AKTER’S ASSERTION THAT “in Bangladesh it is not 2011; it’s 1911” explains a lot. For, it is true not just of Bangladesh but of low-wage workers everywhere. Four decades into the neoliberal revolution, the repeal and erosion of labor protections, shrinking labor unions, precarious employment, stagnant wages, declining buying power, and a global race to the bottom in safety standards have turned the clock back for workers. And it has not been a small step back, but a giant leap. From Arkansas chicken processing plants to Philippine flip-flop factories, low-wage workers are having to again fight for rights already fought for and won one hundred years earlier.
Regression is a difficult concept to absorb, especially for those who live in the world’s most affluent countries. We have been schooled in the ideology of progress, and we like to believe that life for workers has steadily improved. Instead, millions of workers have lost ground. They have less security than workers did forty years ago. Their wages buy less. Their factories are more dangerous.
Low-wage workers understand this all too well. It is the root of their global uprising. From New York City to southern China, Brasília to Cape Town, thousands of twenty-first-century labor stoppages, strikes, civil-disobedience actions, and street protests have called into question the boundless expansion of capital. And that has prompted a violent backlash. There have been targeted murders of movement leaders—in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, in Honduras, Mexico, and Colombia. Indigenous activists, who have led the resistance to dam building, land expropriations, and pipelines from Honduras to Standing Rock, have been particularly hard-hit.1
Honduran environmental leader Berta Cáceres, who fought to prevent eviction of Lenca villagers for a dam project, was assassinated in her home in 2016. At least 111 Honduran land rights activists from different communities have been killed since 2000. In Brazil, more than 400 indigenous activists have died defending their lands. In Mexico and Colombia, indigenous land rights activists continue to be murdered. Around the world, uprisings for workers’ and women’s rights and against dams and mines have touched a nerve. “The answer is to keep on fighting,” Kalpona Akter insists. “If you are always worrying about dying, you can’t live.”
Activists know that their struggles have also brought change: wage increases, hours reductions, enhanced maternity leave, and investigations of labor conditions in complicated global supply chains. The geographic scope and scale of the protests, the vast numbers of people involved, the militancy and the courage of the protesters have been stunning. Many of those rising are the poorest of the poor, willing to risk what little they have for the next generation.
We are witnessing the first truly global uprisings since the 1980s “People Power” movements that toppled Duvalier in Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Ershad in Bangladesh, and Communist dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe. That same wave of mass movements unsuccessfully challenged dictators in Nepal, Thailand, Burma, and Tibet. China’s Tiananmen Square student uprising in 1989 was the last of the People Power movements, a tragically suppressed move to weld political freedoms onto the market forces that Deng Xiaoping had unleashed. Like the global 1968 student uprisings before them, the People Power movements of the 1980s spread across national borders, sweeping many parts of the globe. Resistance is contagious; rebellion feels good.
The uprisings against poverty wages that are the subject of this book have spread with similar speed. Like other poor people’s movements, they have had to depend on support from allies—labor unions, consumer groups, insurgent politicians, progressive businesspeople. But the sparks and fuel have come from mass discontent at the grass roots.
They have pulled off remarkable organizing feats—work stoppages in hundreds of cities, in scores of countries, on every continent. And they have had real successes. Between 2012 and 2015, their organizing yielded wage increases in South Africa, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Myanmar, among other places. Some workers doubled their wages and more. In New Zealand, workers won regular schedules, and in Britain, more than one hundred thousand won guaranteed hours and then proceeded to strike McDonald’s for the right to unionize. The struggle continues. But workers have seen that if they keep the pressure on, wages will rise, and conditions will improve.2
In the US, the Fight for $15 movement begun by fast-food and Walmart workers has grown to include adjunct professors, retail and airport workers, and gas station and home-healthcare attendants. Since most American workers no longer earn a living wage, activists see unlimited possibilities for growth. Many cities have passed the $15 minimum wage. New York and California enacted $15 state minimums. And new living-wage bills are considered every term by cities and towns across the US.3
Will these victories survive the presidency of Donald Trump, and the rise of authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Brazil, and other parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia? Activists believe they will, because rising inequality and falling real wages are so widespread, and are sparking anger across political divides.
Some movement gains will likely not survive. In 2016, the US National Labor Relations Board limited “on-demand scheduling,” under which workers must always be on call but have no guaranteed hours. In another case, the NLRB ruled McDonald’s a “joint employer,” responsible for the treatment of workers in restaurants owned by franchisees. Also in 2016, the NLRB ruled that graduate students are workers and entitled to unionize. Because NLRB members are political appointees, these rulings are endangered under President Trump. Still, activists insist “We Will Not Go Back”—even if the forces arrayed against them are overwhelming. To continue the struggle they use all the tools at their disposal.
