IN JULY 2015, Bleu Rainer, a twenty-six-year-old Tampa, Florida, McDonald’s worker, opened his mail and found an invitation to testify before the Brazilian Senate. “I was kind of shocked,” he laughs. McDonald’s workers in Brazil had filed charges of wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and violations of Brazil’s labor laws. This moved the Senate Human Rights Commission to convene an unprecedented hearing. Their goal was to determine if McDonald’s, with operations in more than a hundred countries, was driving down wages and eroding safety conditions worldwide. So they invited fast-food workers from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia to testify about Brazil’s and the world’s second-largest private employer.1
Legislators from many nations were also invited to offer their views on whether McDonald’s adversely affected wages and labor conditions in their countries. McDonald’s was then being investigated by the European Parliament. European unions had accused the company of tax evasion, overcharging franchise owners, and illegally suppressing worker wages.2
On August 16, 2015, Rainer and colleagues from the Philippines, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, and many other countries came to tell their stories. They were greeted by cheering crowds at the Brasília airport. “People from different unions and politicians from all over Brazil and all over the globe were coming to talk about how McDonald’s tries to keep us at the bottom,” Rainer recalls. “It was amazing. Because McDonald’s has employees everywhere, everything they do has a global impact that affects all workers.”
Rainer’s life had been marked by starvation wages, uncertain scheduling, and boiling oil. “In eight years, I made no more than eight dollars and five cents an hour. I witnessed the torture of not having enough to afford rent, which led to me sleeping from house to house. I even had to sleep at bus stops because I was homeless. There have been nights that I had to go without food so I could buy a bus pass, so that I could get to work the next day. I have had to rely on food stamps to get a good meal and when those food stamps run out, it’s back to square one—which is nothing at all. Sometimes I think: I’m working so hard every day. Why am I not making a living wage? Why can’t I feed myself? Why am I still hungry?”
Though Rainer had already joined the fight for a living wage, he experienced moments in Brazil that opened his eyes. “I met this really cool guy from Japan, another McDonald’s worker. He showed me his arm full of burns.” Rainer raised his arm and held it alongside. The men were burned in the same places. Stripes. Rainer knew how his colleague had been scarred. “They make you get orders out in ninety seconds,” he explains. “You’re constantly behind. So, you’re not thinking about safety. You’re worried that your manager is going to push you.”
A chill passed through him when he saw the matching burns. The men had more in common than their injuries. “Me and him have the exact same story,” Rainer learned as they talked. “I didn’t know it would be that way.” Both men had enrolled in college but had to drop out. “He wasn’t earning enough to pay tuition and neither was I. It was my whole story except he was in Japan.” Rainer felt the pieces fall into place.
When Benedict Murillo, from Manila, heard the men’s stories, he rolled up his sleeves and held out his arms. He had the same burns. He also had left college because he couldn’t pay tuition. Their skin colors, languages, backgrounds were different, Murillo says. Still the three were, in Murillo’s view, “McBrothers”—members of the new global working class. Later, when Murillo told the story in a union hall in Quezon City, fast-food workers placed their arms on the table—fist-to-fist like spokes in a wheel. Identical lines of burns scored each arm.3
At the hearing in Brasília, Rainer learned that some fast-food workers have it worse than he does. He heard testimony from a Seoul worker who delivered “Happy Meals” on a bicycle. “This dude had to cover his face when he testified because he was afraid of retaliation.” In South Korea, the government had been cracking down hard, Rainer learned: police clubs, water cannons, summary imprisonment, and torture. And brutal work conditions.
“This dude told a story about one of his friends who got killed delivering meals. That guy had to deliver three or four meals every thirty minutes. That’s fast riding. And there’s a lot of hills there and lots of traffic.” Brazil’s Arcos Dorados (Golden Arches) bike deliverymen also testified. “They were going through the same thing,” says Rainer.
Deliverymen from several countries exchanged stories. Some spoke through interpreters, others in rudimentary English. What angered Bleu was that “nobody takes responsibility for what fast-food workers go through. But someone is responsible: McDonald’s. Someone needs to take responsibility. We are starting to do that.”
Rainer, Murillo, and other activists who came to Brasília in the summer of 2015 are part of a new global labor movement whose members connect using a mix of old-fashioned and new tactics: face-to-face organizing, cell phones, and social media. They adapt pop-culture references and embed them in local cultures and languages. Disney theme songs, Justin Timberlake jingles, even an electronic dance tune called “Barbra Streisand” are recast and repurposed.
Their protests are not your grandmother’s revolution. Repeated one-day flash strikes have largely replaced months-long sieges that often hurt workers more than management. Activists still march, chant, go door-to-door. But they also use social media, perform street theater, and engage in pop-culture civil disobedience actions. They hold mock trials of Ronald McDonalds. Singing, dancing flash mobs invade fast-food restaurants and shopping malls, posting online about everything they do.
Many twenty-first-century labor activists are under thirty-five and savvy about communications, social media, and popular culture. They take pleasure in subverting expensive advertising slogans, cracking the glossy shell of consumerism. McDonald’s paid pop star Justin Timberlake $6 million to sing “I’m Lovin’ It.” It was the burger giant’s first global television ad. Fast-food workers tweaked the slogan to: “Poverty Wages: Not Lovin’ It.” Anti-sweatshop activists turned Nike’s “Just Do It” into a boycott chant: “Just Don’t Do It.” Walmart’s “Save Money, Live Better” slogan became: “Stand Up, Live Better.” And when Walmart workers staged the first retail sit-in since the 1930s, their signs said: “Sit Down, Live Better.”
Even more than a living wage, these movements are fighting for respect. In Manila, fast-food workers sing the 1967 Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin anthem as they block rush-hour traffic: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me.” I have heard that word from hotel workers in Providence, strawberry pickers in Oxnard, garment workers in Phnom Penh, airport workers in New York City. “You need to respect the job and the role we play,” says airport security guard Canute Drayton. “Bosses need to know that we are not garbage.”
Around the world, low-wage workers are outlining a coherent vision of what a human-centered, post-neoliberal world might look like. What RESPECT means to them is this: a living wage; freedom of assembly, the right to unionize; job security, benefits; safe working conditions; an end to dispossessions, an end to deportations, and restraints on plunder of the earth for profit.
Low-wage workers also speak in terms of freedom. But their idea of freedom is distinct from that of neoliberals, says Filipina fast-food organizer Joanna Bernice Coronacion. Freedom means a decent life for all workers, clean, free water, free time to spend with families, freedom from sexual harassment and violence, wage equity for women and men, an end to labor slavery.
Denise Barlage, a longtime activist in Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) says: “We’re not asking to be rich. We are asking for respect, dignity, decent benefits, to be treated like human beings.” In so many ways, that sums up the spirit and ethos of the new global uprising against poverty wages.4
Researching this book, I have met and spoken with remarkable activists from New York City to Tampa, from Los Angeles to Dhaka, Manila, and Phnom Penh, from Geneva to Brasília. Some are union officials with political clout, big budgets, and armies of members behind them. Others are on-the-ground organizers who work seven-day weeks and eighteen-hour days, for little pay, dedicated to the cause, lit by the promise of change. Most moving and profound have been my conversations with the people who make our clothing, serve our food, care for our elderly and sick, clean our hotel rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, plant and pick our food.
These workers are the human beings behind the big abstract concepts associated with the twenty-first-century economy: globalization; free trade treaties; World Bank loans; austerity regimes; multinational capital and contingent labor. Meeting them, listening to their stories, has revealed those economic and political forces in fresh ways, from the bones out. It is my hope that they will do the same for those who read this book.