May, 17 2017, 03:00pm EDT
Trump Resistance Movement Sets Sights on McDonald's, Joining Fight for $15 in Massive March on Fast-Food Giant's Shareholders Meeting
Women’s March, Movement for Black Lives, Our Revolution, MoveOn, Other Heavyweights to Join 10,000 Underpaid Workers In Two Days of Protest
CHICAGO
On the heels of mass demonstrations against President Trump's policies that have drawn hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets, leaders of the Trump resistance movement will converge in Chicago May 23 with thousands of workers in the Fight for $15 for a "March on McDonald's" that is expected to be the biggest-ever protest to hit the fast-food giant.
On the eve of McDonald's annual shareholder meeting, leaders of the Women's March, Our Revolution, the Movement for Black Lives, MoveOn.org, Color of Change, NextGen and others will join forces with the Fight for $15 to demand that McDonald's - the world's second largest employer - use its power and influence to lift up Americans across the country rather than drag them down.
"Labor rights are women's rights," said Carmen Perez, co-chair of the Women's March. "The link between the gender justice and labor justice movements is strong -- but often unacknowledged. Women's March is proud to join Fight for $15 and others to rise up against unfair labor practices, economic exploitation and workplace sexual harassment. These fights are our fights, and the only way we win is together."
The mass protest comes as McDonald's grapples with widespread consumer rejection of its brand. In March, McDonald's executives announced the company has lost more than 500 million customers since 2012, the year cooks and cashiers at the fast-food giant first went on strike to demand $15 an hour and union rights.
"If McDonald's wants to win back its customers, it needs to prove it respects workers like me - that starts by paying $15 an hour and respecting our right to a union," said Adriana Alvarez, a McDonald's worker from Chicago, Ill., and Fight for $15 leader. "McDonald's has tried changing a lot about its business, but it hasn't changed the way it treats workers like me. We still get paid so little that we have to rely on food stamps and public assistance to raise our families. We still face sexual harassment on the job, and get money stolen from our paychecks. Until McDonald's respects its workers, Americans will continue to reject the company, and our movement will continue to grow."
The march Tuesday will kick off outside Trump Tower in downtown Chicago and culminate in a massive rally outside the flagship Rock N Roll McDonald's, highlighting how McDonald's mistreatment of workers and communities parallels Trump's own abuses of power. Like Trump, McDonald's faces widespread charges of stealing from workers' paychecks, sexually harassing women, ripping off taxpayers, and firing people for speaking out. Workers and leaders from across the progressive movement will stress that resistance to Trump's agenda must include resistance to companies like McDonald's that are "the Donald Trump of corporations."
"We cannot allow corporations like McDonalds to continue violating basic workers' rights to boost profits," said Larry Cohen, Our Revolution Board Chair. "Women and men who work 40 hours a week continue to face poverty. McDonald's continues to stand on the wrong side of worker's rights by opposing minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, and fair scheduling. We're marching to tell McDonald's and other multinational corporations: this greed must end."
The day after the March on McDonald's, thousands of fast-food workers will travel to Oak Brook, Ill., to take their demand for $15 an hour and union rights directly to the company's shareholder meeting. Cooks and cashiers will also protest at McDonald's stores in more than a dozen cities across the country as the company's shareholder meeting unfolds--the first time Fight for $15 shareholder meeting protests have expanded beyond Illinois.
The March on McDonald's follows years of intensifying protests at the company's shareholder meeting led by workers in the Fight for $15. In 2014, the company shuttered its headquarters while police officers met rallying workers in riot gear and arrested more than 100 McDonald's cooks and cashiers during a peaceful sit-in. In 2015, McDonald's workers hand delivered a petition to company representatives bearing more than one million signatures from Americans across the country calling on the company to support $15 an hour and union rights. And in 2016, hundreds of workers waged an overnight occupation outside the company's headquarters ahead of the annual meeting, setting up a tent city following a massive march.
The Fight for $15 has forged deep ties with the Trump resistance movement since the November 2016 election. Marking the 49th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the Fight for $15 and the Movement for Black Lives waged a nationwide "Fight Racism, Raise Pay" protest on April 4 spanning two-dozen cities across the country. And just weeks after the election, thousands of workers in the Fight for $15 walked off the job in 340 cities from coast to coast and engaged in waves of civil disobedience, pledging that they "won't back down" in their fight for $15 and union rights.
Since Nov. 29, 2012, the Fight for $15 has spurred wage hikes totaling more than $62 billion for 22 million underpaid workers, including more than 10 million who are on their way to $15 an hour, by convincing everyone from voters to politicians to corporations to raise pay. Workers have taken what many viewed as an outlandish proposition - $15 an hour- and made it the new labor standard in New York, California, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Home care workers in Massachusetts and Oregon won $15 an hour statewide minimum wages and companies including Facebook, Aetna, Amalgamated Bank, JP Morgan Chase and Nationwide Insurance have raised pay to $15 an hour or higher.
"As the biggest fast-food company and the world's second-largest employer, McDonald's sets the bar for pay and working conditions throughout the fast-food industry and beyond," said Kendall Fells, national organizing director of the Fight for $15. "McDonald's way of doing business is holding all of us back. By paying $15 an hour and union rights, the company can help lift workers across the economy, and protect its own bottom line for the future."
