The spread of the fast food strikes in the USA

[Updated 6 December 2013] - On 29 November last year, 200 workers in fast food restaurants in New York went on strike to demand decent wages. What seemed exceptional at the time, has only grown since, culminating in a national day of fast food strikes in over 100 cities last week.

Their demands are justified, the NYT noted: “we’re talking about big, profitable companies, which are big and profitable in part because they rely on underpaid labour”. You can support these workers by telling fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King that low pay is not ok.

Method

Data on strikes was collected from various sources and may be incomplete. I used d3.js to draw the map and setTimeout to time the transitions. For some reason I couldn’t get this to work with a for-loop without the latest transition terminating the previous ones or all transitions using the last value of i, so I hard coded each step of the iteration.