The Movement for Better Pay and Basic Respect has Gone Global

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In July 2015 Bleu Rainer, a twenty-six-year-old McDonald’s worker in Tampa, Florida, opened his mail and found an invitation to testify before the Brazilian Senate. “I was kind of shocked,” he laughs.

McDonald’s workers in Brazil had filed charges of wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and violations of Brazil’s labor laws. This moved the Senate Human Rights Commission to convene an unprecedented hearing. Their goal was to determine if McDonald’s, with operations in more than a hundred countries, was driving down wages and eroding safety conditions worldwide.

So they invited fast-food workers from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia to testify about Brazil’s and the world’s second-largest private employer.

On August 16, 2015, Rainer and colleagues from the Philippines, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, and many other countries came to tell their stories. They were greeted by cheering crowds at the Brasília airport.

“People from different unions and politicians from all over the globe were coming to talk about how McDonald’s tries to keep us at the bottom.”

“People from different unions and politicians from all over Brazil and all over the globe were coming to talk about how McDonald’s tries to keep us at the bottom,” Rainer recalls. “It was amazing. Because McDonald’s has employees everywhere, everything they do has a global impact that affects all workers.”

Rainer’s life had been marked by starvation wages, uncertain scheduling, and boiling oil. “In eight years, I made no more than eight dollars and five cents an hour. I witnessed the torture of not having enough to afford rent, which led to me sleeping from house to house. I even had to sleep at bus stops because I was homeless.” Some nights, he went without food, when his food stamps ran out.

“I’m working so hard every day,” he thought. “Why am I not making a living wage? Why can’t I feed myself? Why am I still hungry?”

Though Rainer had already joined the fight for a living wage, he experienced moments in Brazil that opened his eyes. “I met this really cool guy from Japan, another McDonald’s worker. He showed me his arm full of burns.” Rainer raised his arm and held it out. The men were burned in the same places. Stripes. Rainer knew how his colleague had been scarred.

“They make you get orders out in ninety seconds,” he explains. “You’re constantly behind. So, you’re not thinking about safety. You’re worried that your manager is going to push you.” A chill passed through him when he saw the matching burns. The men had more in common than their injuries. “Me and him have the exact same story,” Rainer learned as they talked.

Both had enrolled in college but had to drop out. “He wasn’t earning enough to pay tuition and neither was I.” Rainer felt the pieces fall into place. When Benedict Murillo, from Manila, heard the men’s stories, he rolled up his sleeves and held out his arms. He had the same burns. He also had left college because he couldn’t pay tuition. Their skin colors, languages, and backgrounds were different, Murillo says. Still the three were, in Murillo’s view, “McBrothers”—members of the new global working class.

Later, when Murillo told the story in a union hall in Quezon City in the Philippines, fast-food workers placed their arms on the table—fist-to-fist like spokes in a wheel. Identical lines of burns scored each arm.

Fast-food workers placed their arms on the table—fist-to-fist like spokes in a wheel. Identical lines of burns scored each arm.

At the hearing in Brasília, Rainer heard testimony from a worker in Seoul, South Korea, who delivered “Happy Meals” on a bicycle. “This dude told a story about one of his friends who got killed delivering meals. That guy had to deliver three or four meals every thirty minutes. That’s fast riding. And there’s a lot of hills there and lots of traffic.”

Rainer, Murillo, and other activists who came to Brasília in the summer of 2015 are part of a new global labor movement whose members connect using a mix of old-fashioned and new tactics: face-to-face organizing, cell phones, and social media. They adapt pop-culture references and embed them in local cultures and languages. Disney theme songs, Justin Timberlake jingles, even an electronic dance tune called “Barbra Streisand” are recast and repurposed.

Repeated one-day flash strikes have largely replaced months-long sieges that often hurt workers more than management. Activists still march, chant, go door-to-door. But they also use social media, perform street theater, and engage in pop-culture civil disobedience actions. They hold mock trials of Ronald McDonald. Singing, dancing flash mobs invade fast-food restaurants and shopping malls, posting online about everything they do.

Many twenty-first-century labor activists are under thirty-five and savvy about communications, social media, and popular culture. They take pleasure in subverting expensive advertising slogans, cracking the glossy shell of consumerism. McDonald’s paid pop star Justin Timberlake $6 million to sing “I’m Lovin’ It.” Fast-food workers tweaked the slogan to: “Poverty Wages: Not Lovin’ It.” Anti-sweatshop activists turned Nike’s “Just Do It” into a boycott chant: “Just Don’t Do It.”

