Truck With Radioactive Material Stolen In Mexico; Fast Food Strikes Called For 100 Cities
COSTELLO: A truck filled with radioactive material and stolen from a town near Mexico is now the subject of a search by the U.S. Homeland Security Department and Mexican authorities. The material, Cobalt 60, is used in medical treatments. But as CNN's Nick Parker told me, there are other potential concerns.</s>NICK PARKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It is something that has been voiced as something that could potentially be used to make a fairly low-level kind of dirty bomb to be honest with you. But at the same time, if it's in fairly small quantities, it's not particularly harmful to the public. But that said, obviously this particular cargo in the quantity that it was is judged as extremely dangerous by the Mexican authorities.</s>COSTELLO: Officials says they believe the suspects were only after the truck and had no idea that it was carrying toxic material. Fast food workers take their fight for a minimum wage hike nationwide tomorrow. There have been a number of protests over the last year beginning in New York and spread to other cities. But tomorrow's event is being built as the biggest yet for the campaign. Alison Kosik is in New York with more on this, this morning. Good morning.</s>ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. So a year after they started those strikes, they're returning here to New York City tomorrow. They're across the country to cities like Chicago, L.A. and Denver. They're demanding that federal minimum wage go from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Living on $7.25, you cannot do it.</s>KOSIK (voice-over): This is what minimum wage looks and sounds like.</s>SHENITA SIMON, FAST FOOD EMPLOYEE: I would rather sacrifice my meal and my husband would too to make sure my kids can have what they need.</s>KOSIK: They are fast food workers struggling every day.</s>EDUARDO SHOY, FAST FOOD EMPLOYEE: How can you live on $7.25? You couldn't pay your apartment. If you have a family of may be zero, you could support yourself. If you have a family, two kids, a wife, where you live at, underneath the bridge? Yes. That's not right.</s>KOSIK: The median pay for fast food workers is $9 an hour or $18,720 a year.</s>ASST. PROFESSOR DORIAN WARREN, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: They're taking these because they're desperate in an economy that is still not creating enough work for people who want to go to work and still not creating enough middle class jobs.</s>KOSIK: Eduardo Shoy lost his job a few years ago. Now 58 with two children headed to college, he works at Kentucky Fried Chicken in New York earning $7.25 an hour. He also works a night shift as a forklift operator at Kennedy airport. He moved his family to another state and is trying to sell his house.</s>SHOY: For me, it's tough, real tough. I can't do none of the things that I used to do. I used to able to pay my mortgage, able to pay my car payment, able to take my family out to dinner. Now we had to cut it out and we had to sacrifice a lot of stuff.</s>KOSIK: Eduardo will take to the streets in New York this Thursday to take part in a strike which demands that the federal minimum wage be raised to $15 an hour. The protests have expanded since last November when 200 fast food workers staged a one-day strike at more than 20 restaurants in New York City. And this past July and August, there were protests across the country.</s>SHOY: Once the nation is hearing it, you know, we've been striking all over the country so people are getting an understanding. They're seeing the light of what is going on.</s>KOSIK: But the industry says it has created jobs in this difficult economy. In response to the strikes, the National Restaurant Association said in a statement, dramatic increases a starting wage such as those called for in these rallies going to challenge the job growth history, increase the prices for restaurant meals, and lead to fewer jobs created.</s>WARREN: Half of all Americans make $26,000 a year or less. So this fast food worker movement possibly going to do the same thing that the industrial workers did to our economy in the 1930s and '40s.</s>KOSIK: Now, these protests seem to be having an impact even though a $15 federal minimum wage could be a long ways off of becoming a reality. We've been talking to people since they started these. A couple told us they were promoted to full time, and another said they were able to get more hours. So the protests at least are resonate inning that way.</s>COSTELLO: I was just going to ask you, do people fear they lose their jobs? But it doesn't sound like that.</s>KOSIK: Exactly. They're worried about that. But in the end they want to get out there and state their case. This is just a huge growing problem. You look at what's been happening since the recession. During the recession, we lost more than 8 million jobs. Lots of them haven't come back. Many people over the age of 25 have to take these minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet. And now there's a trend that six of the ten fastest growing jobs over the next decade, these are low paying jobs. These are home health aides, veterinary technicians. A lot of people trying to make ends meet on a minimum wage of $7.25. Still to come in the "NEWSROOM", new safety concerns about the exotic car that Paul Walker was ride in when he died.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's like kind of taming a wild animal. If you were taming a wild animal, you would be afraid of it.</s>COSTELLO: We'll talk to an expert about why that Porsche in a deadly crash may be too dangerous to drive.