NOVEMBER 29, 2016: Picketers appeared with the first light. During the breakfast rush they delayed harried commuters hoping for an Egg McMuffin before work. They rallied in Central Square in Cambridge, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, on Broadway in Los Angeles. In St. Louis, adjunct professors sat down in the middle of a busy avenue; in Detroit, McDonald’s workers stepped off the curb into traffic, arms crossed. In Phoenix, they shut down a McDonald’s drive-through, then marched to City Hall and sat in for a $15 wage.
In Manhattan, fast-food workers, Uber drivers, and bike messengers sat down calmly in the middle of Broadway. “We shall not be moved,” they sang, and for a time, police seemed content to let them be. Baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants struck at Logan, O’Hare, and nineteen other big-city airports. Crossing guards sat in the way of parents driving their children to school. In Boston, low-wage workers streamed into the legislature to demand a state minimum wage of $15. They had succeeded in raising the state minimum from $8 to $11 in the past two years. But it was not nearly enough. “Fifteen dollars! No less!” they shouted.
Three weeks after the stunning election of the most far-right president in US history, low-wage workers protested in 340 US cities for a living wage, paid sick leave, and union rights. Hundreds were arrested in civil disobedience actions across the country. Undocumented workers joined in despite the risk. They called it Day of Disruption.
The disrupters were mostly African American and Latina but they were also white, Native, and Asian. A majority were women, but thousands of men joined in. Fast-food worker Samuel Homer Williams and OUR Walmart activist Denise Barlage marched in Los Angeles. Bleu Rainer, Cole Bellamy, and Ann Buckner came out in the dark Tampa morning to stage sit-ins as the sun rose. In New York, Laundry Workers Center members were there.
Protesters offered an analysis of the twenty-first-century economy from the bottom up. Nearly two-thirds of jobs created in the United States between 2008 and 2012 do not pay a living wage. And the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that 60 percent of new jobs created through 2023 will pay too little for workers to live on. “These are the jobs now,” said Richard Eiker as he sat down in front of a Kansas City McDonald’s. So workers are fighting “to make these jobs good jobs.”1
North Carolina home-healthcare aide Hilde Edmundson, who was arrested blocking traffic in Durham on the Day of Disruption, had explained her reasoning a year earlier: “I love caring for people. It’s my calling in life. But because I only make $9 an hour . . . I can’t afford my own place. I catch the bus to work because I can’t afford a car. I depend on food stamps and I can’t afford health care insurance. . . . I’ve been homeless because of my wages. All I’m asking for is justice. People depend on home care workers but as a home care worker I can’t afford to take care of my own health.”2
Conditions for low-wage workers had been deteriorating for years, but the 2016 election dramatically worsened their situation. Fiercely anti-union Republicans had expanded their control of state legislatures, governors’ mansions, and the US Congress. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan vowed to dismantle the social safety net put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and expanded by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. And Donald Trump’s Cabinet promised to roll back hard-fought victories won by low-wage workers since 2012. Immigrants’ and women’s rights were also on the chopping block. Fight for $15 activists swore “unrelenting opposition.” “We won’t back down. We won’t go back,” disrupters chanted.
Vance “Stretch” Sanders, a twenty-one-year-old homeless rights activist, Christian minister, and CVS cashier, woke up at 4 a.m. on November 29 to get to the Fight for $15 office before the sun came up. He enjoyed the quiet morning. Clear desert light illuminated the purple-red mountains that ring the city, as retail workers, fast-food servers, home-healthcare aides, preschool teachers, and adjunct professors marched slowly down the Strip.3
McDonald’s employees wore bright yellow vests emblazoned with a “Menu of Scandals: McShame, McSlavery, and McHumiliation.” They riffed on McDonald’s jingles. “I hate this very much,” they sang. And “McJobs hurt us all.” Near the Mirage hotel, where a man-made volcano explodes every fifteen minutes then turns into a flickering-orange waterfall, the protesters called for magic of a different kind: $15 and a union.
Why target McDonald’s? With a worldwide workforce of 1.9 million, it is the second-largest private employer in the world. Only Walmart employs more. In 2016, there were 36,899 McDonald’s restaurants in 119 countries, serving 69 million people a day. One McDonald’s CFO boasted that, like the British empire of old, the sun never sets on the Golden Arches. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued, only somewhat tongue in cheek, that the transnationalism of McDonald’s might bring world peace.4
Instead, the Golden Arches have come to symbolize all that is wrong with the twenty-first-century global economy. McDonald’s has driven down wages in every country where it operates, activists say, shredding job security, robbing workers of overtime pay, and fighting compensation for those injured on the job. The corporation claimed that it was not responsible for labor violations by franchise owners. Prompted by workers and unions, courts and government agencies have begun to lift the veil on McDonald’s.
In 2015, the National Labor Relations Board ruled McDonald’s a “joint employer,” making the corporation liable for how all its workers are treated. A Brazilian court handed McDonald’s a whopping $30 million fine for labor law violations. And the European Parliament began investigating McDonald’s for tax evasion and exorbitant charges to franchise owners who were being charged rents way above market value.