Even more than a living wage, these movements are fighting for respect. In Manila, fast-food workers sing the 1967 Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin anthem as they block rush-hour traffic: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me.”

Around the world, low-wage workers are outlining a coherent vision of what a human-centered, post-neoliberal world might look like. What respect means to them is this: a living wage, freedom of assembly, the right to unionize, job security, benefits, safe working conditions, an end to deportations.

Denise Barlage, a longtime activist in Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) says: “We’re not asking to be rich. We are asking for respect, dignity, decent benefits, to be treated like human beings.” In so many ways, that sums up the spirit and ethos of the new global uprising against poverty wages.

In August 2016, when he was twenty-one, Carl’s Jr. and CVS worker Vance “Stretch” Sanders attended the first national Fight for $15 convention in Richmond, Virginia. Visiting the capital of the Confederacy, he could not help thinking about the lingering effects of slavery. Ten thousand activists, most of them African American, marched up Monument Avenue, lined by statues of Confederate generals.

Around the world, low-wage workers are outlining a coherent vision of what a human-centered, post-neoliberal world might look like.

“I heard Reverend William Barber speak about the morality of our movement,” Sanders says. Barber is the founder and leader of Moral Mondays, a mass civil-disobedience campaign that began in North Carolina and spread to Georgia, South Carolina, Illinois, and New Mexico. Protesting legislation restricting voting rights, minimum wage increases, and union rights, clergy, professors, students, and low-wage workers would get themselves arrested on repeated Mondays. Sanders, who also preaches the gospel, felt inspired.

“It took us four hundred years to get from zero to $7.25,” Barber told the crowd. “We can’t wait another four hundred years. Labor without a living wage is nothing but a pseudo form of slavery.” The crowd roared in agreement. Sanders listened as fast-food, retail, and home-care workers insisted it was no accident that half of African American workers in the United States earned under $15 an hour.

“We always did the grunt work for low wages,” said Virginia home-care worker Lauralyn Clark. “White babies drank from our breasts, but we couldn’t drink from their fountains. White families relied on us to care for their elderly parents, but we couldn’t ride the bus with them. We cleaned their schools, but our children couldn’t attend. We cooked their food, but we couldn’t sit at their table. Well, enough is enough.”

From its beginnings, the low-wage workers’ struggle in the United States was rooted in the long history of African American protest against the exploitation of black labor, violation of black bodies, and attempts to break the spirit of black workers. Fast-food activists have repeatedly quoted the famous words uttered by former sharecropper and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer when asked why black people could wait no longer for freedom.

“For three hundred years, we’ve given them time,” Hamer said in 1964. “And I’ve been tired so long now, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Marching down Monument Avenue, Stretch Sanders displayed the same fervor and weariness as Hamer had a half century earlier. “We’re young,” he said, “but we understand that black folk have been at this for a very long time. We’re picking up an old struggle.”

At a Fight for $15 march, Bleu Rainer held up a paycheck for $109. “That’s for two weeks’ work,” he said incredulously. Schedules are changed at the drop of a hat. Parents can’t plan child care, or know for sure if they will be able to pay their bills. The movement’s focus on scheduling has started to make a difference.

In May 2017, the New York City Council passed bills mandating that employers give fast-food workers fourteen days’ notice about schedule changes. It also banned back-to-back shifts. Movement members believe these bills will send out ripples.

Bleu Rainer held up a paycheck for $109. “That’s for two weeks’ work,” he said.

Between 2012 and 2015, fast-food workers staged hundreds of one-day flash strikes, every few months in an ever-growing number of cities. And they took advantage of social media to maximize the impact of their actions. Images of shamefaced or weeping Ronald McDonalds went viral. So did the word “McJobs,” denoting dead-end work without benefits. They called on McDonald’s to “Supersize My Wages” and asked customers if they wanted “poverty fries.”

These actions spread around the globe. In 2014, fast-food workers in 230 cities in thirty-four countries on six continents walked off the job to demand a living wage, full-time work, and union recognition.

A series of international conversations enhanced fast-food workers’ sense that they were part of a rising global movement. Workers from New York, Chicago, and 150 other U.S. cities met with counterparts from Denmark, Argentina, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, and other countries. They planned global campaigns and talked of negotiating global labor agreements with the world’s largest corporations.