Social media, accessible via inexpensive smartphones, have enabled activists to publicize their struggles and to let the world know when their leaders are endangered or assaulted. It also helps them to make connections and build coalitions globally. They need no longer depend on corporate media for coverage. In countries like Bangladesh, where garment factory owners control newspapers and television stations, this has been essential. But the sword is double-edged: social media is easily monitored.4
Filipina activist Em Atienza—a diminutive twenty-four-year-old student who has organized street protests for labor rights and against gender-based violence, says that activists “can’t afford to be afraid. We are young, so we must and will keep fighting.” Cambodian hotel organizer Chhim Sitthar says she knows that she might die before she achieves her goals. “That’s OK with me,” she says. “It really is. If I can help the next generation, I don’t mind.”5
The courage of youth is powerful, says veteran Maria Elena Durazo. But these movements have not risen without careful planning by labor veterans. Bangladeshi activist Moshrefa Mishu, who led a 2014 hunger strike of 1,600 garment workers, and Josua Mata, who has helped drive a labor resurgence in the Philippines, argue that the mass protests of the twenty-first century have come from decades of organizing, debate, splintering, and rebuilding.6
Bangladeshi students and workers have organized ceaselessly for at least forty years, Mishu says—for women’s and workers’ rights, against Islamists, against a repressive state. “Organizing and protest are what we do. We’re good at it. We fight. We win a little. We lose. They beat us and we fight again.”7
In the Philippines, say activists Walden Bello and Josua Mata, the struggle has also been very long. Union workers helped power the peaceful 1986 revolution that brought down Ferdinand Marcos. It is ironic, Bello has noted, that post-Marcos “democracy” has not helped Filipino workers and small landholders much. Perhaps the opposite.
Offering a different vision, Bello ran for the Philippine Senate in 2016, demanding justice for low-wage workers and small landholders. American observers, noting the impassioned rhetoric and the devotion of his young supporters, compared him to Vermont’s democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, then running for president of the United States. Though both were ultimately unsuccessful, supporters believe that their campaigns sowed seeds that continue to sprout.8
In Mexico, rebellion against the damages of globalization and neoliberalism has been ongoing since the 1990s. Historian Iain Boal compared the breakup of Mexico’s ejido common lands and the displacement of millions of Mexican peasants in the 1980s and 1990s to the industrialization of England four centuries earlier, when enclosures of “the commons” sparked decades of rebellions, land occupations, and the rise of early labor unions.9
The Zapatistas weren’t quite the machine-smashing Luddites, but they offered indigenous community and traditional knowledge as resistance and solution. Boal wrote of their rebellion: “The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational as capital. Because enclosure takes myriad forms, so shall resistance to it.”
Indigenous resistance has continued unbroken worldwide. The Zapatistas did not disappear. They built autonomous communities in Chiapas that remain vibrant in the twenty-first century. And chants of “Berta Cáceres Vive!” (Berta Cáceres Lives!) animate indigenous land rights protests from Chiapas to Chile.
A decade after the Zapatista uprising, seventy thousand Oaxacan teachers from indigenous Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Triqui communities struck for a living wage and for basic supplies for their students: books, pencils, toilets, and potable water. The state government deployed police helicopters, bullets, and tear gas. Teachers and journalists alike were shot. After the brutal police assault, the strike mushroomed into a movement that ultimately involved over a million people.
Protesters occupied the city’s zócalo (central square). Police cut down the ancient trees so they would have no shade. Oaxacans quietly reclaimed their commons, offering food and water to striking teachers. Together they erected barricades to keep police and military vehicles from entering the city. One night, my family and I drove into Oaxaca past groups of teachers sitting on folding chairs behind burned-out buses. They waved us around the charred metal and onto a dry riverbed. River rocks pinged and echoed as we drove through the smoke of campfires in Oaxaca’s streets.
In the months that followed, grassroots groups governed themselves via teacher and peasant assemblies. Two thousand indigenous women banging “pots and pans” marched into a government-run television station they said had spread false stories about the protests. For three weeks, the women ran their own “Channel of the Oaxacan People.” When police stormed the station, the women fled but soon occupied eleven other TV and radio stations, creating grassroots media of their own: the “voice” of the rebellion.
Death squads and hundreds of arrests finally stilled the protest. Thousands of armed police stormed the city center, posting signs purported to be from city residents thanking the government for “reclaiming our park.” But graffiti sprayed on city walls told of transformations that could not be undone. “We will never be the same again.” And: “This seed will grow.”10
Sprouting seeds, spreading vines, global rebellion grew. Five years later, Occupy Wall Street laid claim to city centers from New York to Hong Kong, building alternative communal institutions, challenging city authorities, battling with police, questioning global capitalism. They launched a discussion that has not yet ended.
In 2016, Mexican teachers were still protesting school privatization, funding cuts, and mandatory teaching of English in place of indigenous languages. As the 2016–17 school year began, Mexican teachers were on strike in four states. Many were still angry about the disappearance and murder of forty-three student teacher activists in 2014. The repression in 2016 was almost as bloody. Twelve teacher-activists and supporters were killed.
In the aftermath, parents, teachers, and students came together to reflect. Teacher-turned-journalist Luis Hernandez Navarro, like so many activists in the new labor movement, argued that workers must study history to understand what is happening to them. Quoting a teacher active in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, Navarro wrote of the 2016 strike: “The task of teachers . . . is to give the people the intellectual means to rebel.” It is that gift that veterans like Mishu, Durazo, and Mata are passing on to a new generation of activists.11