On May 1, 2006, millions of immigrants all across the country went on strike in what was called “A Day Without an Immigrant.” On December 13, 2014, over 100,000 people demonstrated to demand an end to police brutality and violence in Washington, D.C., and New York City, united under the banner Black Lives Matter. On April 15, 2015, more than 60,000 workers in over 200 cities took to the streets to demand better pay and the right to unionize as part of the Fight for $15 campaign. These were the big marches and protests, the culmination of dozens, if not hundreds, of more localized protests across the country. Taken together, these three movements represent a major surge in organizing of, by, and for the new working class.
And while mass mobilizations gain strength and prominence, many progressive leaders and the organizations they lead are turning attention to building political power by creating new membership-based organizations and new strategies for community and voter engagement. Together these mass mobilizations of the public, new forms of organizations and membership structures, and new strategies and infrastructure for political engagement are starting to reshape politics in places like California, New York, Texas, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Georgia. Meanwhile, unions and new working-class groups are renewing their efforts to organize in the South, a region once deemed hopeless for progressive power-building.
The Fight for $15, the Movement for Black Lives, and immigrants’ rights movements have galvanized significant portions of the new working class and achieved visibility in mainstream media. But make no mistake, a proliferation of new activists and new campaigns in major cities, in red states and in blue states, is disrupting the status quo and challenging the historic inequality strangling our nation. There is more great work happening than can be covered in just one chapter, and my apologies to the many excellent leaders and their organizations who are left out of this chapter. So, reader, please keep in mind that for every example of new working-class organizing chronicled in this chapter, there are dozens more that could have been included.
Construction is big business in Texas. And like everything in Texas, it’s bigger there than in most states. Employing close to 1 million workers, the construction industry generates one dollar of every twenty dollars in the Texas economy.1 With a rapidly growing population, the demand for housing, new roads, schools, and other infrastructure has sustained the industry even during the economic downturn. The workers are mostly Latino, about half of whom are undocumented, working long hours for low pay and often under dangerous conditions. More construction workers die in Texas each year than in any other state. Texas’s fatalities in the construction industry are almost double those of California, even though California’s construction workforce is bigger.2 Injuries are commonplace, affecting one out of five construction workers. For all the risk, construction workers in Texas earn low wages, with half of them earning income at poverty level. What’s more, they often don’t get paid overtime or fully paid at all; one out of five workers reports wage theft and no overtime pay.
The construction industry in Texas is a model of the fissured workplaces discussed in Chapter 2. Workers are hired by a long line of subcontractors, all of whom face immense cost pressures with increasing intensity at each link in the contracting chain. These cost pressures result in many employers misclassifying the workers as independent contractors, allowing the employer to avoid paying unemployment insurance and federal payroll taxes. And it leads to skimping on safety protections and adequate training.
Enter the Workers Defense Project (WDP). Cofounded and led by Cristina Tzintzún until the end of 2015, WDP is a statewide membership workers’ rights organization composed largely of immigrants and concentrating on construction workers. With 3,500 members, WDP uses a range of tactics both to help workers directly and to pass reforms to improve working standards in the construction industry. From original survey research highlighting the deplorable conditions facing construction workers to legal support for workers seeking to retrieve back wages, WDP has managed to win major reforms in a state known to be notoriously hostile to worker organizing. In 2013 the Austin City Council passed landmark legislation that requires companies that want to build in Austin and receive tax incentives to pay a minimum wage of $11 an hour and offer the prevailing wage, worker’s compensation, and basic safety training.
Tzintzún explained that the WDP’s target wasn’t the employers of the workers but rather the developers, who hold all the power. “In many other parts of the country, construction jobs are good blue-collar jobs. They are not in Texas,” she told me. WDP estimates that about 50 percent of construction workers in Texas are undocumented, a shift that has led to increasingly abysmal working conditions. “The human cost of the Texas economic miracle that doesn’t really get talked about frequently is that it’s being built on the back of low-wage workers and immigrant workers. We have not just growth but massive growth in minimum-wage jobs, the majority of the workforce lives below the poverty line even though they work full-time, and it’s the most deadly and dangerous place to work in the state.”
The construction industry in Texas employs primarily white U.S.-born workers and Latino workers. When WDP started ten years ago, there was a lot of animosity to overcome on the part of white construction workers, who felt that immigrant workers were stealing their jobs. Tzintzún said, “One of the things I’m most proud of is that we have burly white construction workers, who are thought of as the most Texan guys you could be, standing up and fighting with us for immigration reform, and standing with a bunch of undocumented immigrant workers and seeing their struggle as one. That’s one of the things I’m the most of proud of that we’ve done.” That solidarity was built over time, with intentional efforts by WDP to work with the building trade unions. When WDP decided to focus its energies on construction workers in 2007, Cristina and her staff met with all the building trade unions to let them know that they’d be researching the industry and that they would like to work together. Only one of the unions agreed to work with them. Despite being given the brush-off, WDP let the unions know that it would leave the door open and would work with them at any time. WDP also dedicated itself to getting to know union culture and understanding their issues. As the death toll among construction workers, especially foreign-born workers, continued to rise, WDP was getting ready to release its major survey of construction workers, which found widespread abuse of both wage and safety laws. That was in 2009, and it prompted the building trade unions to come out en masse to support the workers and to apologize to the WDP for previously ignoring what was happening to foreign-born workers. Since that day the WDP and the unions, along with other civic organizations, have linked arms in the fight to improve the construction industry.
