La’Randa Jackson, shown here, supports her mother and her younger brothers by working at the Walmart store in Cincinnati, Ohio. “I skip a lot of meals,” she says. “The most important thing is food for the babies, then my younger brothers. Then, if there’s enough, my mom and I eat.”

La’Randa works for the nation’s largest private employer, and she is not alone in her struggle to afford enough food.

On $10.10 an hour and an unpredictable part-time schedule, Cantare Davunt – a Walmart customer service manager from Apple Valley, Minnesota – winds up digging into her cabinets for older, non-perishable foods like Ramen so she can have a hot meal. Diana Tigon, a cashier at the Walmart store in Arlington, Texas, often finds she is strapped for cash and during rough weeks goes full days without eating meals.

These tragic stories are all too common among workers at America’s largest retailer, which enjoys $16 billion in annual profits. The Walton family, which owns Walmart, has assets valued at an obscene $150 billion.

My latest report shows the direct connection between the unfair working conditions that Walmart perpetuates and the key factors that contribute to hunger in America. For example, 88 percent of households receiving food bank assistance have incomes of less than $25,000 a year; as many as 825,000 Walmart workers are paid than $25,000 a year. Also, more than 57 percent of employed recipients of food assistance work part-time; there are an estimated 600,000 part-time workers at Walmart, though many want to work full-time.

Because Walmart workers must rely on federal assistance programs to fill in the gaps, American taxpayers are subsidizing the retailer’s business model of exploitation. One report from Americans for Tax Fairness estimated the cost to taxpayers of Walmart workers’ reliance on public assistance is $6.2 billion a year.

In a twisted closed loop system, Walmart is also the largest retailer for food stamp spending in the nation, capturing about 18 percent of all food stamp revenue, estimated at $13.5 billion. If Walmart paid its workers a living wage they wouldn’t need to rely on public assistance.

Walmart has the ability – more than any other business – to lift hundreds of thousands of working families out of poverty by improving jobs at its stores, which would, in turn, reduce hunger across the nation.

You can download the complete report here.

Thanks to Anna Lappe’ for inspiring the report’s title with her excellent 2013 article at TakePart.

Food movement leaders tend to stick to their specific issues, whether it’s advocating for healthy food, fighting for workers’ rights or curbing marketing to children. For each of these issues, there are numerous food corporations that need to change. But there is one organization that conveniently provides us with one giant target for all of them: the National Restaurant Association.

The “other NRA” employs 750 staffers and spent nearly $4 million on lobbying and campaign donations in 2012 alone. The trade group representing some 52,000 members was named a “Heavy Hitter” by the Center for Responsive Politics for being a top corporate player in Washington, D.C. No wonder, with board members that include the nation’s largest chains such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Starbucks, and Darden (the restaurant conglomerate that owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster), among others.

NRA Hates Public Health

The National Restaurant Association has had a negative impact on a wide range of issues that foodies tend to care about. Do you think chain restaurants should provide basic nutrition information to their customers? Is it really too much to ask to disclose the calorie count for dishes like the “Five Cheese Ziti” or the “Steak Gorgonzola-Alfredo” at Olive Garden? The NRA thinks so, as the group lobbied against menu labeling laws for decades, until they “gave in” by stripping states of their right to enact such laws. The NRA hated New York City’s menu labeling rules so much that the group filed a lawsuit to stop implementation. They lost.

But that didn’t stop NRA lawyers from filing another lawsuit against New York City when lobbyists didn’t get their way again, this time to oppose limiting the size of sugary soft drinks. (That case is still pending.) Science and plain common sense tells us that consuming sodas out of bucket-size containers is probably not good for you. Yet the NRA and its members demand their right to keep selling these disease-inducing beverages by waging an aggressive astroturf and media campaign in cahoots with the soda industry to manipulate public opinion.

