Annelise Orleck
Annelise Orleck remembers the interview she had with a fast-food worker that provided her with the title for her most recent book.
“We are all fast-food workers now,” Keegan Shepard, a graduate student and activist with the Fight for $15, told her. Shepard’s point, explains Orleck in a recent conversation with The Progressive, was that low-wage work affects huge numbers of us, cutting across traditional lines of social class and education.
“He said that people critique low-wage earners by telling them, ‘Hey, if you want a better salary, go back to school. Get an advanced degree,’ ” Orleck remembers. “He went on, ‘I’m taking classes at a community college, and I realize there are professors with Ph.D.s who are earning eight dollars an hour just like I am.’”
“The American Dream is broken,” Orleck says, “and I think a lot of people realize it.”
And it’s not just an American problem. Orleck’s book,“We Are All Fast Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages (Beacon Press), takes on a wide array of labor struggles. It includes hotel workers from Cambodia to Chicago. It discusses garment workers in Bangladesh, who manufacture cheap and trendy “fast fashion” clothing—and who, Orleck writes, have died by the thousands in hundreds of factory fires in this century alone. On April 24, 2013, nearly a century after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that killed 147 workers in 1911, the collapse of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh killed 1,134 workers and injured 2,500 more.
“The American Dream is broken.”
“So, one part of the story is international,” Orleck says. “One part of the story is the interlocking racial justice and economic justice, and another part is the resurgence of global feminism.” Her book links those struggles to living-wage campaigns in New York and California, and organizing efforts by adjunct instructors in colleges and universities, farm workers, and retail employees of the famously anti-union Walmart.
Orleck, who teaches at Dartmouth College, has focused her scholarship on the history of women, particularly women in the labor force. Earlier books have focused on women who unionized the Nevada gambling industry and on the history of women in labor activism over the course of the 20th century.
The diverse group of largely female labor activists she writes about in her new book, Orleck says, are the face of contemporary feminism.
“Hotel housekeepers and farmworkers were ‘Me too’ long before #MeToo,” Orleck notes. “Three out of four hotel housekeepers have been sexually harassed or been in situations where they felt in danger of sexual assault.” As a result, hotel workers around the world have centered sexual violence in their campaigns, demanding “zero tolerance for sexual violence from employers, from guests, and from coworkers.”
“Three out of four hotel housekeepers have been sexually harassed or been in situations where they felt in danger of sexual assault.”
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, representing indigenous migrant workers in Florida, campaign against sexual violence in the farm fields. In a union of grape-pickers in South Africa, about two-thirds of the members are women. “Everyone in that union, male and female, has to sign a pledge that they will be a warrior against violence against women,” Orleck says.
The new labor activists have deployed pop culture, flash mob-style protests, and smartphones to organize actions. They’ve allied with movements for indigenous rights and for racial justice, as when Fight for $15 activists joined in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
They have turned the global economy into a battleground. In her book, Orleck describes the April 15, 2015 living wage strike and rallies by low-wage workers in some forty countries, along with two hundred U.S cities: “They marched in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and hundreds of other American cities,” she writes. “They marched in London, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, Manila, Seoul, Tokyo, Rio, Tegucigalpa, Buenos Aires, Brasília, Cape Town, Freetown, and Accra.”
Low wages and economic inequality are at the heart of the struggle, she says. “It’s not whether you have a job, it‘s whether you have to have three jobs to put a roof over your kids’ head.”
“It’s not whether you have a job, it‘s whether you have to have three jobs to put a roof over your kids’ head.”
And many more people are affected than they may even realize. “In the U.S., 50 percent of workers make under thirty-thousand dollars a year. And 70 percent make under $50,000,” Orleck says. “That’s barely middle class.”
Rightwing politicians have exploited economic resentment to divide people and to promote policies that exacerbate inequality, says Orleck. She sees the recent wave of wildcat teachers strikes for better school funding in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and now Colorado, as evidence of workers gathering force to take a united stand for greater equity.
Orleck once recoiled when someone called her “a professional optimist,” but now claims the label with pride.
While under no illusions, she is hopeful that working people are gathering the strength for a new era of activism. Even those who aren’t themselves low-wage workers can promote justice by paying attention to where their food, clothing, and other goods and services come from—and to the conditions under which they are produced, she notes.
“I think hope is absolutely crucial,” Orleck says. “I could have written a book that was just an expose. There are hard moments in this book. But that’s only part of the story.”
The other part is the persistence, creativity, and success that the new movement is having. “It makes the courage and the valiance of people rising up all the more remarkable.”
Wisconsin freelance writer Erik Gunn is a longtime writer on labor and workplace issues.