Thousands of miles north of Texas, in a completely different political environment, Casa Latina in Seattle, Washington, is organizing day laborers for better working conditions and fighting for better wages and benefits for the entire new working class. Similar to WDP, Casa Latina started out as a legal services organization to help foreign-born, low-paid workers who were fighting to get paid for work they’d already done. At first most of the workers who came to the organization were day laborers, often hired directly from the street. But as more immigrants came to Seattle, Casa Latina received complaints from foreign-born workers working in restaurants, janitorial services, and construction, often about violations from the same employers time and again. That’s when Casa Latina changed its strategy from legal services to an organizing model, one in which the workers themselves decide how to price their labor. When it first became a workers’ center, dispatching day laborers in 1998, its staff worked from a humble trailer on an empty parking lot. Today the organization has three buildings, which are used for leadership training, English-language classes, and workshops on job skills. In 2014 Casa Latina dispatched close to nine thousand jobs, with an average hourly wage of $16.46.3
As the executive director, Hilary Stern, told me, when Casa Latina first decided to become a workers’ center, the staff really had no idea how to structure their organization. To develop their model, they joined and worked closely with national networks of workers’ centers, including the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. These and other national networks like them have sprung up in the past decade to support local organizations. As an exchange within these networks, Casa Latina spent time with long-established workers’ centers in Los Angeles, adopting their model of participatory democracy, which lets the workers collectively decide on their working conditions, including their wages and how the jobs are dispatched. The workers decide their minimum wage and when they can raise it based on market conditions. When Casa Latina started, the workers set their minimum wage at $9 an hour. During the tech boom, they raised it to $10. A few years later they raised it to $12 an hour, then $15 an hour. When Seattle raised its city minimum wage to $15, the workers raised their minimum wage to $16. But that’s just the floor wage. For jobs that require more training and skill, such as carpentry, the wage is $20 an hour.
But Casa Latina isn’t just a dispatcher for day laborers; it’s also an advocacy organization that mobilizes the public and runs campaigns to improve working conditions for all of Seattle’s new working class. Its first campaign, and legislative win, was a wage-theft ordinance that it introduced and helped to pass in the Seattle City Council. Stern shared an anecdote with me about how Casa Latina came to focus on wage theft. The project started over ten years ago, when workers who weren’t day laborers began coming to Casa Latina. The staff would spend time trying to obtain money for their workers, but often they weren’t successful in getting all or even some of their money back. So they decided it was time to organize a citywide crackdown on wage theft. Stern told me that one of the workers asked her, “Why is it that if I steal a candy bar I could be thrown into jail but someone can steal thousands of dollars from me and nothing happens to them?” Stern reached out to a council member who agreed to introduce the ordinance, which the workers and the council member worked on jointly to get the language right. She and the workers spent time educating council members through brown-bag lunches and hearings. And four years ago Seattle passed an ordinance making it a criminal offense to withhold pay from workers. Unfortunately, the council didn’t dedicate funding to provide enforcement, and as a result no employer has been prosecuted. The only place to go for a wage-theft complaint is to call 911, and the police have no idea how to handle these cases. In addition, for a criminal offense you have to prove intention, and it’s been fairly easy for employers to make excuses for not paying their workers. So Casa Latina and other organizations pushed for an Office of Labor Standards, which the city council approved and funded in 2015.
There are literally hundreds of workers’ centers like Casa Latina and the Workers Defense Project in the United States, primarily made up of black and immigrant workers in some of the lowest-paid, most marginalized jobs in our society. Estimates suggest that there are more than two hundred workers’ centers, many of them local organizations now federated into national alliances that bring together workers by sector, including the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Guestworker Alliance, the National Taxi Workers Alliance, and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.4 Workers’ centers are aligning around updating federal and state labor laws, which still exclude millions of working-class jobs from oversight; raising minimum wage laws; and fighting wage theft. These organizations work with local unions, faith groups, and other advocacy organizations engaging in lobbying, direct action, and education to pass reforms. And they are winning, bringing visibility to workers who have long been kept in the shadows of America’s labor markets.
The success of domestic workers in winning new recognition in American labor laws, after being long excluded as a legacy of our racist history, is one of the most inspiring examples of what can happen when the new working class comes together in pursuit of justice. While today the National Domestic Workers Alliance boasts a presence in twenty-six cities and eighteen states of over ten thousand nannies, housekeepers, and care workers, it began in 2000, when Ai-jen Poo cofounded Domestic Workers United (DWU), a multiracial organization in New York City. Seven years later, in response to a growing cadre of domestic worker organizing, she helped found the National Domestic Workers Alliance, where she is currently director. But the fight began in New York City, where, after seven years of campaigning, domestic workers won their first bill of rights. The final legislation covered 200,000 domestic workers, providing an eight-hour workday, overtime pay, a minimum of twenty-four consecutive hours of rest per week, three paid days off per year, protection against discrimination and harassment, and worker’s compensation insurance protection. As Poo writes in her book, The Age of Dignity, “The New York Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights became a flagship campaign, a symbol of the beginning of the end of invisibility for domestic workers around the country. The work in New York inspired women around the country who were part of the newly formed National Domestic Workers Alliance.”5 The fight for the New York law and the campaigns that have resulted in similar laws in Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, California, and Oregon are the result of strong multiracial alliances, including between the largely white employers and the predominantly immigrant and black workforce. The struggle for basic worker protections has brought a range of advocates together to fight side by side, including immigrants’ rights groups, women’s groups, faith groups, unions, and a smattering of celebrities.
From domestic workers to day laborers to taxi workers, the struggle is for dignity and visibility—the most basic components of life in a civilized society. Yet for millions of these workers, it has taken persistent demonstrations, countless acts of courage, and some kind of enduring optimism to win the right to be paid for their labor (all of their labor), time off to rest, and protection from harassment. Daniela, who worked seventeen-hour days for $3 an hour as a live-in nanny and maid in San Francisco when she immigrated from Mexico to the United States, joined the campaign for a bill of rights in California, saying, “Hopefully the bill of rights will pass so that all of this ends, so that the abuses end, and one knows her rights. And so that the worker has some time for herself. Because there are many women who live where they work and really they are like slaves—you feel like a slave. You can’t say anything, move, or do anything because of your fear. The fear should end. One should be able to say things without having to be afraid.”6
Back in November 2012 in New York City, a brave band of two hundred fast-food workers walked out of their jobs and into the streets to demand a better wage and the right to form a union. Just six months later, fast-food workers went on strike in six major cities across the country. As workers were joining the movement in greater numbers, the organizers added another tactic to their campaign: corporate shaming. Tipped off by a McDonald’s worker, the campaign made public a website that McDonald’s had created for its employees called, naturally, McResource. Part of the website was geared toward helping employees make a simple budget. Unfortunately, the sample budget revealed the behemoth to be just a tad out of touch with reality: It provided just twenty dollars per month for health-care expenses and nothing at all for gas expenses. Other parts of the site urged employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle by eschewing—wait for it—fast food. Further gaffes were exposed when a McDonald’s employee called the McResource helpline and was told she would qualify for food stamps, and the website added new advice for its workers like cutting food into smaller pieces to stave off hunger. The exposure generated lots of bad publicity, even from business-friendly outlets like Forbes and CNBC, prompting the company to pull the website. With the press increasingly on its side, the Fight for $15 staged its first national strike in August 2013, with workers in over sixty cities participating. Two months later strikes occurred in more than one hundred cities. Then just six months later, on May 15, 2014, fast-food workers in 230 cities, on six continents, joined the campaign, staging strikes, rallies, and protests, and bringing many supporters along with them.
