WHEN CAMBODIAN GARMENT WORKERS won a wage increase in the fall of 2015, Kalpona Akter saw Bangladeshi garment workers smiling as they watched cell phone videos of celebrations in Phnom Penh. Massimo Frattini has seen European workers watch Fight for $15 videos on their phones. Cell phones help workers feel part of something global—the electricity of rebellion. But transnational movements predate cell service.1
Sociologist George Katsiaficas, who has studied the global protests in 1968 and “People Power” movements in the 1980s, argues that uprisings are infectious. The pleasures of revolt spark currents of change that spread across national borders. Katsiaficas calls this “the eros effect.”
A buzz sweeps marginalized communities, an elation at the possibility that they might be able to enact change. Las Vegas antipoverty activist Ruby Duncan remembers how she felt as a welfare rights activist in the 1970s. After a lifetime of taking orders, she says poor mothers finally became “the ones doing the demanding.” She felt it like a surge of power.2
“As people are transformed through insurgencies,” Katsiaficas writes, “they refuse to tolerate previously accepted forms of domination. Popular wisdom grows in each iteration of the movement’s emergence; ever-new aspirations animate action.”3
Adrenaline spreads grassroots protest from one city to the next, one country to another. Hope is an important, and understudied, political force. Amid genocidal wars, refugee crises, and violent repression, a disappearing middle class and a planet grown hotter, currents of hope began running through the world in the 2010s, animating worker movements and connecting them. On days of global action, one can feel electricity crackling.
On April 15, 2015, low-wage workers in two hundred US cities and in forty countries on six continents struck and rallied for a living wage. They marched in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and hundreds of other American cities. They marched in London, Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, Manila, Seoul, Tokyo, Rio, Tegucigalpa, Buenos Aires, Brasília, Cape Town, Freetown, and Accra.
It wasn’t only economic gains that moved them. The marchers sought to reoccupy cities where all but the wealthiest have been marginalized by rising costs, to make visible the people whose labor makes cities run. While workers are relegated to far-flung fringe neighborhoods or marooned in bleak, poor “ethno-burbs,” cities that were once economically diverse, home to manufacturing as well as banking and luxury real estate, became sanitized and gentrified amusement parks for the rich.
In perhaps the most famous theme park for the wealthy, a place called Manhattan, tens of thousands marched that day. They revealed in all its astounding diversity the working class of a truly global city where nearly two-thirds of children lived with a foreign-born parent. Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Afro-Caribbean, Polish and Bulgarian, Russian and Irish, Dominican, Mexican, indigenous Central American immigrants, and their American kids marched. American-born union workers marched too: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italian.
Among the low-wage workers who came out that day, many were legal residents but many others were undocumented. Hotel workers, home-healthcare providers, restaurant and bakery workers, car service and school bus drivers, crossing guards, airport baggage handlers, “car washeros,” fast-food servers. They made a conscious choice to come out of the shadows, riding subways and commuter trains from apartments in East New York, Flatlands, Brownsville, and the Bronx where two and three generations shared lodging.
It took a leap of faith for them to come out into the light, says Dominican organizer Virgilio Aran, to lift their heads, to walk freely down the streets of the city center where they worked but could not afford to live. Undocumented workers well understand that employers pay them too little and work them too hard because they are sure that workers without green cards are too frightened to report abuses. Aran has fought for a long time to change that.
On April 15, 2015, he walked with his wife and fellow activist Rosanna Rodriguez, greeting marchers in emotion-filled Spanish, shaking hands and giving hugs. A few years earlier the couple had founded the Laundry Workers Center (LWC) to organize undocumented Spanish-speaking workers across New York. Working with Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC), they sparked a wave of labor uprisings in restaurants, bakeries, warehouses, and laundries across the city and around the region. As this book goes to press, their movement is ongoing.
The LWC and ROC organize immigrants who work not for large companies but for small businesses and family-run chains. Often they are exploited by bosses from their home countries who try to intimidate workers by threatening to harm family members living abroad. In spite of this, restaurant workers in the Bronx and Queens, warehouse workers in Brooklyn, and retail workers in Manhattan have repeatedly struck since 2012, signed union cards, filed court complaints, and brought cases before the NLRB. And they have won. A 2012 campaign led by Mexican immigrant Mahoma Lopez to organize the Hot & Crusty bakeries, and a 2016–17 union drive at the B&H photo warehouse, resulted in new unions, no small feat.4
Still, Aran and Rodriguez say that the most radical work they do is psychological. To transform scared workers into labor activists, organizers must help them overcome legitimate fears and anxieties. Undocumented migrants must transcend lifetimes of being told that they are good only for cheap labor, says Aran. To foster that, the LWC runs consciousness-raising and peer education groups. Workers teach one another about labor history, racism, and women’s oppression. “Since so many of the workers are women, everyone must understand the history of sexism,” says Aran. Dominicans teach about white-skin privilege in the Dominican Republic and in the US. “Racism affects workers negatively,” he says. “We try to help them fight that feeling.”
