TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD CARL’S JR. and CVS worker Vance “Stretch” Sanders attended the first national Fight for $15 convention in Richmond, Virginia, in August 2016. Visiting the capital of the Confederacy, he could not help thinking about the lingering effects of slavery. Ten thousand activists, most of them African American, marched up Monument Avenue, lined by statues of Confederate generals. “I heard Reverend William Barber speak about the morality of our movement,” he says. Barber is the founder and leader of Moral Mondays, a mass civil-disobedience campaign that began in North Carolina and spread to Georgia, South Carolina, Illinois, and New Mexico. Protesting legislation restricting voting rights, minimum wage increases, and union rights, clergy, professors, students, and low-wage workers would get themselves arrested on repeated Mondays. Sanders, who also preaches the gospel, felt inspired.
“It took us four hundred years to get from zero to $7.25,” Barber told the crowd. “We can’t wait another four hundred years. Labor without a living wage is nothing but a pseudo form of slavery.” The crowd roared in agreement. Sanders says: “It was really something.”1
For three days, Sanders listened as fast-food, retail, and home-healthcare workers insisted it was no accident that half of African American workers in the US earned under $15 an hour. “We always did the grunt work for low wages,” said Virginia home-healthcare worker Lauralyn Clark. “White babies drank from our breasts, but we couldn’t drink from their fountains. White families relied on us to care for their elderly parents, but we couldn’t ride the bus with them. We cleaned their schools, but our children couldn’t attend. We cooked their food, but we couldn’t sit at their table. Well, enough is enough.”2
It all began four years earlier. Weeks after the Walmart walkout, a few fast-food workers in New York City decided to strike. One of the organizers was twenty-two-year-old Brooklyn Kentucky Fried Chicken worker Naquasia LeGrand. In 2016, she looked back amazed. Her little group had kicked off something bigger than they ever expected: a global uprising against poverty wages. “We triggered something epic that had never been done,” she marveled. In 2014, LeGrand was invited to the White House to witness President Obama sign an increase in the minimum wage for workers on federal contracts. “We never thought it would even get this far,” she said that day. “We’re just sick and tired of being sick and tired.”3
From its beginnings, the low-wage workers’ struggle in the US was rooted in the long history of African American protest: against exploitation of black labor, violation of black bodies, and attempts to break the spirit of black workers. Fast-food activists have repeatedly quoted the famous words uttered by former sharecropper and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer when asked why black people could wait no longer for freedom. “You always hear this sob story,” she said in 1964. “You know it takes time. For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long now, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”4
I’ve heard it from fast-food workers everywhere. Bleu Rainer told me he was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Marching down Monument Avenue, Stretch Sanders saw black workers holding signs that said: “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.” Sanders told that story with the same fervor and weariness Hamer had displayed a half century earlier. “We’re young,” he says, “but we understand that black folk have been at this for a very long time. We’re picking up an old struggle.”
Under twenty-first-century conditions. At a Fight for $15 march, Bleu Rainer held up a paycheck for $109. “That’s for two weeks’ work,” he said incredulously. His schedule at McDonald’s was decided by algorithm, he explained, and the computer called him in only when managers felt like it. Schedules are changed at the drop of a hat. Parents can’t plan child care, or know for sure if they will be able to pay their bills.
The movement’s focus on scheduling has started to make a difference. In May 2017, the New York City Council passed bills mandating that employers give fast-food workers fourteen days’ notice about schedule changes. It also banned back-to-back shifts. The movement started with New York fast-food workers, activists say. They believe these bills will send out ripples.5
Before they started organizing, normal life was impossible, workers say. LeGrand was working three jobs to make rent on a two-bedroom apartment she shared with five other people. Most people she knew worked two or three jobs. Bleu Rainer was sleeping in bus stations because he didn’t earn enough to pay Tampa rent. The decision to protest was not that hard, says Rainer. “We really had nothing to lose.”6
Between 2012 and 2015, fast-food workers staged hundreds of one-day flash strikes, every few months in an ever-growing number of cities. And they took advantage of social media to maximize the impact of their actions. Images of shamefaced or weeping Ronald McDonalds went viral. So did the word “McJobs,” denoting dead-end work without benefits. They called on McDonald’s to “Supersize My Wages” and asked customers if they wanted “poverty fries.”
These actions spread around the globe. In 2013, the National Guestworker Alliance asked Massimo Frattini and the IUF to support foreign student workers protesting horrific labor conditions at US fast-food restaurants. In Pennsylvania, “exchange students” were being forced to work eighty-hour weeks at McDonald’s and sleep in jammed basement dorms. When Frattini reached out to affiliate unions in Europe, Asia, and Africa, he was stunned by their response.
“We had no idea how ready they were,” he says. During the summer of 2013, fast-food workers staged “days of action” in more than thirty countries. Eleven months later, fast-food workers in 230 cities, in thirty-four countries on six continents, walked off the job to demand a living wage, full-time work, and union recognition. It was the most global strike in history.
A series of international conversations enhanced fast-food workers’ sense that they were part of a rising global movement. Workers from New York, Chicago, and 150 US cities met with counterparts from Denmark, Argentina, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, and other countries. Los Angeles McDonald’s workers flew to speak with counterparts in Tokyo. Workers from Chicago and New York traveled to the Philippines. They planned global campaigns and talked of negotiating global labor agreements with the world’s largest corporations.
And they shared experiences. LeGrand remembers meeting a McDonald’s worker from Thailand who made her realize that there were fast-food workers who had it worse than she did. But American workers also learned that some in other countries had it better. In unionized Denmark, Bleu Rainer found out, fast-food workers earned the equivalent of $21 an hour, with paid vacations, health benefits, and subsidies to attend college. He was impressed. It could be done. He learned a lot more when he joined workers from twenty-two countries at the Brazilian Senate hearings in the summer of 2015.
On April 14, 2016, low-wage workers struck in three hundred cities and forty-plus countries. Momentum continues to grow. Nineteen-year-old Los Angeles activist Samuel Homer Williams believes that this movement, like the black freedom struggle fifty years earlier, will be remembered as a turning point: “For me it’s about being a part of history,” he says, “part of something bigger than myself. I kind of feel like a hero, knowing that I’m helping people stay in their homes, pay their bills, and be able to eat. That’s something that a lot of people haven’t been able to do lately. We’re trying to change that. And I think we will.”7