But all of these actions paled in comparison to what happened on April 15, 2015, when the campaign officially expanded from fast-food workers to include retail and home care workers and even adjunct professors. It was the largest protest of low-wage workers in United States history, with at least sixty thousand people joining protests and rallies in cities across the country.7 Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, who has put the full resources of the SEIU behind this fight, said this about the movement: “There is not a price tag you can put on how this movement has changed the conversation in this country. It is raising wages at the bargaining table. It’s raised wages for eight million workers. I believe we are forcing a real conversation about how to solve the grossest inequality in our generation. People are sick of wealth at the top and no accountability for corporations.”8
I spoke with Scott Courtney, assistant to the president for organizing, about why the SEIU decided to support the campaign. He told me that when Mary Kay Henry became president of the SEIU in 2010, she asked the question “not how do we just rebuild unions and have a bigger union, but how do we make income inequality the issue that politicians in our country have to deal with?” The answer to that question over time became the Fight for $15.
The ability of the leader of the nation’s fastest-growing union to ask that kind of question, one that reaches beyond the parochial goal of fighting only for its members, is the result of over a decade of work by leaders organizing people who had been excluded from traditional union membership (sometimes by laws and sometimes by the practice of labor unions). Jodeen Olguín-Tayler was active in the effort to engage union leaders to fight for the broader social struggle of the working class. Olguín-Tayler has spent fifteen years organizing the working class, first as a labor organizer at a local union and then running a national campaign to address the needs of elder-care workers and clients. She’s now my partner in crime at Demos, as our vice president of campaigns and strategic partnerships, and she explained the long trajectory that made the Fight for $15 possible. “We knew that social agitation and public campaigns that reframe and transform ‘worker issues’ into community and social issues—that is, into class issues—was key to our ability to build a movement that could put economic, racial, and gender inequality back into the spotlight of public debate. This was a proactive, offensive strategy to move from protesting bad conditions to winning dignity and power for a broad, multiracial working class—a class where we, people of color, women, and immigrants, would finally be recognized as equals and deserving of our dignity,” she explained. There were many successful predecessors to the Fight for $15, such as the living wage campaign of taxi drivers in San Francisco. All these wins demonstrated to the union movement that victory was possible by engaging a larger set of workers in the fight and building pressure for them to heed the call bubbling up across the country.
With the immense courage of the workers matched with the considerable financial resources of the SEIU, the Fight for $15 has taken those proven strategies and racked up major wins. In less than three years, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have raised their minimum wage to $15. In the summer of 2015, New York State’s Wage Board approved a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers at major chains. What’s remarkable is how the demand for $15 has quickly become mainstream. “We don’t get laughed at anymore when we walk in the room,” Courtney observed, remembering the rough times when the movement started. Back in 2012 the demand for $15 was greeted with incredulity. Fast-food workers, long seen as the bottom of the economic food chain, earning $15 an hour? It’s a testament to the workers, who across race, gender, and age have shown a level of class solidarity America hasn’t witnessed in at least a generation. And perhaps most important, it’s brought hope to the new working class.
I asked Courtney how the movement has been able to build and maintain solidarity across such a wide range of experiences, and he talked about how the SEIU has given people the space to talk. And through that talking, they’ve come to realize that only by standing together will they be able to make their lives better. “People are smart. They get it. They get that they’ve been getting a raw deal, they’ve been getting a raw deal for a long time. And they haven’t had hope. They have hope now. They do believe they’re going to win. And when people come together and start thinking they can win, it’s pretty spectacular to be a part of,” he told me. This is a movement primarily, but not entirely, of people of color and immigrants, the very backbone of the new working class. And their success is made all the more sweeter by the reality that most people were skeptical at best when the first calls for $15 and a union were made. As we head into the 2016 elections, the Democratic candidates for president have already publicly supported the fight for $15, meaning that one way or another, this issue will continue to take its rightful place on the national stage.
The Fight for $15 uses a strategy well honed by conservatives: Establish a strong left flank in order to make any negotiation away from the big demand, in this case $15 an hour, seem moderate and commonsense by comparison. When the Fight for $15 started, even dyed-in-the-wool progressives thought a $15 minimum wage was ridiculous. But for cities with high costs of living, like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco, a $15 minimum is actually reasonable. So now for other cities, like Kansas City and Cincinnati, $10.10 feels not only reasonable but maybe a bit low. The Fight for $15 has fundamentally changed what’s considered mainstream in our political debate about wages.
In the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, three women channeled their outrage into what would eventually become the centerpiece of a new civil rights movement. Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi came up with a profound yet simple rallying cry for dignity: Black Lives Matter. By the end of the night, the three women made the decision to start a movement, one that would seamlessly blend online and on-the-ground strategies. I met Cullors (whose story is featured in Chapter 5) and Garza at Demos’s gala in 2015, where we honored all three women with a Transforming America Award (Tometi was not able to attend). By one estimate, there were more than one thousand Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations around the globe between June 2014 and October 2015.9 The demonstrations erupted after the murders of unarmed black men, teenagers, and children by police officers, from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Eric Garner in Staten Island to Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and sadly, many more black men and black women are killed with each passing month. Over time these protests grew into a broader campaign for racial justice. Like the civil rights movement a half century ago, Black Lives Matter is a broad demand for freedom from political and economic oppression. But unlike the earlier movement, Cullors, Garza, and Tometi have purposefully put black women in the forefront of the movement and emphasized the voices of queer, transgendered, and disabled black people.