When a worker feels strong enough to step into the light, Aran says, that’s a breakthrough. “If you’re an undocumented immigrant, you get up every single day and you get on the train to go to work and someone might say, ‘Give me your papers.’ If you don’t have documents, then you’re facing deportation.” To do that every day takes incredible courage, he says. “You’ve made such hard choices: to come to another country, to cross borders, to learn a new language, to adapt and find work and face deportation every day. When you realize that”—he pauses—“you understand that you are a superhero! It’s my job to help workers find that feeling.”
Most undocumented immigrants are warned not to reveal their real names, says Aran. In the age of Donald Trump, those fears have deepened. But the only path to freedom is to reject terror. “When you no longer fear,” Aran insists, “when you tell your own story, when you know your own history and that of the workers who have struggled before you, when you say your own name, when you show your face, then you have power. Then you know that employers can’t report you or they too will face government sanctions. Then intimidation in the workplace doesn’t affect you so much.” He takes a slow breath. “Then you can fight back.”
Aran, Rodriguez, and Mahoma Lopez, president of the LWC, believe that transformation can come only when disrespected workers become teachers. So every Sunday, in the Bronx, Washington Heights, and Lower Manhattan, restaurant, bakery, and warehouse workers meet to hear one of their own lecture. Then the group talks together—about labor history, sexism, racism, wage theft, and labor law. These are twenty-first-century freedom schools. As Rodriguez describes how they work, I think of Ella Baker and Septima Clark, civil rights pioneers who insisted in the 1950s and 1960s that poor, uneducated African Americans had wisdom to teach—and then created schools where they did so. At a Sunday class, as a Dominican waitress teaches immigrant restaurant workers about the black freedom struggle in the US South, I imagine Baker and Clark nodding with satisfaction.
On April 15, 2015, Laundry Workers Center activists joined a march in which more than half of the participants earned too little to properly feed their families. But for that day they controlled the streets of Midtown Manhattan. They flooded Columbus Circle, dancing beneath the gates to Central Park, poured onto Broadway, marched to Times Square. Singing and cheering, they said their names aloud.5
Bleu Rainer and hundreds of fast-food workers marched wearing “Black Lives Matter: I Can’t Breathe” sweatshirts, tying the movement for higher wages to the struggle against police violence—highlighting the last words uttered by Staten Island street vendor Eric Garner as he was choked to death by police a year earlier. “It’s the same struggle,” says Rainer. “We are the same people. We all want the same thing. We deserve dignity and a decent life.”
Some marchers carried Ronald McDonald puppets. They waved the corporate clown high. In some versions, he wept in shame. “McJobs Cost Us All,” said a popular shirt. The McDonald’s logo appeared on banners, covered by the words “Poverty Wages: Not Lovin’ It.” High school students mugged for the cameras. Wheelchair-bound veterans in neon-green OUR Walmart shirts wheeled with the marchers. Kids ran and laughed under signs that said: “Everybody Deserves Respect.”
As we reached Times Square, daylight fading, city lights flickering on, hundreds of home-healthcare providers, clad in white lab coats, began to sing and dance to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” With a Caribbean lilt, they sang: “We’re overworked, and underpaid . . . All we ask is fifteen dollars. We’re overworked and underpaid.”
They repeated it again and again, dancing and singing, block after block. Humming, clapping, twirling. Tourists smiled and sang along. Twilight descended over Times Square, electronic billboards flashed. And for a few minutes on a warm spring evening, middle-aged, immigrant, black, Asian, and Latina home-healthcare workers owned Broadway.
The recognition came in a rush. It was the kind of feeling that enables people to keep mounting protests. Marching en masse, they were more than low-wage workers. Fear was replaced by strength. Hunger was sated by solidarity.
Against the twilit sky, an untold number of hands raised their cell phones to record and upload videos to social media. People shared and commented on cell phone videos of sister marches in London and Tokyo, Manila, Nairobi, and Seoul. One woman started showing around a photograph of a march in Dhaka. There, a young woman held a sign that said: “Bangladeshi Workers Support the $15 Minimum Wage.” She had photographed herself and posted a selfie—as so many teenage girls do every day.