Inside a crowded café in Tampa, Fla., Annelise Orleck first heard the words that would eventually become the title of the book she was there to research.
“We are all fast-food workers now,” said Keegan Shepard, a graduate student at the University of South Florida.
Shepard was sitting among a diverse alliance of professors, students, fast-food workers and community activists who had all met at the café that day to talk about Florida’s Fight for $15 campaign.
His words reflected a globalization-spurred trend that’s led to a world in which billions of people struggle to survive on poverty wages, often while working at unsafe jobs, without any security or benefits.
Tampa was just one of many stops on Orleck’s journey around the globe as she researched what she says has become a massive, unified, global uprising of these workers.
Her book, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages,” took her to Bangladesh, Cambodia and the Philippines, where workers are fighting for safer working conditions in clothing factories and farmers are rising up after being displaced.
But much organizing and outcry is taking place right here in the U.S., where Orleck says conditions for low-wage workers are not all that different from those in developing nations.
She traveled between Los Angeles and New York City, interviewing those with the courage to go up against the world’s two largest private employers – Walmart and McDonald’s – as well as farmworkers, hotel and home care workers, and even college professors, who have all reached their boiling point and have begun to demand living wages, safety and respect from their employers.
From Orleck’s bird’s-eye view of this burgeoning global labor movement, she shows readers that where there is despair, there is also hope, because when workers come together and rise up, positive change often follows.
Orleck will be at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 19, for a book signing and reading.
She has a written five books on the history of women’s issues, activism, immigration and politics, including “Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty” and “Rethinking American Women’s Activism.” Orleck, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, resides in Vermont and is a professor of history at Dartmouth College.
Emily Green: What conditions set the stage for this worker uprising?
Annelise Orleck: I think there are a few:
Workers started to be scheduled by computer algorithm in many places. Nobody had set schedules anymore. People could be called in at the last minute if the place was busy, but they could also be told as they were on their way to work and had already paid for a babysitter, “Sorry, you’re not needed now.” That complete erosion of any sense of stability for workers, I think, set the stage for an uprising and a feeling that people had nothing to lose.
Bleu Rainer, the fast-food worker I profiled in Tampa, Fla., showed me a paycheck for $109. He said, “That was my paycheck for two weeks because the algorithm decided that it wasn’t busy and they didn’t need me.”
Additionally, wages have been stagnant for 40 years. And by 2016, 70 percent of American workers were earning less than $50,000 a year; 50 percent were earning less than $30,000 a year. So you have 50 percent of employed Americans in poverty.
And we’re seeing that: A recent study showed 10 percent of Disneyland workers are homeless; the study that came out very recently that showed 36 percent of college students – supposedly the winners in the American Dream Sweepstakes – are hungry, and 10 percent to 12 percent don’t have a secure place to live.
In the Global South, where there was land grab after the 2008 crash by big corporations looking for safer investments, millions and millions of people were forced off their land as it was sold to transnational farming conglomerates or seed conglomerates. Conditions creating migrancy and homelessness. That was another thing that made people feel like they didn’t have anything to lose.
I think we’ve reached the point where things are bad enough for enough people that we’re seeing an uprising. I think it’s very similar to the Great Depression, where we began to see support for socialism; we began to see unemployed marches. We’ve seen a return of hunger strikes as part of this protest movement, and as one activist, Denise Barlage from the Walmart workers movement, said to me, “It’s really easy to go on hunger strike when you’re already hungry.”
All of those things and the kinds of communications that it made possible set the stage for this global uprising.
E.G.: Can you tell me about the scope of this uprising? Is it reaching every corner of our planet?
A.O.: It is. It’s broadened. All kinds of low-wage workers have had a one-day strike every year in April, in May, and those strikes have taken place in 40 countries on six continents in hundreds of cities.
It is truly reaching from South Africa – from the Western Cape wine industry to the berry pickers in Baja California, in Mexico, to the garment shops of Dakar, Bangladesh and Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to the Thai berry pickers in Iceland and Lapland.
We are seeing, really, a global uprising of low-wage workers and also of farmers and farmworkers. There’s an organization called La Via Campesina, “The Peasants’ Way,” that is run by an organic farmer from Zimbabwe named Elizabeth Mpofu. She sees what’s happening to farmers and farmworkers as part of what’s happening to all workers, and they have galvanized days of action by farmworkers. There have been hotel workers’ days of actions that have taken place all over the world – from Africa to Albany.
E.G.: Are the conditions faced by low-wage workers here in the U.S. all that different from conditions we’re seeing in developing nations?
A.O.: No, they’re not. There is one story that I recount in this book of a hotel housekeeper by the name of Santa Brito, who went into labor. She’d been asking for time off while she was pregnant. She wasn’t feeling that well, and they wouldn’t give it to her. She was afraid to ask for more, even unpaid time off, because she was afraid she would be fired. But when she went into labor, she asked her supervisor if she could leave, and her supervisor said no because her shift wasn’t over. Finally, her water broke while she was making a bed. She went to the hospital to give birth to her baby, in her uniform, stopping only to wash the toxic cleansers that she works with off her hands. Two weeks later, she was called by her supervisor and fired for leaving her shift early.
