Fibonacci Blue
Wanda Coker was rudely awakened to economic injustice during her pregnancy in 1995. Unable to secure government assistance, she says she was hospitalized seven times due to the overwork, poverty wages, and the resulting malnutrition that she endured as a fast-food worker.
But the fifty-one-year-old, now an assistant manager at a Burger King in Durham, North Carolina, began fighting back a year and a half ago. That’s when her daughter, a McDonald’s employee at the time, recruited Coker to the Fight for $15 movement, which has sparked wage increases for millions across the country.
The two are now looking to help kick Fight for $15 into higher gear. On February 12, they will participate in nationwide strikes and protests in partnership with a revived Poor People’s Campaign, originally organized by Dr. Martin Luther King. The event could offer a welcome boost to Fight for $15, while elevating the visibility of the the Poor People’s Campaign as it prepares to unleash a wave of mass civil disobedience this spring.
Wanda Coker
“We need everybody in America to be able to feed their families, afford to live, keep their lights on,” Coker tells The Progressive.
On February 12, thousands of fast-food cooks and cashiers will walk off their jobs to demand higher wages and union rights, in a protest that commemorates the the fiftieth anniversary of a sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee—a historic struggle championed by King shortly before his assassination.
The Poor People’s Campaign was launched in 1968 to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make very clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life,” the Reverend Ralph Abernathy said at the time. Abernathy led the campaign after King’s assassination.
The rebooted movement—officially called the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—will carry on this tradition, demanding solutions to a range of interlocking injustices, including systemic racism, economic inequality, voter suppression, and environmental destruction, says the Reverend Liz Theoharis, who co-chairs the Poor People’s Campaign with the Reverend William Barber II.
Fight for $15, Theoharis explains in an interview, will provide “a real infusion of excitement and energy” into the Poor People’s Campaign. The collaboration could also provide a lift to Fight for $15.
Sparked by New York City McDonald’s workers who staged a walkout in 2012, Fight for $15 has spurred dozens of cities and states to increase minimum wages, resulting in raises for roughly half of the forty-three million people who were reportedly earning poverty wages in 2013, estimates Stephanie Luce, a labor professor at the City University of New York. It’s put ten million of these workers on a path to $15 an hour, according to Fight for $15.
Yet the movement has struggled to notch victories in states that prohibit localities from setting their own minimum wages, Luce said. It’s main underwriter, SEUI, is also thought to have scaled back funding, having reportedly planned on slashing its budget under a Trump administration. And the movement has had little success with unionizing low-wage workers, though it did spawn an innovative nonprofit in New York City.
“We need everybody in America to be able to feed their families, afford to live, keep their lights on.”
The collaboration with the Poor People’s Campaign may breath new life into Fight for $15 by further emphasizing the link between economic and racial inequality, as well as by tying in other causes, Luce says.
The movement has needed “to elevate the fight from issues to values” and articulate a “vision that challenges the very precepts and assumptions of capitalist society,” argues Jonathan Rosenblum, a long-time organizer who helped lead the first successful battle for a $15 minimum wage, in SeaTac, Washington,
“The Poor People’s Campaign has the potential to provide this transformational lever, by elevating the fight from a number, 15, to a moral movement,” he said.
On Monday, fast-food workers, historians, and community leaders from across the country will converge on Memphis for a forum on the legacy of the sanitation workers strike, followed by a march from Clayborn Temple to Memphis City Hall, the same path walked by the sanitation workers fifty years ago.
Strikers in more than two dozen other cities, including Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago, Miami and Houston, will also hold marches and protests.
“We’re going to try to get some of the workers inside to come out and join us,” Coker says about a planned rally in front of a McDonald’s on Martin Luther King Parkway in Durham, Tennessee. Her Fight for $15 chapter helped put Durham city workers on a path to a minimum of $15 an hour, but she wants the wage expanded, along with stronger union rights.
“We can shift the conversation away from blaming people for problems they’re having.”
The February 12 protest is a prelude to a forty-day offensive that the Poor People’s Campaign will launch on Mother’s Day, May 13. The nationwide campaign will feature six weeks of direct action, public education and civil disobedience, climaxing in a “massive mobilization,” in Washington, D.C. on June 23, Theoharis said.
“[We] will put ourselves and our bodies on the line to make sure that . . . we can shift the conversation away from blaming people for problems they’re having,” Theoharis says.
The movement aligns a broad array of unions, community groups and other organizations, with coordinating committees in thirty-two states. It will be mutually “transformative” for participating organizations, not “transactional,” Theoharis says. And it will draw inspiration from a famous statement made by King during a lecture in 1967:
“Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.”
Teke Wiggin is a freelance Brooklyn-based reporter who covers labor, technology and housing. Follow him at @tkwiggin.