Despite all that, low-wage work­ers will return to pick­et lines and demon­stra­tions Wednes­day in a Nation­al Day of Action in the fight for $15 an hour.

Rais­es would, of course, cost these bil­lion-dol­lar cor­po­ra­tions some­thing. More cost­ly, though, is the price paid by min­i­mum-wage work­ers who have not received a raise in six years. Even more dear is what these work­ers have paid for their cam­paign to get rais­es. Man­agers have harassed, threat­ened and fired them.

This is no plea for pity for cor­po­rate king­pins like Wal­mart and McDonald’s inun­dat­ed by work­ers’ demands for liv­ing wages.

The date is 4⁄ 15 . These are work­ers who live pay­check to pay­check, bare­ly able to pay their bills, and cer­tain­ly unable to cope with an emer­gency. They know the risk they’re tak­ing by par­tic­i­pat­ing in strikes for pay hikes. They’ve seen boss­es pun­ish co-work­ers for demon­strat­ing for rais­es. To lose a job, even one that pays pover­ty wages, dur­ing a time of high unem­ploy­ment is ter­ri­fy­ing. Still, thou­sands will par­tic­i­pate Wednes­day. That is valor.

Kip Hedges exhib­it­ed that courage. He’s a 61-year-old with 26 years of ser­vice as a bag­gage han­dler for Delta at the Min­neapo­lis-St. Paul Air­port. He want­ed bet­ter wages for young work­ers and a union. He said so in a video, not­ing that ​“prob­a­bly close to half make under $15 an hour.”

Delta fired him. The air­line said he’d dis­par­aged the com­pa­ny. Appar­ent­ly Delta believes it has been dis­par­aged if the fly­ing pub­lic learns the truth about the way Delta treats workers.

Clear­ly, Delta planned to shut Hedges up and intim­i­date oth­er work­ers. The mes­sage to his co-work­ers was clear: ​“You wan­na talk about the pal­try wages you get? Well, let’s talk about this pink slip.”

But when Delta messed with Hedges, it messed up big time. The fir­ing failed to silence him. He con­tin­ued to protest low wages. His co-work­ers ral­lied round him. The media cov­ered his fir­ing and his appeal. He looked like a low-wage work­er hero. Delta looked like a vin­dic­tive heel.

Unlike Hedges, Shan­na Tip­pen was no activist before she got fired from her min­i­mum-wage job in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She was just try­ing to get by, and falling short by about $200 a month. Her boss at the Days Inn where she worked as a night shift jack-of-all-trades asked her to talk to a Wash­ing­ton Post reporter who had dropped by the hotel to dis­cuss the state’s new­ly insti­tut­ed 25-cent increase to the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage of $7.25.

Tip­pen told the reporter, Chico Har­lan, that she hoped the lit­tle bit of extra mon­ey would help her pay for her grandson’s diapers.

After the Post pub­lished the sto­ry, the man­ag­er of the Days Inn, Her­ry Patel, tele­phoned Har­lan to com­plain about being quot­ed in it. Then he fired Tip­pen. She recount­ed it to Harlan:

“He said I was stu­pid and dumb for talk­ing to [The Post].” Even though, of course, Patel had told Tip­pen to talk to the reporter. Tip­pen con­tin­ued: ​“He cussed me and asked me why you wrote the arti­cle. I said, ​‘Because he’s a reporter; that’s what he does.’”

Patel told Har­lan that Arkansas vot­ers, who approved the pay increase in a ref­er­en­dum by 66 per­cent, should not have done it. ​“Every­body wants free mon­ey in Pine Bluff,” Har­lan quot­ed him as saying.

Patel appar­ent­ly did not under­stand that Tip­pen per­formed work that kept the hotel run­ning every night, which means she earned the mon­ey. The truth is that Patel, like so many oth­er employ­ers, believes that employ­ees should work for free.

The Post and oth­er papers wrote about Tippen’s fir­ing, mak­ing her an icon for ill-treat­ed, low-wage work­ers and Patel the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of miser­ly bosses.

Work­er-exploit­ing employ­ers like McDonald’s, Chipo­tle and Wal­mart have shown them­selves to be craven in the face of coura­geous work­ers’ wage protests as well.

Over the past few months, the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board (NLRB) has filed charges against McDonald’s and Wal­mart alleg­ing they vio­lat­ed work­ers’ rights, includ­ing threat­en­ing ret­ri­bu­tion against those who par­tic­i­pat­ed in strikes.

In Decem­ber, the NLRB in Cal­i­for­nia ruled that Wal­mart ille­gal­ly pun­ished work­ers for strik­ing and seek­ing to union­ize. The judge deter­mined that Wal­mart man­agers ille­gal­ly intim­i­dat­ed work­ers by, for exam­ple, telling one, who had tied a rope around his waist to pull a heavy load, ​“If it was up to me, I would put that rope around your neck.”

In the Chipo­tle case, the NLRB ruled that a man­ag­er in St. Louis ille­gal­ly fired work­er Patrick Leep­er for par­tic­i­pat­ing in Fight for $15 demon­stra­tions and for talk­ing about wages at work. After the deci­sion, a com­pa­ny spokesper­son told the news web­site ThinkProgress: ​“Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, it is always a top pri­or­i­ty for us to remain com­pli­ant with all local and fed­er­al labor laws.”

“Gen­er­al­ly,” Chipo­tle tries. Gen­er­al­ly. Not in this par­tic­u­lar case involv­ing low-wage work­ers demon­strat­ing for bet­ter pay. But, you know, gen­er­al­ly Chipo­tle tries to obey the law.

In the orig­i­nal Wash­ing­ton Post sto­ry about the tiny increase in the min­i­mum wage in Arkansas, Dominic Flis, whose com­pa­ny owns 18 Burg­er Kings in cen­tral Arkansas, said rais­ing the min­i­mum wage push­es up pay for oth­er work­ers too. Here’s what he said:

“If some­body was already mak­ing $7.50, and min­i­mum wage goes to $7.50, they’ll have some expec­ta­tion of a raise as well,” Flis said. ​“And I have to main­tain my workforce.”

The Brook­ings Insti­tute calls this the rip­ple effect. The pay increase at the bot­tom rip­ples all the way up the pay scale.

Hedges, the fired Delta work­er, put it anoth­er way: ​“a lot of the bet­ter paid work­ers also under­stand that the bot­tom has to be raised oth­er­wise the top is going to fall as well.”

If for no oth­er rea­son than self-inter­est, join the gut­sy min­i­mum-wage work­ers at a Fight for $15 eventWednes­day.