Americans took to the streets in large numbers on Thursday to show their support for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour wage for members of Congress. In major cities across the nation, fast-food workers and other service employees held signs, shouted chants, and gave impassioned speeches to demonstrate their conviction that Congress deserves a maximum hourly wage of fifteen dollars. “Members of Congress are people, just like you and me,” Tracy Klugian, a McDonald’s employee who took part in the Washington protest, said. “They should be paid what they deserve.” Assuming that they continue to take off approximately two hundred and forty days a year, members of Congress earning the proposed maximum would see their average annual income adjusted from a hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars to thirteen thousand five hundred dollars, a salary that many marchers called “fair and equitable.” “I know what members of Congress will say: ‘I can’t live on that,’” Harland Dorrinson, a protester in Chicago, said. “Well, if they want to earn more, they should go out and acquire some skills.” While organizers of the marches proclaimed today’s protests a success, in some cities the demonstrations met some opposition from counter-protesters, who argued that fifteen dollars was too much. Source URL |