Organizations leading the March on McDonald's include: Fight for $15, the Women's March, MoveOn.org, Movement for Black Lives, Our Revolution, Next Gen, Color of Change, Fair Immigration Reform Movement, Repairers of the Breach, Indivisible Chicago, Women's March-Chicago, Center for Community Change, 350.org and Patriotic Millionaires.
Fast food workers are coming together all over the country to fight for $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation. We work for corporations that are making tremendous profits, but do not pay employees enough to support our families and to cover basic needs like food, health care, rent and transportation.
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In what Arizona's attorney general slammed as an "unacceptable and outrageous" act of "unchecked aggression," a federal immigration officer fired pepper spray toward recently sworn-in Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva during a Friday raid on a Tucson restaurant.
Grijalva (D-Ariz.) wrote on social media that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers "just conducted a raid by Taco Giro in Tucson—a small mom-and-pop restaurant that has served our community for years."
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Grijalva said in a video uploaded to the post that she was "sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent, pushed around by others, when I literally was not being aggressive, I was asking for clarification, which is my right as a member of Congress."
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Mocking the incident on social media, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin contended that Grijalva "wasn’t pepper sprayed."
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McLaughlin provided no further details regarding the nature of those injuries.
Democrats in Arizona and beyond condemned Friday's incident, with US Sen. Ruben Gallego writing on social media that Grijalva "was doing her job, standing up for her community."
"Pepper spraying a sitting member of Congress is disgraceful, unacceptable, and absolutely not what we voted for," he added. "Period."
Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said on social media: "This is unacceptable and outrageous. Enforcing the rule of law does not mean pepper spraying a member of Congress for simply asking questions. Effective law enforcement requires restraint and accountability, not unchecked aggression."
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) also weighed in on social media, calling the incident "outrageous."
"Rep. Grijalva was completely within her rights to stand up for her constituents," she added. "ICE is completely lawless."
Friday's incident follows federal agents' violent removal of Sen. Alexa Padilla (D-Calif.) from a June press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) was federally indicted in June for allegedly “forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers" during an oversight visit at a privately operated migrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey and subsequent confrontation with ICE agents outside of the lockup in which US Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez, both New Jersey Democrats, were also involved.
Violent assaults by federal agents on suspected undocumented immigrants—including US citizens—protesters, journalists, and others are a regular occurrence amid the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign.
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They described the measure as an "emergency billionaires tax" aimed at recouping the tens of billions of dollars that will be stripped from California's 15 million Medicaid recipients over the next five years, after Republicans enacted historic cuts to the program in July with President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which dramatically reduced taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
Among those beneficiaries were the approximately 200 billionaires living in California, whose average annual income, Saez pointed out, has risen by 7.5% per year, compared with 1.5% for median-income residents.
Under the proposal, they would pay a one-time 5% tax on their total net worth, which is estimated to raise $100 billion. The vast majority of the funds, about 90%, would be used to restore Medicaid funding, while the rest would go towards funding K-12 education, which the GOP has also slashed.
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Meanwhile, several of his longtime consultants, including Dan Newman and Brian Brokaw, have launched a campaign alongside “business and tech leaders” to kill the measure, which they’ve dubbed “Stop the Squeeze." They've issued familiar warnings that pinching the wealthy too hard will drive them from the state, along with the critical tax base they provide.
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Mamdani's proposal was met with a litany of similar warnings from Big Apple bigwigs who threatened to flee the city and others around the country who said they'd never move in.
But as Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein explained in October for the American Prospect: "The evidence for this is thin: mostly memes shared by tech and finance people... Research shows that the truth of the matter is closer to the opposite. Wealthy individuals and their income move at lower rates than other income brackets, even in response to an increase of personal income tax." Many of those who sulked about Mamdani's victory have notably begun making amends with the incoming mayor.
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A billionaire income tax garnered the most support across party identification. On average, two out of three (67%) of Americans supported the tax including 84% of Democrats, 64% of Independents, and 51% of Republicans.
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The United States Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether US President Donald Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship—as guaranteed under the 14th Amendment for more than 150 years—is constitutional.
Next spring, the justices will hear oral arguments in Trump's appeal of a lower court ruling that struck down parts of an executive order—titled Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship—signed on the first day of the president's second term. Under the directive, which has not taken effect due to legal challenges, people born in the United States would not be automatically entitled to US citizenship if their parents are in the country temporarily or without legal authorization.
Enacted in 1868, the 14th Amendment affirms that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
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Here is the question presented. It's a relatively clean vehicle for the Supreme Court to finally decide whether it is lawful for the president to deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants. www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25...
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— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 10:55 AM
Several district court judges have issued universal preliminary injunctions to block Trump's order. However, the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority found in June that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts."
In July, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit unanimously ruled that executive order is an unconstitutional violation of the plain language of the 14th Amendment. In total, four federal courts and two appellate courts have blocked Trump's order.
“No president can change the 14th Amendment’s fundamental promise of citizenship,” Cecillia Wang, national legal director at the ACLU—which is leading the nationwide class action challenge to Trump's order—said in a statement Friday. “We look forward to putting this issue to rest once and for all in the Supreme Court this term.”
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Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, said that “it’s deeply troubling that we must waste precious judicial resources relitigating what has been settled constitutional law for over a century," adding that "every federal judge who has considered this executive order has found it unconstitutional."
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