On April 14, 2016, low-wage workers struck in 300 U.S. cities and forty-plus countries. Momentum continues to grow. Nineteen-year-old Los Angeles activist Samuel Homer Williams believes that this movement, like the black freedom struggle fifty years earlier, will be remembered as a turning point.

“For me it’s about being a part of history, part of something bigger than myself,” said Williams. “I kind of feel like a hero, knowing that I’m helping people stay in their homes, pay their bills, and be able to eat . . . . We’re trying to change that. And I think we will.”

Activists in the low-wage workers’ struggle are rightly proud of what they achieved between 2012 and 2016. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia now have minimum wages set above the federal $7.25. About forty localities have enacted minimum wages higher than those in their states.

The movement’s most significant U.S. victories occurred in the spring of 2016, when California and New York—the country’s largest labor markets—both approved a $15 state wage. New York and California are very expensive places. Fifteen dollars an hour, phased in over several years, will not give workers enough to support families. Still, these are noteworthy victories, raising wages for tens of millions of workers after decades of wage stagnation.

Just as important, the movement shifted public opinion, convincing most Americans that all workers deserve a living wage. By 2016, six in ten Americans supported a $15 hourly minimum, a belief that crossed party lines. A few years earlier, the idea of more than doubling the federal minimum seemed delusional.

Victories of the movement have raised wages for tens of millions of workers after decades of wage stagnation.

On the same night that Donald Trump was elected president, voters in four states raised the minimum wage. Health care workers won increases in both public and private institutions. Hospital workers in five states won $15, as did home-care workers in Massachusetts and Washington.

Large banks, insurance companies, and high-tech corporations also raised wages: Aetna, Facebook, Amalgamated Bank, Wells Fargo, and the Bank of America adopted minimums of $15 or more. Many smaller companies have too. The usually intransigent retail sector moved a little: Target, Gap, IKEA, T. J. Maxx, and Costco raised their minimum.

Even Walmart and McDonald’s gestured at change. McDonald’s raised wages for some employees (just ninety thousand of its workforce of more than two million). And Walmart raised its minimum to $10, but then cut hours and benefits and closed stores.

Activists also saw progress in their battle for paid time off. In 2015, 36 percent of U.S. workers, forty-one million people, were ineligible for even one sick day per year. Many fast-food workers had no sick leave and almost three-quarters admitted handling food at work while sick. Since then, seven states and the District of Columbia passed paid sick-leave bills, as did New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, and other cities.

The period of 2016-17 even brought a new influx into labor unions, especially among airport workers. Baggage handlers in Los Angeles and airport workers in Minneapolis signed union contracts in November 2016, seventeen years after they began living-wage protests. A month later, eight thousand New York City and New Jersey airport workers won union recognition. These victories proved that unions can win even in environments where workers are employed by many different subcontractors.

Airport workers Prince Jackson and Canute Drayton say they were inspired by fast-food activists. Jackson is a baggage handler, Drayton a security guard at JFK. Both are in their forties and have lived through other social justice struggles. This feels different.

“We could feel that the movement was really growing,” Jackson says. “We knew that there were thousands of underpaid service workers in New York City who don’t get benefits for doing jobs that are vital to the life of the city. Most of us have a friend or relative who works or did work in fast food. We know how hard they work, what a tough job they have, and that the pay they get is ludicrous.”

Jackson and Drayton were thrilled when President Obama signed an executive order in 2014 raising minimum salaries for workers under federal contract. As leaders in the fight, they were invited to the White House. “It was an incredible feeling, standing with the President,” Jackson says. “Something I can tell my grandkids.”

Between 2012 and 2016, living-wage activism earned $61.5 billion in raises for 19 million workers, twelve times what Congress gave workers when it last raised the federal minimum wage in 2007; 11.8 million workers in twenty-five states, cities, and counties won raises in 2016. On January 1, 2017, twenty-one states, twenty-two cities, four counties, and one region increased wages. After decades of stagnation, wages for the bottom 40 percent of American workers were finally starting to rise.

Workers know this is just a first step, said Laphonza Butler, president ofCalifornia’s hospital and home-care workers’ union and cochair of the Los Angeles living-wage coalition. “Fifteen dollars an hour is only $31,000 a year. Nobody’s going to Vegas on $31,000 a year. It’s just enough to get by, to get the basics, but we think it is an incredible accomplishment.” 

Excerpted from the forthcoming book, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, by Annelise Orleck, Beacon Press. Orleck, the author of four previous books, is a professor of history at Dartmouth College.