Low-wage workers in
around 200 cities across the country are holding the biggest-yet day of action in their Fight for $15 campaign today. What started as fast food workers
in one city in November 2012 has spread to home care and child care workers, retail, adjunct professors, and more, with ever-growing numbers of participants and scattered reports of stores
closed by the strike, at least temporarily.
This organizing comes against a backdrop of stagnating wages and skyrocketing unemployment, along with lower wages for a more educated population of low-wage workers than prevailed in the United States in 1968. As many as half of workers in some low-wage industries are receiving some form of public assistance. Workers tell stories of struggling to pay rent and arrange child care, and even face sleep inequality. And the organizing is having an effect. Walmart and McDonald's and other major chains might not admit it, but their recently announced wage increases are due to pressure from workers—and an effort to shut down further organizing. In the McDonald's case, it's also a blatant PR move, giving just a small fraction of workers a raise. But workers aren't falling for it. Anthony Fambrough, an Atlanta-area McDonald's worker, writes that:
... the raise would not apply to me or any of the 90 percent of McDonald’s workers at franchised stores.
I work hard every day wearing a McDonald’s uniform. There’s no question that I work for McDonald’s, and seeing this protest touched a nerve: If the company will do anything to deny me a raise — even pretending that I don’t work for the company in the first place — then how much longer could I stay quiet if I wanted any hope of support myself and providing for my family one day?
Beyond those inadequate, PR-driven raises, the fight for $15 has had an effect on policy, pushing state and local minimum wage increases beyond the $10.10 congressional Democrats had been pushing—itself a number that was seen as politically implausible just a couple years ago. So while McDonald's workers are unlikely to be unionized any time soon, and Walmart isn't sitting down at the bargaining table with its workers, this fight is making a difference. If nothing else, it's raising the floor, changing our sense of what's possible, and, by reaching across the country and across industries, creating some of that old-fashioned notion of solidarity.