Uber Drivers Join the Fight for $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage

Workers in more than 340 cities will participate in union-backed protests today, calling for higher pay.

​NEW YORK November 29, 2016; The Service Employees International Union-backed “Fight for $15” campaign is organizing protests across 340 cities today, a movement that began with just a few hundred fast-food workers in New York City. In four years, Fight for $15 has grown to an international movement in more than 300 cities on six continents of fast-food workers, airport workers, retail employees “and underpaid workers everywhere.”

Adding to the list of the “underpaid workers” are Uber drivers, who planned to join today’s protests and call for better pay and the right to join a union, reports Reuters. The news service writes that hundreds of Uber drivers in two dozen cities, including San Francisco, Miami and Boston, are supporting the union-backed Fight for $15 campaign, which calls for raising the U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 to $15 an hour.

Justin Berisie, an Uber driver in Denver, told Reuters he was joining Tuesday's protests. "Someone who lives in America and goes to work every day, that person deserves a decent living," he said, telling Reuters that he has a 5-year-old daughter and earns $500 or less, before expenses such as gasoline, during an average week of working 50 to 60 hours.

Earlier this month, The Hill wrote that Fight for $15 organizers were promising its “largest, most disruptive protest ever” on November 29 in response to Donald Trump’s presidential election win. “Just because the election went a certain way, doesn’t mean we’re going away,” Kendall Fells, organizing director of the Fight for $15, told the news source.

Fell also said that raising the minimum wage is a “winning issue,” adding that there would be thousands of protesters at about 20 airports in major cities come November 29.