Food service and janitorial staff at the Pentagon are going on strike Wednesday morning, opening a new front in the ongoing fight to get President Obama to end the federal government’s practice of paying poverty wages to contract employees at federal facilities.

The Pentagon employees’ walkout follows similar strikes by service workers at federally owned, privately operated facilities in Washington, DC, such as the Ronald Reagan Building, Union Station and the Smithsonian museum food courts. It also comes after wage theft charges against employers at the Reagan Building and the train station. The expansion of the campaign to the Pentagon comes almost exactly eight months after the first strikes led to retaliatory firings by employers, indicating that efforts to intimidate workers did not succeed.

The workers in question are on the payroll of companies like Dunkin Donuts and Taco Bell, but in a sense their real employer is the federal government. The government hires fast food, retail, security and janitorial companies to service contracts for federal properties. Those contracts give the government a chance to set wage and hour terms for the on-the-ground workers who will actually cook the food and haul the trash. Federal contracts of this sort actually prop up more low-wage jobs than notoriously low-paying companies McDonald’s and Wal-Mart combined. At present, three in four of these workers make less than $10 per hour, and four in 10 rely upon public assistance despite working a full-time job. The same contracts funnel a total of $24 billion per year to the CEOs of the companies that pay their workers so poorly to staff public facilities.