Low-Wage Workers' Struggles Are About Much More than Wages
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- Published on Monday, 20 April 2015 23:34
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1107 .... April 21, 2015
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Low-Wage Workers’ Struggles
Are About Much More than Wages
Arun Gupta
When fast-food workers first took the streets in New York City in November 2012 to protest for higher wages and a union, no one could have imagined how successful the campaign would be. Since then the low-wage workers movement, known as Fight for 15, has helped spur eleven states and numerous cities to raise the minimum hourly wage. It's enabled campaigns in Seattle and the Bay Area to pass citywide measures for $15-an-hour minimum wage. Fight for 15 and a separate campaign called Organization United for Respect at Walmart has also pushed companies like McDonald's, Target, and Walmart to announce in early 2015 that they would raise the minimum wage for hundreds of thousands... of employees.
The success of the organizing is due to everything from the abysmal recovery from the 2008 economic crisis to Occupy Wall Street's role in shifting the national dialogue from austerity to economic inequality. But Fight for 15 is due primarily to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which initiated the campaign in 2011 and has poured tens of millions of dollars into growing waves of protest that are battering the image of the fast-food giants.
As the protests have grown, the campaign has become both broad and narrow. SEIU has linked the plight of fast-food workers to that of retail and convenience-store workers, home healthcare aides, childcare workers, and adjunct professors. At the same time Fight for 15 is focusing its fire on McDonald's. One SEIU insider says the strategy is, "Pummel them until they come to the table." Another organizer outlined the thinking back in 2013: Fight for 15 was trying to cause enough problems for McDonald's image and stock price that SEIU could say to the company, "We can make this all go away" if it agreed to a deal on wages and unionization.