Other public health policies the NRA has vigorously opposed include soda taxes, trans fat bans and lowering sodium levels, which are sky-high in chain restaurants. But there are a few policies the NRA is actually in favor of, such as expanding the use of food stamps for fast food. They also led the charge for “cheeseburger bills”, which aim to shut the courtroom door to customers harmed by unhealthy fare.

NRA Hates Children

An especially important issue on the NRA’s menu of obstruction is marketing to children. Despite decades of advocacy efforts aimed at getting the food industry to stop targeting children as young as age two, we’ve come up mostly empty. A few years ago, the NRA helped kill an effort by four federal agencies to improve the industry’s notoriously lax voluntary guidelines on food marketing to children. The NRA also lobbies to make sure that children continue to be targeted with toys in unhealthy meals. All the while, the NRA pretends to care about kids by inventing a public relations scheme it calls “Kids LiveWell” purporting to help parents find healthy food for their children when dining out. Too bad the evidence shows almost all of such meals are of poor nutritional quality.

NRA Hates Animals

Not content just to be an enemy of public health, the restaurant lobby also takes aim at those advocating for sustainable food and farm animal welfare. One of the NRA’s favorite mouthpieces is the notorious lobbyist Rick Berman, who revels in his nickname “Dr. Evil,” and mounts aggressive campaigns against labor organizations, nutrition groups, and animal welfare advocates while his clients keep their noses clean. Berman has penned articles published in the industry trade paper, the Nation’s Restaurant News, for example, criticizing recent restaurant industry pledges to raise pigs humanely and calling on restaurants to fight back against animal activists, warning: “Operators need to roll up their sleeves before it’s too late.” Berman also loves pink slime and mercury-laden fish. Berman misses no opportunity to slam advocates of sustainable food, touting “modern technology for maximizing the efficiency of [food] processing.” He’s even attacked Michelle Obama for calling on restaurants to serve healthier options for children and families.

NRA Hates Workers

If all of that isn’t enough evil-doing, the NRA’s main agenda is to keep workers down by spreading fear about the alleged economic doom that would bestow the restaurant industry by meager increases in worker wages and paid sick days. The federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25 an hour. Can you live on that? Today is February 13, a reminder that the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is only $2.13 an hour – it’s been stuck there since 1991 – or, more accurately, the NRA and its members have kept it there. The NRA wants the restaurant industry to stand alone in not having to pay its own workers – claiming that we, the customers, pay their workers’ wages for them through our tips.

The restaurant industry loves to whine about how it cannot possibly afford to raise worker wages. But as author Anna Lappé recently pointed out, Darden (the leading sit-down restaurant chain) pays its top five executives more than $16 million a year. McDonald’s paid its CEO more than $13.8 million in 2012, even with declining sales. With that kind of money to throw around, leading restaurants can more than afford to pay their workers a living wage.

NRA members would still have plenty of money left over for other business improvements, such as sourcing more sustainable food and insisting their meat suppliers stop engaging in cruelty. Some changes wouldn’t even cost them money, like no longer exploiting children. That change would save restaurants money; money better spent on workers’ wages and paid sick days. It’s time for the food movement to come together and fight this common enemy.

Saru Jayaraman is co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Center United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. See ROC’s latest video and #LivingOffTips campaign here.

Originally posted at Corporate Accountability International.

It seems both ironic and fitting that while most Americans are obsessed with food for the Thanksgiving holiday, this week also marks International Food Workers Week, organized by the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

While many large restaurant chains and other sectors of the food industry bear responsibility for mistreating their workers, recently, McDonald’s has engaged in a series of jaw-dropping and idiotic communications with its workforce. Each one is a painful reminder of how impossible it is to live on fast-food wages.

For example:

•  In July, McDonald’s shared a budget planning guide that included a line-item for a second job, which would sadly be needed on the typical hourly wage of $8.25 (compared to the CEO’s annual salary of $8.75 million). But as CNN demonstrated, McDonald’s attempt to help its workers with a sample budget was way out of touch with the realities they face. (Like paying for such luxuries as heat, which McDonald’s budgeted at zero.)

