[act-ma] 2/12 Fast Food & Beyond: Labor's Fight Against Inequality DSA Forum at E5

[David O. Knuttunen]

February DSA Forum:

Fast Food & Beyond: Labor's Fight Against Inequality

WHEN: Thursday, February 12, 7:30 pm
WHERE: 9 Hamilton Place, Boston (Encuentro 5)-across the street from Park
St. T stop
SPEAKERS: Ben Kreider-Brandeis University; Carl Nilsson-Fight For 15


According to the anti-poverty charity Oxfam, the top 1% will soon own more
wealth than most of the rest of the world combined. Senator Bernie Sanders
notes that the six heirs to the Wal- Mart fortune are richer than the bottom
40% of the American people. Meanwhile U.S. wages have been stagnating since
the 1970s, and the standard of living for much of the working and middle
class has actually declined. And now economic inequality has become so
difficult to ignore even Republicans have taken notice.

So what to do about it? Proposals range from Obama's mildly progressive tax
reforms and expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, to doubling down on
the same neo-liberal economic policies that helped bring about this decline
in the first place-like Obama's proposed new trade agreement. (A partisan of
"bi-partisanship," the President seems to have a foot in each camp.)

But one party often ignored in these political and policy debates has more
of an interest in fighting inequality and more capacity to do so than anyone
else: the labor movement. Our speakers will assess union struggles here and
abroad, and in particular the current efforts of local fast food workers to
organize for a living wage against Big Food.

DSA member Ben Kreider is a doctoral student at Brandeis studying poverty,
labor and US economic inequality. He has served on the Board of Washington,
DC Jobs with Justice, worked as a union researcher at several DC think
tanks, and then for three years with the Laborers' International Union of
North America. He has also presented papers at the Labor Research and Action
Network and the Transatlantic Student Symposium in Berlin, Germany.

Carl Nilsson works on the Fight For 15 campaign to raise the wages of low
income workers; last year he was a key leader of Raise Up Massachusetts,
which helped pass the paid sick leave referendum. Carl has also been a
stand-up comic, an organizer with MA Neighbor to Neighbor, Barack Obama's
2008 MA field director, and has held similar positions with the campaigns of
Governor Patrick in 2010 and Senator Ed Markey in 2013.

Download a PDF Flyer here:
http://www.dsaboston.org/files/15-02-12_Fast%20Food%20Flyer_COLOR.pdf 
Or click the link at the bottom of the page here:
http://www.dsaboston.org/feb12-2015/ 

Democratic Socialists of America P.O. Box 51356 Boston, MA 02205  Phone:
617-782-8787 http://www.dsaboston.org