<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-style: none; color: inherit; padding: inherit; margin: inherit;" class=""><div id="article" role="article" style="border-bottom-width: 0px;" class=""><div class="page"><p word_count="26" data-wc="26" class=""><font face="Georgia" class=""><b class="">WASHINGTON</b> – Americans took to the streets in large numbers on Thursday to show their support for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour wage for members of Congress.</font></p><p word_count="34" data-wc="34" class=""><font face="Georgia" class="">In major cities across the nation, fast-food workers and other service employees held signs, shouted chants, and gave impassioned speeches to demonstrate their conviction that Congress deserves a maximum hourly wage of fifteen dollars.</font></p><p word_count="31" data-wc="31" class=""><font face="Georgia" class="">“Members of Congress are people, just like you and me,” Tracy Klugian, a McDonald’s employee who took part in the Washington protest, said. “They should be paid what they deserve.”</font></p><p word_count="51" data-wc="51" class=""><font face="Georgia" class="">Assuming that they continue to take off approximately two hundred and forty days a year, members of Congress earning the proposed maximum would see their average annual income adjusted from a hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars to thirteen thousand five hundred dollars, a salary that many marchers called “fair and equitable.”</font></p><p word_count="36" data-wc="36" class=""><font face="Georgia" class="">“I know what members of Congress will say: ‘I can’t live on that,’” Harland Dorrinson, a protester in Chicago, said. “Well, if they want to earn more, they should go out and acquire some skills.”</font></p><p word_count="29" data-wc="29" class=""><font face="Georgia" class="">While organizers of the marches proclaimed today’s protests a success, in some cities the demonstrations met some opposition from counter-protesters, who argued that fifteen dollars was too much.</font></p></div></div></blockquote></body></html>