•  Last month, a representative from the corporation’s phone helpline dubbed “McResource” told a worker in Chicago that she “definitely should be able to qualify for both food stamps and heating assistance” and pointed her to other local resources such as food pantries. A corporate spokesperson said the helpline was a “confidential service.”

• Then just last week McDonald’s got caught once again giving workers not just unhelpful financial advice, but also inane and insulting “tips.” To stretch their food dollars, hungry workers were told that “breaking food into pieces often results in eating less and still feeling full.” Over-shopped? Just get refunds on any unopened holiday purchases. Feeling stressed out? McDonald’s has it covered: Just “quit complaining” since “stress hormone levels rise by 15 percent after ten minutes of complaining.” And if that doesn’t work, taking “at least two vacations a year can cut heart attack risk by 50 percent.” (I wonder where CEO Don Thompson vacations.)

While it’s easy to make fun of these incredibly stupid and insensitive corporate missteps, for most of McDonald’s 700,000 workers (four million in the fast-food industry), it’s no laughing matter; instead, it’s a reality they live every single day.

A staggering 20 million people in the U.S. alone work in the food system, with almost one-third of them getting paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour or the “tipped minimum wage” of $2.13 per hour in restaurants. (Yes, you read that right: 2 dollars and 13 cents.) As a result, food workers are more likely to rely on food stamps to make ends meet, among other indignities.

As I described in my recent report about McDonald’s charity (or lack thereof) with Corporate Accountability International and Anna Lappé’s Small Planet Institute, the fast-food corporation consistently obstructs policy efforts to raise the minimum wage. For example, McDonald’s is a member of the National Restaurant Association, which spent close to $4 million in campaign donations and lobbying in 2012 and staunchly opposes raising the minimum wage.

According to Bloomberg, in the wake of national protests by workers for higher wages and paid sick days, McDonald’s “helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionization efforts that erupted recently on the streets of Chicago and New York.” It may be cheaper to put up a website and staff a helpline, but that won’t help workers.

Making matters worse, a recent study showed that 52 percent of the families of fast-food workers need to rely on public assistance programs, costing taxpayers nearly $7 billion a year. Moreover, a related report from the National Employment Law Project found that McDonald’s topped the list of fast-food corporations whose workers rely on government programs, which essentially subsidize the industry’s low wages. As Forbes put it, McDonald’s costs “the taxpayer $1.2 billion annually in public assistance programs for their low-paid workers.”

For my report, “Clowning Around with Charity,” I closely examined McDonald’s claims of giving generously, but found that in contrast, the corporation donates relatively little, even to its namesake cause, the Ronald McDonald House Charities. Given how badly the corporation treats its workers, McDonald’s stinginess should come as no surprise. But before giving away any of its billions of dollars in annual profits, McDonald’s should first pay its workers a living wage.

Joann Lo, executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, told me she is “disgusted by the hypocrisy of multinational corporations like McDonald’s that pay minimum wage to their employees but then tout how they give back to the ‘community’ through donations and sponsorships.” She added: “The best way that McDonald’s can give back to the community is to pay its employees a living wage.”

Now is a good time to add your voice to this growing chorus. It’s not enough to just not eat at McDonald’s, or to ask McDonald’s to serve healthier food, or even to try and get the fast-food giant to stop marketing to children. Everyone in the food movement (and everyone else too) has a responsibility to ensure our fellow human beings are treated with the respect they deserve, starting with being paid enough money to live on. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Here are few ways to support International Food Workers Week:

• Change your Facebook profile picture to the poster above to show you stand with workers this Thanksgiving week – click here to download.
• Sign the petition to raise the minimum wage.
• Join the #raisethewage Twitterstorm on today! (Tuesday, 11/26)
• Participate in an event or action in your city.
• Watch and share the new video “Guess Who’s Coming to Breakfast?”

Additional Resources:

- Food Chain Workers Alliance
- Restaurant Opportunities Center United
- Low Pay is Not OK
- Fast Food Forward

Originally posted at Corporate Accountability International.