weekend Gov. Ed Rendell ordered the union and SEPTA to remain at the bargaining table or risk consequences.

Willie Brown, the local's president, said they decided to strike after both sides agreed that they had gone as far as they could in negotiations. The announcement came just hours after the Phillies beat the Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series, the last game to be played at Citizens Bank Park. Brown said the strike was effective as of 3 a.m. Tuesday. The doors to subway stations were gated off Tuesday and no buses crawled the streets in the city's downtown corridor. Commuters trying to get to work said they had to make last-minute accommodations when they awoke to word of a strike.

RELATED: The last major transit strike in the Northeast was 2005's MTA strike in NYC which lasted only 36 hours.

BART To Strike On Monday

Union employees of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) are set to begin a strike on Monday.

Bay Area residents face the prospect of a commuting nightmare Monday morning after the president of BART's second-largest union announced that it will go on strike at the end of service Sunday night. If Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, which represents about 900 train operators, station agents and power workers, follows through on its strike threat it will be the transit agency's first strike since September 1997, when a five-day strike created havoc for commuters. At a news conference outside the union's office across the street from the Lake Merritt BART station, ATU Local 1555 President Jesse Hunt said, "We have no choice" but to go on strike after BART board members voted 9-0 earlier in the day to impose pay and work rules on the union, effective immediately. Hunt cited the fact that the implementation of terms and conditions of employment brought members of the ATU under a contract "far worse than the contract that was in front of our union this week" as the main reason behind the strike.

BART averages 340,000 passenger trips on weekdays.