Hank Kalet

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McDonald’s workers are taking their activism to the company’s headquarters — and they are facing arrest to make their point that it’s time we start paying people who grill our burgers and take our orders a living wage.

As Reuters reported earlier today

<span class="articleLocation”>Fast-food workers from three dozen U.S. cities on Wednesday will protest at the headquarters of McDonald’s Corp (MCD.N), calling for a significant wage hike, as company shareholders also prepare to weigh in on the pay of the fast-food giant’s top executives.

The latest, and possibly largest, protest against the global chain comes a day ahead of a shareholders vote on executive pay at McDonald’s, where Chief Executive Don Thompson took home total compensation of $9.5 million in 2013.

Low-wage U.S. restaurant and retail workers are calling for a rough doubling of pay to $15 per hour and the right to unionize. Their frequent protests have helped fuel a national debate on income inequality at a time when many middle- to low-income Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

AP is reporting that about 100 McDonald’s workers are being arrested during protests, after workers breached a barricade “Down the street from Hamburger University” and were met by “dozens of police officers in riot gear (who) warned protesters to disperse.”

Pay is the issue. Most McDonald’s workers — most workers in the fast-food industry and in many other service-sector jobs — are working for minimum wage or not much more, usually working multiple jobs and still not making much more than poverty wages. Most are adults — according to a variety of studies — and many are forced to seek help from government agencies, which puts taxpayers in the position of subsidizing low-wage service work even as the company’s CEO took in $9.5 million in 2013.

McDonald’s is part of a larger problem with American capitalism, of course, one that reaches beyond the fast-food industry and raises questions about how much we really value service-sector work. These jobs are important and should pay a livable wage, but most do not and we don’t seem to care. As long as our Big Mac and fries are served hot and come cheaply, we can continue to look past the man at the grill or the woman at the window. And when we do consider them — usually when we need to complain that the Shamrock Shake just isn’t green enough — we view them as disposable and dismiss them as nothing more than low-wage workers. After all, anyone can do these jobs and, if they want better pay, they should find better work or go back to school, which is a lot easier said than done in an economy where one in six workers is unemployed or underemployed and the cost of going back to school is prohibitive.

No wonder the workers are finally starting to fight back.

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My latest from The Progressive Populist — on the death penalty.

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The news came Tuesday that Camille Lepage was found dead in the Central African Republic. Lepage, as Nicholas Kulish writes in the Times, was a French photographer who had done work for The New York Times and others in war zones around the globe. He described her as someone always looking to tell the stories of those in extremis, of those whose stories otherwise would not be told.

Kulish’s reflection on Lepage reminds us of the dangers that so many journalists face — both overseas and, to a lesser degree, in the United States — and reminder that what we do matters. In age when celebrity gossip and horse-race political journalism hold sway, it is important to remember that the journalist is not only the eyes and ears of the public, but also the mouthpiece of those without power, and often the only way that the powerless can be heard. We bear witness — in Sudan and Central Africa, in Israel and Palestine, in Detroit, Trenton and Newark.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking on a panel at Rutgers on the topic of homelessness and the Tent City homeless camp in Lakewood (it was tied to my friend Jack Ballo’s film Destiny’s Bridge and my own long poem As an Alien in a Land of Promise). We were asked what could be done. My answer, speaking as a journalist and artist, was simple: I challenged my journalism students to act as witnesses, to get into the communities and find those in need. Tell their stories, I said. And I meant it.

Lepage and the journalists who work in war zones around the globe do that under the most dangerous of circumstances. The stories they bring us may not help us make sense of the world — how can they? — but they help us see things we otherwise might be happy to leave in the shadows. They tell us that war and poverty and violence are still all too real and, in doing so, they just might reach those one or two or three readers or viewers moved enough to start agitating for change.

You can see her breathtaking photos here.

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Here is the lede from today’s story in The New York Times on the phenomena known as “colony collapse.”

Honeybees could be on their way back, according to a new federal report.

Good news, right? After all, as the National Resources Defense Council points out, honeybees are necessary to maintain the food supply.

The list of crops that simply won’t grow without honey bees is a long one: Apples, cucumbers, broccoli, onions, pumpkins, carrots, avocados, almonds … and it goes on.

Without bees to pollinate many of our favorite fruits and vegetables, the United States could lose $15 billion worth of crops — not to mention what it would do to your diet.

A story, then, that shows a possible rebirth of the honeybee population should make all of us feel a lot better about things.

Not so fast. The lede does not exactly reflect where this story is going. The results of the new federal report do not show a resurgence of honeybees, but rather a slowing of the “collapse” — which is a very different phenomenon, as the story makes clear:

The new survey, published on Thursday, found that the loss of managed honeybee colonies from all causes has dropped to 23.2 percent nationwide over the winter that just ended, down from 30.5 percent the year before. Losses reported by some individual beekeepers were even higher. Colony losses reached a peak of 36 percent in 2007 to 2008.

The survey of thousands of beekeepers was conducted by the Department of Agriculture and the Bee Informed Partnership, an organization that studies apian health and management.

“It’s better than some of the years we’ve suffered,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a director of the partnership and an entomologist at the University of Maryland. Still, he noted, a 23 percent loss “is not a good number.” He continued, “We’ve gone from horrible to bad.”

The Times does makes this clear — just not in its lede. As I tell my journalism students, the lede has to focus the readers’ attention and set up expectations. This lede undercuts what otherwise is a good report on an important story and could make it easier for readers predisposed to dismiss discussions of the fate of honeybees to do just that. After all, who cares about the fate of bees?

The answer is (or should be): All of us, as the Times’ nutgraph (the context paragraph or three designed to anchor readers in the story) makes very clear.

The collapse of bee populations around the country in recent years has led to warnings of a crisis in foods grown with the help of pollination. Over the past eight years, beekeepers have reported losses over the winter of nearly 30 percent of their bees on average.

Colony collapse, as it is often called, is something that may have dire consequences for the food supply, leading at the very least to rising food prices. There is significant debate as to why this is happening and about what should be done to reverse the long-term trend. And this week’s report provides what maybe the first positive spin on the story in years. But there still was a 23 percent loss of bees over the winter — which is only good news when compared to recent years. It doesn’t indicate a trend or say anything about the future of honeybees. The lede on the Times’ story shouldn’t have, either.

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