Alicia Garza explained to me why it’s so important that this movement not simply replicate the leadership and strategies of its predecessors. Her analysis about why there is a need to proclaim that “black lives matter” today, a half century after the civil rights act was passed, lies in part in what can now be seen as the flawed strategies pursued back then. “The time when a black man in a suit, who is typically a preacher, speaks for all of us has ended. We are coming to recognize as a society that the nuclear family only exists for some people, and that’s not actually the standard that folks should be held to. Because of our social and economic conditions, we’ve been forced to create family where we can find it, as opposed to these really narrow definitions of what that looks like. When I hear elders talking about the civil rights movement of their time, and some of the reasons why the external optics were so much different than the reality of how things played out, it had a lot to do with appealing to white mainstream society about what we deserved as people. And so if we could mirror and mimic what white families looked like and what white social structures looked like, and show that we could do it just as well, then we would also supposedly demonstrate that we were worthy of our humanity. And that didn’t work. That didn’t work. For us, we’re saying that this isn’t about appealing to white mainstream society. This is about saying that black folks come in all different sizes, all different shapes. We’re very different and complex as a people, and that deserves to be celebrated. And the humanity of all of us deserves to be affirmed, and that we all have value.”
She and the codirectors of Black Lives Matter are determined to make sure that every single presidential candidate formulates a concrete position on what he or she will do to make black lives matter in this country. And they expect that answer to go far beyond criminal justice reform. “For us, it’s less about endorsing candidates than it is to build the kind of coalition that can hold whoever is elected accountable to meeting the needs and dreams of our communities.”
Across the country, a new generation of activists, rooted in the struggles of the poor and working class, is engaging in a new kind of solidarity, across race and gender but also across the broad issues of immigrants’ rights, labor rights, and civil rights. These organizations are often led by young people of color, and they are forging deep alliances with one another, learning together how to reignite the call for racial justice in the twenty-first century. Most of the new activism began when George Zimmerman was acquitted. Because race has always been classed and class has always been raced, most of these city- or state-based organizations understand the connections between corporate power, police brutality, underfunded public schools, and low-paying jobs. There’s a new beltway of activism flowing through the South, from Atlanta, Georgia, all the way down to Miami, Florida, and on over to Jackson, Mississippi.
Phillip Agnew is the director of Dream Defenders, based in Florida, and was one of the handful of young activists invited to the White House to meet with President Obama about the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Agnew, whom I met at a Demos gala when we honored Dream Defenders with a Transforming America Award, brought the house down in his acceptance speech. Like so many other leaders, he and his group are joining the chorus of activists supporting Black Lives Matter while continuing to do local organizing and work to change policies and laws. In an interview, he seamlessly laid out the breadth of the challenge and what animates working-class people whose struggles form the backbone of the second wave of civil rights activism: “The values that our country is supposed to be built on—equal opportunity for all, the ability of all to represent our values at the ballot box—this country has never done that. What it has done, very successfully, is taken certain people—based on their color, based on their ethnicity, based on their immigration status, based on their education level, based on their economic status—and said that those people are not worthy of the values put on paper. The role of people in Black Lives Matter—the role of people who are angry about police, about the environment, about the economy—is to remind people that America has some values that it’s never lived up to and that have never applied to certain people. We want to change that.”10
In the past decade, more than a hundred thousand young immigrants, most undocumented, have built a considerable network of activism that is winning policy reforms at the state and federal level. Known as DREAMers, for their first campaign to allow undocumented immigrants in-state tuition and eligibility for federal student aid (legislation known as the Dream Act), United We Dream is the largest youth immigrant justice network, with fifty-five affiliate organizations in twenty-six states. The DREAMers are young people like Giancarlo Tello, who is currently a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Tello told me that he learned he was undocumented in his sophomore year of high school. He had passed his written driver’s license test and was ready to go to the DMV to get his learner’s permit so he could start practicing actual driving. That’s when his mom told him he couldn’t get a license because of his immigration status. He didn’t quite understand the full implications of this until his junior year, when it came time to apply for colleges, which required a Social Security number, which he did not have. He couldn’t apply for aid or scholarships, which required residency or citizenship. And he couldn’t get a job, because he didn’t have legal authorization. He learned he could go to Bergen Community College, thanks to his older cousin, who is also undocumented and was attending. It was there that he met another undocumented student, who invited him to a training session that was being held by the New Jersey Dream Act Coalition, one of the United We Dream affiliates. “Against my parents’ advice, I decided to go, and it was definitely worth it,” Tello told me. “It was the first time I’m meeting other undocumented students and seeing people who are actually affected by the issue and advocating on behalf of themselves. Not being afraid of deportation or the stigma that comes with being undocumented. That’s what initially inspired me. That’s where I met a lot of my mentors and other undocumented youth who had been fighting the struggle for a long time. They showed me there’s a different way to go about our lives and challenge the status quo.”
Tello graduated from Bergen Community College in three years, taking an extra year because he had to work and pay his way through college. He had to pay the international tuition rate because he was undocumented. He applied to Rutgers and got accepted, but again had to pay the higher out-of-state tuition rate. Each course was about $2,700, so for the first year he took only one class for two or three semesters, and then he decided to take one semester off to work and advocate for the New Jersey Dream Act. That one semester turned into a year, but it was worth it. In December 2013, Governor Chris Christie signed into law the New Jersey Tuition Equality Act, which provides in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Tello took advantage of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy during his year off from school, which enabled him to get a Social Security number, work legally, and get a driver’s license. He worked full-time during the campaign, at a law firm doing office work and for the Communications Workers of America (CWA). CWA was one of the biggest allies in the fight for the New Jersey Dream Act. Today Tello receives a full scholarship from Rutgers University, which offered him the scholarship based on his social justice activism. He continues to be actively involved in immigration justice, speaking at colleges across the state, testifying at hearings, and generally engaging and encouraging his peers to join the movement.