McDonald’s makes much of its profit on real estate. When land values dropped worldwide in 2008, McDonald’s went on a buying spree, becoming one of the largest real estate companies on earth. Charging franchisees rents of between 8 and 15 percent of their revenues, it earns up to $14,000 a month per store. Some say McDonald’s is a real estate empire financed by burgers and fries. One former chief financial officer said that store sales just about cover franchisees’ rent. There is little profit. So franchise owners cut costs by squeezing workers.5
That’s how we got “McJobs,” says Bleu Rainer. A “McJob” is defined by Webster’s and The Oxford English Dictionary as low-paid work that offers little satisfaction and few prospects for advancement. Living-wage activists say we don’t need dictionary definitions. People around the world have worked in McJobs. Many remain stuck in McJobs for their entire working lives. An estimated one in eight Americans has worked for McDonald’s itself, and with little to show for it. “I was even promoted to manager,” says Rainer, “but I never made more than $9.15 an hour or had a schedule I could depend on. That’s a McJob.” Stretch Sanders also knows about McJobs. He is trying to put himself through college on his CVS cashier’s salary.6
Sanders used to work for Carl’s Jr., owned by Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s first nominee to head the federal labor department. Charged with stealing $20 million from his workers in California, Puzder was the target of thirty-three investigations for workers’ rights abuses. While earning a salary three hundred times that of his lowest-paid employees, Puzder told reporters he’d rather replace his workers with robots than raise their wages. Robots “are always polite,” he said. “They never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”7
Views like that invite protest. In September 2016, Sanders led an occupation of Nevada governor Brian Sandoval’s office. Protesters demanded a $15 state wage and an end to mistreatment of undocumented workers. Las Vegas preschool teacher Luc Perez joined the sit-in. After eight years of teaching, she did not earn enough to pay her bills. Even that doesn’t hurt as much, she said, as seeing three- and four-year-old students whose parents have just been arrested for immigration violations. They say: “My mom is not with me. Someone took her away.”8
Sanders was upset by the 2016 election results, he says, but not as frightened as many people he knew. “My brothers and sisters were already being shot down in the streets by police. My coworkers were already having their doors broken down at dawn by ICE. Parents were being dragged away and taken someplace their children couldn’t find them. That’s why we started fighting. That’s why we won’t stop. I honestly don’t know how much worse it can get.”
For Sanders, Rainer, and many others, the living-wage campaign is inextricably tied to the struggle against police violence and for immigration reform. Fight for $15 activists at a McDonald’s in Ferguson, Missouri, provided safe space during the unrest after police killed teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014. Living-wage marchers in New York wore shirts emblazoned with the last words of Eric Garner, father of six, killed by the NYPD that summer. “We’re the same people,” says Rainer. “We have to hold down three jobs, and when we are done and tired, walking home from work, then we are abused by police, raided by immigration cops.”
Sanders says, “I was a Black Lives Matter activist before I was born.” He is the nephew of Chicago Black Panthers who were close to Fred Hampton, the young Panther leader murdered by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969. Sanders’s uncle was in the apartment with Hampton the night he was killed. He grew up on those stories.
Police violence, government crackdowns, and charges of corruption also fueled worker protest around the world at the end of 2016. On November 30, hundreds of thousands of South Korean workers struck as students nationwide boycotted classes. Unrest had been building for months as President Park Geun-hye’s crackdowns on labor and farmer protest grew increasingly brutal. Trade unions, farmers, and student groups were enraged by her administration’s assaults on labor rights and coziness with transnational corporations. Retail and fast-food workers’ unions protested deteriorating conditions for workers. Vast street demonstrations, involving over a million people, ultimately led to her trial and removal.9
But her impeachment did not end the protests. Seoul McDonald’s workers had been marching for months, angry that the burger giant evaded paying benefits and overtime by classifying all its workers as part-time and temporary. After almost three years of protest, McDonald’s Korea announced, early in 2017, that it would hire full-time workers. In April, the corporation recognized the fast-food workers’ Korean Arbeit Workers Union and began contract negotiations. “We are human too,” Korean fast-food workers had chanted. Finally, said one worker, they were being treated that way.10
Meanwhile in Brazil, striking port and oil workers paralyzed the country. In December 2016, CUT, the national union federation, declared a month of work stoppages, strikes, and rallies. They were protesting a “legislative coup” three months earlier that removed Worker Party president Dilma Rousseff, her successor Michel Temer’s announcement of a twenty-year freeze on public services budgets, and plans to privatize the country’s oil reserves and allow oil drilling by multinational corporations.11
As turmoil built, fast-food workers took Arcos Dorados, the McDonald’s Brazilian affiliate, to court. Reviewing evidence that the company had repeatedly violated Brazilian labor law, judges levied large fines. Fast-food workers also poured into Brussels as 2016 came to an end, demanding that the European Parliament investigate McDonald’s for violating minimum wage laws, operating unsafe workplaces, and punishing employees who tried to unionize. Bleu Rainer and a delegation of American fast-food workers came to support their European counterparts.
At the same moment, Nepali migrant workers in Kuala Lumpur charged McDonald’s with enabling labor slavery and human trafficking. The Nepalis told reporters they had been brought to Malaysia so that McDonald’s could evade that country’s labor laws, working them longer and paying them less than they could legally pay Malaysians. Their passports had been confiscated. They were billed for transportation and uniforms and forced to work for free until they had paid those costs. Since all Malaysian McDonald’s are owned by the transnational corporation rather than franchisees, the workers hoped to embarrass executives into giving them their back pay and sending them home.
Corporate leaders seemed at first unmoved, insisting that these workers were not McDonald’s employees but instead worked for the labor contractor who had brought them to Malaysia. It was a brave gambit, stateless migrants going up against the world’s second-largest private employer. It seemed unlikely to work, but enough bad press did the trick. Six months later, McDonald’s admitted complicity in slave labor and announced that it was cutting ties with unethical labor brokers in Malaysia.12
The European protests made an impression as well. The French government hit McDonald’s with a bill for back taxes. The UK Labour Party cut ties with McDonald’s. New Zealand’s Parliament made zero-hours contracts illegal nationwide. In April 2017, McDonald’s began offering UK employees fixed-hour contracts. On Labor Day 2017, UK McDonald’s workers struck for the first time in four decades. After decades of worsening conditions, the needle seemed finally to be moving in a different direction.13