Now when I tell that story, people who read this book often remember it because it’s so shocking, and they have said to me, when I’m giving talks or interviews, “Could you tell me that story about the Philippine hotel housekeeper?” And I say, “No. Santa Brito does not work in the Philippines. She works in Providence, Rhode Island.”
What’s happened is globalization of garment work, of hotel work, farm work, of fast food has driven down wages here in this country and made conditions worse in this country. And the decline of unions has done that as well. So no, they’re not that different.
E.G.: What stands out to you as different about today’s labor movement, as compared with movements of the past?
A.O.: There are a few differences. One is that, though there has always been global rhetoric, social media has really made it possible for workers to organize very quickly and globally because they can communicate with each other within seconds. And through using social media, they’re no longer dependent on professional media to spread the word or to cover their events. They can cover them; they can shape the images coming out of those protests.
In addition, the flash strike is taking the place of long, drawn-out grinding strikes. Workers have been able to do these one-day strikes so they don’t lose too many wages and companies don’t usually fire people, but they are nevertheless able to get out their discontent with the brands and to have protests all over the country, and the world, that show up huge multinationals like McDonald’s and Walmart for the promises they’ve broken, for the lies they’ve told and for the illegal things they’ve done to retaliate against workers for organizing.
The final thing is that the majority of those involved are women, and particularly, women of color. As important as wages are women’s issues in terms of galvanizing the movement. For example, wanting to see an end to sexual violence and gender-based workplace violence and sexual harassment, an end to pregnancy discrimination and wanting to see gender-wage equity, as well.
E.G.: One chapter is titled, “You can’t dismantle capitalism without dismantling patriarchy.” How is the patriarchy reflected in the world’s labor struggles?
A.O.: That quote came from a 27-year-old woman activist named Sister Nice Coronacion in the Philippines, and it was her view, and it’s the view of an organization called World March of Women that she was part of, that patriarchy takes advantage of women workers, uses them as a surplus labor force willing to come in at lower wages because they have children to feed. It uses sexual violence and sexual harassment to keep women compliant, and it also uses children and women’s lack of access to reproductive devices, birth control, as a way of creating more workers who are more desperate and who will work under any circumstances. In all of those ways, she sees capitalism and patriarchy as intertwined.
E.G.: You wrote that to many of the labor rights activists you interviewed, “the living-wage campaign is inextricably tied to the struggle against police violence and for immigration reform.” Can you explain how these seemingly separate civil rights issues are connected?
A.O.: (Fast-food worker) Bleu Rainer explained really clearly how the fight for living wage is tied to the struggle against police violence when he said, “We are the same people. We are the people who are harassed and beaten by police when we are tired and coming home from our second or third job, which often brings us into the streets late at night because we have to work so many jobs to survive.”
And he pointed out that, for example, after police shot teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., it was living-wage activists in a local McDonald’s who invited protesters in to get a safe space away from police violence. It’s very much the same people, and I think the immigration struggle is also tied to it because they are also the same people.
A veteran activist for the hotel workers, María Elena Durazo, said to me, since the early 20th century, the labor movement has been tied to the struggle for immigrant rights because immigrants are used to breaking unions to drive down wages. They have always been used to make extra profits for capitalists, and now more than ever, she feels that it is essential for the labor movement to stand with immigrants, and we’re seeing that happen.
E.G.: I was surprised to read that in Denmark, fast-food workers earn the equivalent of $21 per hour, with paid vacations, benefits and subsidies to attend college. Do you think something like this is achievable in the U.S. in your lifetime?
A.O.: Yeah, I think it would. First of all, the first question that people always ask is, “If we raise wages, aren’t prices going to go up?” No, because there is plenty of surplus. Part of what’s happened is that corporations are engaging in shareholder buyback, because CEOs’ worth and salary is determined only by how much the value of the shares of the company increase.
One thing that I would like to see, that has started to be called for, is limiting how much of the profits of the company can go into shareholder buyback. Maybe instead, you can have a regulation that says a certain percentage has to go to raises; a certain percentage has to go to benefits. In the past 40 years, you have CEOs that make 20, 30, 80 times what their lowest-paid workers make. Now it’s like 350 times what their lowest-paid workers make. No one’s asking to equalize distribution of wealth so that the wealthy can’t be wealthy anymore, but I think it’s time to simply limit it so that you don’t have the world’s three wealthiest men owning the same amount of wealth as almost the bottom half of the human race. That’s just obscene, and I don’t think it’s sustainable in terms of healthy economies.
E.G.: Your book highlights success stories, where workers came together, rose up and demanded better treatment, and in many cases won in some respect. What can we learn from successful campaigns? What works?