Tello and the hundred thousand other young, mostly undocumented immigrants are fueling a new generation of activists who are working together to challenge systems and the status quo. “There’s a lot of movements on a lot of fronts, and a lot of solidarity,” he explained. “We have a lot of great solidarity struggles between people of color, immigration, and LGBTQ movements.”
While the children of immigrant parents have found the courage to speak out, so too have many of their parents. On May 1, 2006, millions of the new working class walked off their jobs and took to the streets in cities and towns across the country. The immigrant activism was met with solidarity from the AFL-CIO, a major shift from its historic anti-immigrant posture. By walking out of their jobs, millions of immigrants effectively shut down entire industries that day. In Los Angeles, the mostly Mexican and Central American port truckers shut down 90 percent of the port’s activity, and 50 percent of the meat and poultry processing ground to a halt. The Day Without an Immigrant mobilization underscored the latent power of the new working class to disrupt business as usual.
Ben Speight is exceedingly good at a difficult job. He’s an organizer for the statewide Teamsters Local 728 based in Atlanta, Georgia. A thirty-three-year-old white man, he’s been organizing since he was eighteen, spending eleven of the past fifteen years as a union organizer with the Teamsters. He doesn’t see his work as being in the service of others but as organizing with others. As he explained, “In my fifteen years of organizing, I have never been a part of a campaign where the core of our support and the majority of our support did not come from black workers. Every campaign that I’ve been a part of, dozens of campaigns in the South, have all got the initial interest and the majority of their support from black workers. Black workers seek out union representation in the South more than we have the capacity to assist.” Speight attributes this trend to the strong culture of resistance in the black community and the belief that collective action produces results. And he’s right. Compared to whites, African Americans are much more collectively oriented and community-centered, a worldview born of the reality that survival meant banding together. As John Powell recounts in his book Racing to Justice, individualism, a key value of the American ideology, is in fact a very racialized concept, and one that conflicts with the orientation toward communitarian values that are held deeply by African Americans. The tension between these two values ricochets through all our major policy debates, and generally, though not exclusively, breaks down along partisan lines, with the Democratic Party leaning more toward communitarianism and the Republican Party leaning toward individualism. The same split exists along racial lines, and it is an important contributor to the reality that today people of color are more likely to be union members than whites are.
Speight told me, “The dynamic of racism is alive in every campaign we have.” In order to win, the union has to have a supermajority, and that means that the folks inside the company fighting for the union have to reflect all the workers that are employed. So when they set up the worker committee, they’ve got to bring together white, black, and Latino workers. And he doesn’t try to evade the issue of race. He addresses it directly and openly. The Georgia local has 8,200 members, and he told me that there are some workers who come in with “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” T-shirts and members who come in wearing Confederate flag belt buckles. But when they realize that they have a common demand and a common adversary—their employer—they work through their prejudices and join together to win.
In his most recent campaign, at United Natural Food, which supplies organic food to stores such as Whole Foods, it was two white workers who sought out the union. But they realized they weren’t going to win with just their own social networks in the workplace, so they actively had to build relationships with the black workers and overcome a lot of distrust about their motives. On the other hand, at his last campaign, at Coca-Cola, the anti-union committee was all white workers, and according to Speight, Coca-Cola flouted numerous labor laws, including firing three African American workers who were at the center of the campaign.
There’s a myth that you can’t unionize in the South. But as Speight makes the case, industry is flocking to the South to take advantage of the legacy of hostility toward unions. It’s helpful to remember here that most of the right-to-work laws were originally in the South, with the intention of maintaining a highly racialized low-wage structure. Today those laws remain, and as a result both foreign and domestic companies are moving their operations to the South, including Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Nissan, and Boeing. Speight wants the labor movement to recommit to organizing in the South, with a new Operation Dixie. The first Operation Dixie was a failed campaign by the Congress of Industrial Unions to organize workers in the South in the postwar years. It failed largely because of the hardened racial lines of Jim Crow and the prohibitions on strikes set in place under Taft-Hartley. The defeat of Operation Dixie resounds powerfully today, both in terms of the emaciation of the unionized workforce and the race to the bottom engendered by the South’s long-standing animus to anything that smacks of cross-race solidarity.
In February 2014, after months of intense organizing and even active support from the company, the United Auto Workers lost the election to unionize Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was a bruising defeat, made even more so by the fact that the election was exceedingly close—712 to 626, just 86 votes shy of what would have been a game-changing victory for the southern working class. The stakes were rightly seen as huge, both for labor and for corporations in the South, both of which understood that a win for the UAW would ripple across the South, opening the door to unionization at auto plants across the region. And so Republican leaders launched an all-out assault on the campaign, despite Volkswagen officials urging third-party actors to remain neutral and stay out of the battle.11 The antitax zealot and conservative Svengali Grover Norquist, as well as major conservative political donors David and Charles Koch, supported a well-funded campaign against the union.12 Billboards warned residents that a union vote would turn Chattanooga into the next Detroit. The governor of the state, Bill Haslan, argued that the state would lose jobs because employers would not come to Tennessee if the UAW won. United States senator Bob Corker made similar threats, saying “they” would not expand their plants if the UAW was victorious. Meanwhile, the state proposed a $300 million incentive package for VW to expand its production by adding an SUV production to the plant, but attempted to tie the money to a no vote on the union.13 And in the strangest through-the-looking-glass analysis of American values, state senator Bo Watson reproached Volkswagen for not vehemently opposing the union effort, saying that its approach was “unfair, unbalanced, and, quite frankly, un-American in the traditions of American labor campaigns.”14 Keep in mind that in the fall of 2013, the UAW reached the critical threshold of a majority of workers signing cards in support of the union. But with several months in between the call for an election and the actual voting, there was plenty of time for opponents to play hardball. And that they did. Eighty-six workers. Just eighty-six workers who stymied solidarity in the South once again.
