To the great credit of the Service Employees International Union, they have been giving assistance to workers in the fast food and related industries, organizing across workplace lines, corporations, and even regional lines to stand up in the workplace and even strike.
And the effort has been remarkably successful. Many workers have won pay increases, respect on the job, some individual grievances and, compared to many traditional strikes, very few firings, terminations, or permanent replacements. They have also raised a couple of critical issues in America — the need to double the minimum wage and the trap of endless poverty for more and more Americans.
What they haven’t won is union recognition, membership, and contracts.
But focusing on those traditional goals in this moment in American history in this industry is a mistake. For decades organizers have talked about the need to organize the fast food industry, but no one could figure out how to do it.
Now SEIU and other unions are helping workers build an organic, from the ground up, worker led movement for workplace justice.
Right now that is as good as any of us can do. With a yawning wealth and income gap threatening our democracy, impoverishing our people, buying our politics, rolling back our history, and privatizing the common good; we need more fights, more people in the street, more stiff challenges to the status quo, more movement.
We need genuine, organic struggle.
By these measures the still growing fast food organizing and movement is remarkably successful. And SEIU and other unions who’ve supported the fast food workers and the workers themselves deserve our support and our respect.
Photo source: Daniel X. O’Neil on Flickr via Creative Commons License: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
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