Fibonacci Blue
Protesters outside a McDonald’s in Minneapolis in 2016. Their efforts succeeded in establishing a $15-per-hour minimum wage.
When the Minneapolis City Council passed a landmark $15 minimum wage bill last June after years of organizing, community and labor groups celebrated. But nearly a year later, many workers are still waiting to be paid in full.
The law has had to withstand a court challenge brought by local employers, along with repeated attempts to block the measure by state lawmakers. The minimum wage phase-in—rising incrementally over five to seven years—began rolling out in early 2018, from $9.50 to $10 an hour (above the federal minimum of $7.25 but barely enough to cover basic needs in the region). It was the first victory in a midwestern city in the Fight for 15 movement. Yet even this gradual wage hike has been tripped up by local bosses—including the brand that originally inspired the call for $15 an hour and a union.
The Golden Arches are bending the rules, says McDonald’s worker Steven Suffridge. He and other staffers have filed complaints with the city after getting paychecks during the first few weeks of the year that fell short of $10-an-hour.
Suffridge is also frustrated by a larger burden he sees all Minneapolis workers like him facing. “It’s really not about the money,” Suffridge told The Progressive. “It’s about the justice. . . . It stings to know that you’ve been taken advantage of.”
A seventeen-year veteran of the fast food industry, Suffridge sees glaring racial disparities across the city’s jagged economic landscape, which has some of the widest income gaps in the country. Getting shorted on weekly paychecks is compounded by the daily disrespect that poor people of color endure.
“The low-income workers are treated differently than [higher] paid workers,” Suffridge says. “And the Twin Cities seems to have some of the worst racial disparities because we have so much of a mixture of people here.” The wage boost is a step forward—Suffridge says he just began receiving the proper wage at his job—but truly fair compensation at work remains elusive across the low-wage workforce.
The wage boost is a step forward but truly fair compensation remains elusive across the low-wage workforce.
Like Cleveland and other “heartland” hubs, the Twin Cities might seem like a bulwark of the midwestern middle class. But the city, is fractured by deep segregation. Poverty-wage fast food jobs are predominantly filled by people of color, many of them working precarious short-term or contract-based work with minimal protections. As in many other cities, the service industries—retail, janitorial, restaurant work—keep them at the margins, their communities typically politically and socially disenfranchised.
Last year, Minnesota’s white household incomes were more than double that of black peers. Black workers suffered an unemployment rate twice that of whites’, with much lower home ownership rates in their communities as well as vastly disproportionate incarceration risk. Overall, non-whites and immigrants would benefit the most from the $15 minimum wage boost in Minneapolis.
Raising the wage floor legislatively, however, has proven an easier lift than keeping bosses from punching holes in it. Endemic wage theft continues to drive the city's economic gap.
Minneapolis’s leading grassroots worker center, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), helped Suffridge and fellow labor activists win the initial Fight for $15. The union-backed national economic justice effort, spearheaded in 2012, put Minneapolis workers on the political map and culminated in the enactment of the midwest’s highest minimum wage standards coupled with a new earned sick time law.
But now they’re fighting to give the law some teeth. Even before the $15 wage ordinance, local workers were reporting that their bosses were routinely cheating them, with about half of all respondents reporting some form of recent wage theft. Estimates of levels of wage theft suggest that local fast food workers lose more than $2,500 each year, pushing their income below $10,000—less than a quarter of what they need to cover a family’s basic needs. As of 2015, Minneapolis authorities documented some 5,500 labor standard violations in the previous decade—likely only a tiny fraction of the scale of the problem.
While CTUL has helped with numerous wage theft cases in recent years, official claims often face long, stressful bureaucratic investigation procedures and relatively paltry final settlements.
Estimates of levels of wage theft suggest fast food workers lose more than $2,500 each year, pushing their income below $10,000.
Cleaning worker Cecilia Guzman worked with CTUL to formally complain in 2015. She racked up some $4,500 in unpaid back wages before her boss eventually fired her, and even after winning her claim the wages remained unpaid while her family tumbled into financial crisis. She testified in CTUL’s survey report: “It is unacceptable that even after all I have been through . . . I am still in debt, and the bosses who haven’t paid me still haven’t felt the consequences of their actions.”
CTUL identifies the core of the problem as the casualization and outsourcing of low-wage work. Many corporations, including household brands like Amazon and Target, spin off their frontline jobs to third-party agencies—temp staffing agencies, for example—or through elaborate contracting arrangements.
Such arrangements allow them to sidestep the regulations that come with regular employment, and workers are left with only marginal protections, or are not considered employees at all, but “independent contractors.” To combat this trend, CTUL’s Responsible Contractor Policy establishes a sector-wide framework of wage and safety standards—for example, a formal six-day schedule and worker-led safety committees at the facility.
Worker solidarity and peer-centered organizing are especially critical for the many immigrant members, who live under the terror of the Trump administration’s expanding anti-immigrant crackdowns. (The relatively liberal local government has promised that local agencies will not comply with federal immigration enforcement, but many remain wary of any interaction with government authority.)
Workers organizing with CTUL have pressured contractors to adopt uniform standards that also bind the mega-brands under which they actually work. One set of rules covers all the workers at the contracting parent companies, engaging them workplace by workplace across the retail supply chain, from Best Buy to Whole Foods.
Legal mechanisms protecting wages most effectively operate through community partnerships, which can act as on-the-ground watchdogs for abusive workplaces.
Along with grassroots activism, strong labor enforcement also requires full-fledged legal penalties and dedicated state agencies. And, as the National Employment Law Project explains in a policy analysis, legal mechanisms most effectively operate through community partnerships, which can support vulnerable workers and act as on-the-ground watchdogs for abusive workplaces.
Community alliances can also build toward more sophisticated protections, such as wage bonds or repayment funds that provide members a proactive safeguard against risk of wage theft.
Suffridge acknowledges the work left to do to empower workers to push stubborn bosses to respect their rights. “It hurts, because we fought for this,” he says. “We signed petitions, we went to City Hall. . . . We've done so much to just have them rip it from us.” But Suffridge remains optimistic that the workers will win in the end.
“Luckily, we have the law, and we have it in writing now,” he says. “We just need to enforce it.”
Michelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent, and co-produces Dissent’s “Belabored” podcast.