When labor loses, it’s not just better wages and working conditions that are left on the table. What’s also lost is the civic participation and political education that unions provide. And other than churches, unions are really the only game left in town for fostering deep social and political connections. Unlike most congregations, today’s unions are racially diverse, forging a deep understanding among members that blacks, Latinos, and whites share a common cause. The civic muscle-building of workers by labor unions is often overlooked but is essential to rebuilding the power of the new working class. And I’d argue that it’s this political education and solidarity-building that is really behind the vehement opposition to unions within the Republican Party and conservative operatives.
Cultivating solidarity among racially diverse union members is the job Rafael Návar, political director for the Communications Workers of America, wakes up every morning to pursue. About half of CWA’s 700,000 members are white, so bridging differences across race and ethnicity is his bread-and-butter. As Návar sees it, one of the chief obstacles to building that kind of solidarity is a deep class analysis about why workers, including the white working class, have lost so much ground. Without a shared understanding of how capitalism has been reengineered by elites in the past three decades to encourage financial and capital rent-seeking behavior, the working class (and the middle class as well) can be easily steered toward scapegoating a group of people as the source of their problems. Without an understanding of how the rules have been rewritten, the lack of good jobs gets blamed on undocumented immigrants by both the white and the black working class. Meanwhile, the white working class can view its inability to move up the income ladder as the fault of affirmative action, with blacks supposedly taking the best jobs that would have otherwise gone to white people.
Under Návar’s leadership, CWA created a comprehensive curriculum to educate its members, which includes education about current political fights, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership debate. But the real meat of the curriculum is the political economy, which is currently part of a presentation called “The 40-Year Class War,” which tackles the biggest problem Návar sees among the working class: a lack of strong class analysis. “We have to start off from a commonality and a perspective that critiques the economic system,” he said, “that is really at fault for why the white working class has been losing earnings and wages and then tie that common problem to how it is impacting people of color.” “The 40-Year Class War” tells the story of the rise of organized business, which I detailed in Chapter 4, and the corporate assault on workers’ rights. The curriculum also incorporates what Návar calls “other struggles,” connecting the dots of other movements to the labor movement. There are three “other struggles” segments, which will be rolled out in phases: immigration, Black Lives Matter, and the environment. The union is currently engaging its members around immigration, holding a series of two-day “boot camps.” Návar shows the film Harvest of Empire, which examines how policies in Latin America driven both by our trade policy and by major corporations fueled immigration to the United States. When Návar ran this boot camp in southern Virginia for a group of white members and one black member, it was transformative. The members were angry upon learning the story, and understood that their struggle was intertwined with that of Latino workers. CWA has run these boot camps all across the country, to audiences that are overwhelmingly black or white, and the response has been the same. One of the trainers in Georgia who ran a boot camp was very anxious about the reaction and worried that there would be backlash among both white and black members. But the day after the training, he called Návar to let him know that the members loved it, and were “pissed” at what they had learned.
Návar is doing good old-fashioned consciousness-raising, and for the progressive movement, the loss of unions playing this role is a severe blow to building the kind of shared worldview among the working class critical for rebuilding political power. And that kind of work is gaining more traction across the labor movement. In February 2015, the AFL-CIO launched a Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice. Carmen Berkley, director of Civil, Human and Women’s Rights at the AFL-CIO, is leading the initiative, which has the full participation of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council. The initiative is an embodiment of the ideals of AFL-CIO’s president, Richard Trumka, who has not shied away from issues of race. In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer, Trumka described the tragedy in a high-profile speech in St. Louis by saying, “Our brother killed our sister’s son,” referring to Darren Wilson, the police officer, and Mike Brown’s mother, who is a member of the UFCW. Over the course of the year, the commission will hold discussions with local labor leaders in eight cities across the country, to directly address issues related to race and the labor movement. “Honestly, ten years ago, I don’t know if we would have been able to pull off a race commission,” Berkley told me. “People are not avoiding race anymore. At the AFL, we believe now is the time to talk about things we should have talked about a long time ago. And it has to be about solutions and not just lip service.”
Of course, labor unions can’t be the only institution providing a framework for solidarity; the major political parties have a role here too. While the Republican Party has built solidarity among the white working class through the strategic use of racially coded appeals, the Democratic Party until very recently abandoned progressivism for a more business-friendly platform. The centrist takeover of the Democratic Party was the animating value behind the formation of the Working Families Party (WFP) and a spate of newly focused state organizations working to build independent political power.
Back in 1998, at the beginning of the Clinton administration, Dan Cantor and a handful of other individuals established the Working Families Party. Cantor, who serves as WFP’s national director, remembers the founding principles behind its formation: “The Democratic Party had drifted far to the right, had abandoned its working-class roots, whose allegiance was always contested.” The major planks of the Working Families Party are investments in public goods such as debt-free college tuition and child care, racial equity, and climate change with the understanding that providing a decent standard of living for working people must go beyond wages.
At this point it will be helpful to outline how the WFP functions as a third party that doesn’t siphon votes away from the Democrats, like Ralph Nader did in the 2000 election. The WFP strategy concentrates on Democratic primaries at both the state and city level. Federal races remain prohibitively expensive for the WFP to engage in, though its leaders are trying to figure out how to break through the money barriers. Their candidates run as Democrats with endorsements from the WFP. When it comes to the general election, the WFP exists in states that allow fusion voting, which enables candidates who are endorsed by the WFP to run on both the Democratic Party line and the WFP line. Voters then cast their vote for the candidate on either the Democratic Party line or the WFP line. When Democratic candidates win with a significant number of votes coming from the WFP line, it helps create pressure for progressive action from the candidate, who will be held accountable by WFP members.
