San Marcos Wendy’s Workers On Strike Today

Wendy’s employee and protest organizer Joshua Perez said the workers are also demanding safer working conditions and improved training.

By Jordan Buckley | Exclusive to SM Corridor News

Inequality is their recipe?

Workers at the Wendy’s franchise on East Hopkins have declared a strike for today, May 1st, in a statement released last week claiming they are “tired of being harassed, intimidated, and stolen from.”

The declaration calls on “management to put an end to unjust labor practices,” for example by “closing the wage gap for men and women doing the same work.”

Wendy’s employee and protest organizer Joshua Perez (pictured right) said the workers are also demanding safer working conditions and improved training.

Safe working conditions were the focus of an all-day work stoppage last June after employees reported a working environment in excess of 100 degrees, affirmed by a clandestine photograph signaling the kitchen’s digital temperature gauge — which allowed only two digits — maxed out at 99.

The Wendy’s workers’ strike initiates today at noon, and protest organizers are encouraging supporters to dress in red.

May First has long been a global holiday for labor activists, dubbed International Workers Day, which Wendy’s picketers will celebrate following their San Marcos action.

The San Marcos-based fast-food activists will then carpool to a march leaving Austin City Hall, alongside the award-winning construction-worker organization Proyecto Defensa Laboral, to the state Capitol, where a series of educational workshops will commence.

Yesterday, members of Fight for 15 and San Marcos Socialist Collective — other local groups supporting fast-food-industry reforms — addressed congregants of the San Marcos Unitarian Universalist Fellowship to invite them to today’s action.

Numerous UUs participated in last summer’s protest calling for repair of the store’s air conditioning system.

Wendy’s is also under fire from farmworkers in Florida, who decry the company’s refusal to join their Fair Food Program, which ensures fair pay & work conditions for tomato harvesters.

Centro Cultural Hispano hosted farmworker leader Lupe Gonzalo in November, whose organization won a Presidential Medal in 2014 for the success of their efforts to transform the tomato industry in Florida, drastically improving wages & eliminating formerly prevalent abuses including forced labor and sexual violence.

Ms. Gonzalo told attendees that Wendy’s remains the only of the world’s five largest fast-food chains to reject their human-rights initiative.