A Day in the Life

This past July, in the middle of a summer of political discontent, there occurred a small reason for hope. In seven American cities, thousands of men and women who toil at fast-food chain restaurants picketed in loud and energetic one-day strikes. They demanded the seemingly impossible: a wage of $15 an hour, almost double the rate many workers now receive for jobs that require them to stand up for many hours, serving an estimated fifty million people every day.