But the WFP isn’t just about electing more progressive candidates. Its strategy is to be the left flank of the Democratic Party and eventually move the center of the party back to being the champions of the working class and of public investment in general. As Cantor told me, “The idea in forming the WFP was to be both independent and relevant. It’s easy to be independent and not relevant, but that’s not really helpful. And it’s kind of worked better than we ever thought it would.” The WFP is now active in ten states and can count some significant victories directly attributable to its work. In New York State, where the party is particularly relevant and powerful, Dan told me that fully two-thirds of voters are aware of the WFP. While most of the attention is given to the WFP’s electoral work, its members actually spend 90 percent of their time working on issues, coordinating closely with various coalitions and state legislators to move progressive policy forward and “give the vote meaning.” Electing good candidates isn’t enough by itself, because, as Cantor told me, “We’ll elect people and the next day the Chamber of Commerce has got their arm around them. ‘Glad you’re here—let’s talk.’ ”
As the WFP has gained power, particularly in New York State, it has faced the problems that can come with legitimacy: whether to play ball with power or lose access as an outside actor. That’s exactly the dilemma the WFP faced during Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign for reelection in 2014. After four years as governor in New York State, Cuomo had alienated and frustrated nearly every progressive activist in the state. He made promises to enact public financing to address the deeply corrupt politics in Albany but failed to put any muscle behind the effort. Then he shut down his own creation, the Moreland Commission, established to investigate the money-drenched system and backroom deals that define Albany policymaking. He proposed tax cuts for the affluent at a time when New Yorkers desperately needed public investment in jobs, schools, and child care. So when he ran for reelection, he faced a progressive challenger in the primary, Zephyr Teachout. Teachout is one of the country’s foremost experts on campaign finance and money in politics, and she made that issue a center of her platform. Her campaign generated serious attention and grassroots support, so when it came time for the WFP to vote on whether to endorse Teachout or Cuomo, the decision was about access to power. Even though Teachout was gaining ground, she faced a candidate with a considerable war chest, and her chances of winning the primary were slim. And if the WFP withheld its endorsement from Cuomo and he won, the party and its platform would face a vengeful king, losing any kind of leverage or power needed to push through policies like paid sick days and minimum-wage increases that its members and most New Yorkers supported. The vote for endorsing took place at the WFP convention, and to say this was a contentious debate would be an understatement. Governor Cuomo saw the writing on the wall and made a promise to campaign hard for Democratic candidates in the state senate, who finally had a chance to gain the majority, and he promised to deliver public financing. Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York City supported Cuomo, and in the end the WFP gave Cuomo and not Teachout its endorsement. “Cuomo got what he wanted, and then he didn’t feel any obligation to keep his promise to us and to others,” Cantor explained. “We were aware that it was a risk, but we made a bet that he would keep to his word, because in politics all you have is your word. But he chose otherwise and the Republicans remained in power.”
While Cuomo reneged on his promise to fight on behalf of Democratic candidates to regain control of the state senate, he nevertheless delivered a major boost to the new working class. Under state law, Cuomo can establish a wage board for certain industries, and he created one to study the pay of fast-food workers. As we’ve seen, the wage board voted in July 2015 to raise the pay of fast-food workers in the state to $15 an hour. This victory can be viewed in part as payback for the WFP endorsement, because the Fight for $15 set of organizations and unions who are part of the WFP voted to back Cuomo in the primary fight.
The WFP can rightly take credit for igniting a wave of paid-sick-days legislation as well. The fact that in the United States workers have to advocate and lobby for the right to take a day off when they’re sick or their child is sick without losing pay is indicative of the long slide in labor standards for the new working class and the lack of bargaining power to secure basic benefits. San Francisco was the first city to pass paid-sick-days legislation, followed by a string of major cities and Connecticut in 2011. But the fight for this basic benefit was nothing short of a political showdown in New York City. After five years of activism and lobbying, the City Council passed a fairly weak version of paid sick days that covered about 1 million workers. Then the WFP ran a progressive slate of candidates for the City Council in 2012, and they all won their seats. As Cantor told me, with the new City Council in place, it took only about three hours to amend the law to cover another 300,000 to 500,000 workers. Three hours compared to three years—that’s the difference electing progressives to office can make in the lives of the working class. The City Council had more than enough votes to pass the measure, but the speaker of the council at the time was Christine Quinn, and she refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. Some speculate that she was appeasing the business community in anticipation of her run for mayor in the Democratic primary. In the end, the WFP brought a formidable onslaught of pressure from activists across the city, and Quinn begrudgingly brought the bill to the floor, where it passed handsomely.
In the past decade a growing number of state-based organizations realized that in order to make real gains for their working-class members, they’d need to get serious about building political power. And that meant changing the way they did business from traditional coalition work and lobbying to a long-term commitment to political education and mobilization of the new working class.
Olguín-Tayler, whom we met earlier in the chapter, explained to me the impetus for and context behind this strategic shift among working-class organizations: “It came from a growing frustration of wanting to move away from being protest movements and instead be organizations and people who are actually shaping and winning policy, and moving from just having the power to make complaints and grievances to being able to have the power to actually govern and determine our lives and conditions.”
It’s a formidable challenge. Many of these organizations do regular door-knocking in working-class neighborhoods, where they try to persuade citizens to vote in upcoming elections by talking about what is at stake. It’s a tough sell. A standard response to a door-knocker is “It doesn’t matter whether I vote or not.” But these organizers are committed, and they’ve made some significant gains in some incredibly politically challenging environments, such as Virginia.
Jon Liss is the executive director of New Virginia Majority (NVM), an organization whose mission is to change the electorate in the state by turning out the black, Latino, Asian, and working-class vote. Liss has been organizing the working class for decades, in what he calls “new working-class organizations” that sprouted up during the 1990s and the early years of this century to fill the vacuum left by the long decline in unions. But the mobilizing of the new working class went beyond standard workers’ issues to address the big challenges in their lives: access to good public schools and affordable child care, avoidance of the school-to-prison pipeline, and the need for health insurance. In Virginia, Liss led this work through Tenants and Workers United, a precursor organization to NVM. But there were limits to this approach, as he noted: “The limits of the new working-class organizing were that we were doing work in essentially one region, or one city, a lot of work in two decades. At the same time, the demographics in Virginia were changing. So we set out to change the electorate.”