A.O.: One thing that’s worked is that wages have increased. When this campaign started, wages had been stagnant for 40 years. As of 2016, we started to see some increases. American low-wage workers between 2012 and 2016 won for themselves $61.5 billion in wage increases. To get some perspective, that’s 12 times what Congress gave them the last time it raised the federal minimum wage in 2007.
Mexican berry pickers, in a huge 2015 strike, doubled their wages. One way they did that was they walked off the farms and blocked the flow of berries into the United States. And berries are the fastest-growing and most wealth-producing sector of the produce industry.
I think blocking the doors to Walmarts on Black Friday, blocking the Transpeninsular Highway where the berries came into the U.S. and just walking off the job – all of those were successful.
Lobbying with city governments has been extremely successful. City governments are the most progressive in the country right now, and you’ve begun to get minimum-wage laws. New York passed a regulation last summer that workers are hoping will go global, and that was a scheduling ordinance. It mandated that New York City employers must give their workers two weeks’ advance notice of their schedules.
(Oregon passed similar legislation in 2017, mandating retail, food service and hospitality employers with 500-plus workers worldwide give employees their schedules at least one week in advance. This law goes into effect July 1, 2018.)
A program called Jobs to Move America has already made deals with the transit authorities in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In these deals, city governments make agreements with local community organizations and unions when they buy buses, trains and trucks for city fleets. (The agreement is) that they are going to award contracts to companies that agree to make those vehicles in the cities where they’re going to be used, to hire local people to be the manufacturing workers, to make these union shops, to hire women, people of color, veterans, ex-cons, and also to pay attention to environmental ramifications. The question is, will it then go to places like Portland, Seattle, other cities where there’s a chance that you could make those kinds of deals with city governments? I think that’s also an extremely promising strategy, and unlike Donald Trump, who promised to bring manufacturing back to American cities, this movement is really doing it.
Another successful strategy was pioneered by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in the 1970s, and that is to say you don’t just target your direct boss on farm, in a garment shop or in an electronic shop. You target the corporation at the top of the supply chain.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers – tomato pickers – started traveling the country and protesting in front of fast-food stores and Whole Foods and Walmart. They said, “You guys buy all the tomatoes. If you paid a penny more a pound for tomatoes, awarded farmers who paid their workers a little more, paid a little more to fund inspections, by workers, of safety, and to investigate claims of sexual harassment and abuse and enslavement, you would create a better, safer industry.” And indeed, where they started, in the Florida tomato fields, which were described by one federal judge as ground zero for modern slavery, are now some of the best agricultural workplaces in the world.
We’ve seen that same strategy has won with the garment industry. The Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord, a consumer-labor-worker alliance, convinced 225 of the largest clothing producers in the world to sign an agreement that said, “We will pay more to make sure that our factories are safe, and that workers’ wages go up, and that violence against workers does not happen, and we legally bind ourselves to be sued in our own countries if we break this agreement.” In Vermont, recently, farmworkers won the same kind of agreement from Ben and Jerry’s.
E.G.: Here in Portland, we’ve got a minimum wage that will increase to $14.75 by 2022. That was considered a big win. I couldn’t imagine trying to get by on that – even now – if I were a single mother or even a single person, really, with how high rents are. Do you think by fighting for such small concessions, the movement is failing to combat the root cause, as you describe it, of neoliberalism?
A.O.: I think that questioning neoliberalism, this idea that profit and increasing shareholder value is the highest achievement of collective human endeavor, I think that this movement is questioning that.
I think it’s questioning this idea that neoliberalism is essential for freedom. It’s asking, what is freedom? For us, freedom is freedom from sexual violence, freedom from hunger. It’s free water, free education, and free heating and energy assistance. This movement is, in fact, questioning the underpinnings of neoliberalism. But these are poor people. This movement is the 3.5 billion poorest people on Earth, not the top wealthy few, and not even the middle class, except it does now include, increasingly, educated people. So the fact that they have won victories that we see as relatively small is remarkable.
As someone who’s always written about poor people’s movements, I’m always asked this question: What did they really achieve? How much did they really win? The war on poverty didn’t end poverty in our time, no – but it cut it! The war on poverty cut childhood hunger by half in 10 years. There were significant victories, and I think what we need to do is look at these victories and say that they are a foundation for more. Obviously, as Laphonza Butler, who was co-chair of the L.A. living-wage campaign and president to the health care workers local there, said to me, “Nobody’s going to Vegas on $15 an hour.”
But, she said, people who are literally strangled by impoverishment and by the sense that nothing was ever going to get better, the psychological benefit and the emotional benefits, even of these small wages, are important. Because they gave them to themselves, and they see that if we struggle, we can win.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
"We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now" by Annelise OrleckPhoto courtesy of Beacon Press Boston
If you go
What: Annelise Orleck book signing and discussion of the global low-wage worker uprising
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 19
Where: Powell’s Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., Portland