Over time, Liss and others in Virginia realized that without political power, their organizing efforts far too often led to dead ends. With the formation of New Virginia Majority in 2008, the goal is to build what’s known in the field as “independent political power,” which involves ongoing and consistent voter education and mobilization of the new working class—individuals overlooked by the Democratic Party’s voter drives. In the black belt, a region stretching from Tidewater through Richmond, black voters, especially black women, are a solid progressive voting bloc and, according to Liss, a major reason that the Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, won his election. But Virginia is also one of the few states that take away voting rights for ex-offenders, resulting in 350,000 missing voters, most of whom are men of color. New Virginia Majority have set some ambitious goals. In northern Virginia, they’ve trained and hired people from the neighborhoods to go out and organize, with the goal of talking to people six times between September and November, when it’s election time. Their initial list is daunting, anywhere between 60,000 and 160,000 people, and they’ll door-knock about one-third of those potential voters. From there they begin winnowing their target list based on where people stand on key issues. So in 2008 they began by asking individuals if they supported universal health care, and then if they supported extending health care to immigrants. If someone answered no to either question, he or she wasn’t put on the list of people whom NMV would try to turn out. The final turnout universe might be about 25,000 to 50,000, which is enough to swing an election in Virginia.
After six years of experience and practice in building a dependable working-class voting bloc, the organization created an electoral arm so it could endorse candidates and engage in electoral politics. The organizers set their sights on a thirty-year incumbent conservative Democrat backed by the local Tea Party, U.S. representative Johnny Joanou of the 79th House District. The 79th District covers Portsmouth, a working-class community with a majority black population. New Virginia Majority organized the local unions and other activists to throw their support behind a progressive city council member who was launching a primary challenge to Joanou, a man with the symbolically challenging name of Stephen Heretick. Thanks to a coordinated voter education and get-out-the-vote effort, Heretick won the primary by a razor-thin margin of two hundred votes. The vote was won by pure field muscle. “We hope to change the nature of the party over time by changing the consciousness of its voters,” Liss told me.
NVM has made some progress in changing the face of who shows up on election day. But turning ideas for policy into actual law requires a robust and consistent political participation, something that has been more challenging to accomplish. Liss’s goal for NVM is to create an active membership organization whose engagement goes beyond clicking on an email voicing an opinion on legislation. With twenty thousand people signed up on the email list, the organization has gotten a bird’s-eye view of the challenges it faces in bridging alliances across race. When it has sent out pro-immigration emails, it has gotten push-back from some members. When it has sent out emails about mass incarceration, it has gotten push-back from some members. But Liss won’t be deterred. In September 2015, New Virginia Majority brought together two hundred activists from across the state to ratify a common state agenda, which will provide alignment and shared goals across organizations working in Virginia.
Over in Missouri, Ashli Bolden, the codirector of Missouri Jobs with Justice, is fighting to build power with the new working class. “Right now we have two political parties that are being controlled by money and by corporations basically,” she said. “So what are we doing to step outside of what we thought was our safety net—the Democratic Party—to see the policies we want in our communities to make our lives better? No one is talking about raising the minimum wage until it’s an election year. And then after the election year, no action is happening. Nobody is talking about collective bargaining rights, or how everything is going private because nobody wants anything to be public anymore. We have to start electing people that come from our base who want the same things we do. That’s why we need independent political power.”
Missouri Jobs with Justice is focusing on changing the structural barriers in our democracy by working on getting campaign finance laws passed in Missouri and tackling redistricting, which right now gives disproportionate voting power to rural areas in the state. And there’s a growing level of activism building throughout the state. After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Bolden told me that “people came out of nowhere.” There are more activists than the existing organizations, from small informal organizations to churches, could coordinate. Missouri Jobs with Justice is currently identifying all the groups working on social justice to invite them and the local unions to a “table”—political-speak for a place where various organizations can come together to strategize.
Missouri Jobs with Justice, along with the Fight for $15 campaign, SEIU, and others, fought hard for the $13 minimum wage that the Kansas City council passed in July 2015. The law isn’t perfect, because it includes a young person’s exemption, which allows employers to pay subminimum wage to younger workers. The law also doesn’t have an automatic cost-of-living adjustment. But its passage was significant not only for workers in Kansas City but potentially for workers across the state. When Kansas City passed its law, it created a domino effect: Kansas City County, St. Louis, and the state legislature are all now actively considering minimum-wage increases to at least $13 an hour, despite claiming that they couldn’t do it just weeks before the city council in Kansas City passed its bill.
Bolden is motivated by her own experience growing up in a union household. “I know how important it is for your parents to have good health care, good wages. I had a good childhood,” she explained. “When my father was laid off from McDonnell Douglas, I saw what taking all that away looks like. That’s why I fight. I remember that life. And I want other children and other people to have that beautiful life of wages and benefits.”
The work that both Bolden and Liss are doing is replicated in at least a dozen states across the country, including Florida, Washington, New Mexico, Minnesota, Ohio, and New York. These organizations speak to a larger fight happening within the Democratic Party, between those who want to see the party get back to its working-class roots and those who want to continue threading the needle by being both business-friendly and moderately pro-workers’ rights. At the national level, this fight is epitomized by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has become the leader in the struggle to shift the Democratic Party back to solid progressivism. It’s echoed in major cities, most illustratively by the election of Bill DeBlasio, who triumphed over more moderate Democrats in the primary, as mayor of New York City. And it’s reverberating throughout towns and cities, with new leaders and new organizations doing creative and innovative work to rebuild working-class power. They’re not only beating back bad laws against the odds, they’re also advancing proactive reforms that can make a difference in people’s lives.
I am by nature not an optimist. In fact, I tend to vacillate between cynicism, pessimism, and downright despair about the state of this country. But in the past several years I’ve become steadily more optimistic. Through my work at Demos, I’ve seen the steady emergence of a new generation of activism and leadership focused squarely on revitalizing working-class power, weaving together issues of economic, social, and racial justice. It’s a long-term project, to be sure. But the examples of a newly organized working class defeating attempts to scale back workers’ rights or restrictive voting laws are not only too numerous to cover in this chapter but too numerous for a cynically inclined person to ignore. Likewise, the victories bubbling up in towns and states across the country on minimum wage and paid sick days are big enough to chip away the pessimism that has gripped many progressive activists for decades. The Sleeping Giant is awaking. And our nation will be all the better for it.