EVEN SO, THE STRUGGLE GETS WEARYING. “It’s been over one hundred fifty years since we abolished slavery,” says Virginia home-care worker Lauralyn Clark, “but we still have slave-wage jobs where we’re not paid enough to survive.” Clark does not believe it is a coincidence that so many low-wage workers are people of color.1
Nor do Tampa fast-food worker-activists Reika Mack and Bleu Rainer. They feel they are standard-bearers for a “new civil rights movement.” Stretch Sanders says that it is his job to teach the younger generation about the “freedom fighters on whose shoulders we stand.”2
In 2015, Mack, then twenty-six, got to meet some of them. She was one of five hundred Fight for $15 activists from ten states who traveled to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. was once pastor. There, the young workers were tutored by some of the sanitation strikers who marched with King in Memphis in 1968. “Dr. King was supporting a labor action on the day he was killed,” Mack learned. “Civil rights and labor rights have always been part of the same struggle.” Forty-seven years later, white-haired Memphis activists led young fast-food workers as they marched to a McDonald’s on a traffic-clogged Atlanta avenue. There they sat down and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Echoes of the 1960s black freedom struggle suffused the protest. Marchers carried signs that said: “I Am a Man,” as the sanitation workers had in 1968. They also had “I Am a Woman” signs because most fast-food workers are. “It was a beautiful thing,” Mack says, “to know that we were marching for the same cause as they did so many years ago. For our humanity, for our rights.” She was impressed that the Memphis 1968 veterans, men in their seventies, seemed to fully grasp the anger of young women workers in the twenty-first century. It moved her to be part of a struggle begun in her grandparents’ generation.
“One of the things the Memphis strikers told me was that it was fine to get mad, but to get mad enough to fight back. Politically. Channel it, they told us.” She nods as she speaks. “Well, we’re mad enough now. We’re fed up and we can’t take it anymore. We don’t have any other weapons but to get mad and fight back for what’s right.”3
When Long Beach, California, McDonald’s worker Maia Montcrief first came out to protest for $15 and a union, it was the day before her eighteenth birthday and the day after she took her last high school US history exam. “My role models are the protesters at civil rights sit-ins,” she says. A child of Haitian immigrants, Montcrief shares a two-bedroom apartment with her mom and four siblings. Her mother is a postal worker. It’s crowded and Maia would like to move to her own place, but she is saving to pay tuition at Long Beach City College. “I want to study psychology and minor in brain science so I can be a brain surgeon,” she says confidently.
Montcrief joined the living-wage fight out of a sense of responsibility to her neighbors, she says. “I was born in Long Beach, raised in Long Beach, and I will fight for its survival.” Besides, organizing feels natural to her. “I talk to my friends at McDonald’s. I talk to my friends at Burger King. We are going to push for this—march, testify—until we get our rights.”
Learning history has given her courage. “My heroes are Malcolm X, Rosa Parks,” she says. “Rosa was strong. I want to be like that.” She pulls herself up to her full height of five feet two, then pumps her fist in the air. “I want to be like our conductor of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman. I want to meet the president.” She recently learned that Tubman met Abe Lincoln. “I would like to meet President Obama,” she says with a shy smile.
“And I want to see a woman president.” (She had hoped it would be Hillary Clinton.) “I will tell her to support our feminist needs. Females make less than guys. Even if we have the same hours, the guys always end up making more. That’s not right.” And when something is not right, Maia says, “I make that my fight. And I will stand out there at the front until the fight is won.”4
Stretch Sanders says he is carrying the torch for his aunt, Carolyn “Polly” Beach, a pioneering Black Panther youth organizer. He is also inspired by the women of the Las Vegas welfare rights movement who shut down the Strip in the 1970s to protest cuts in benefits to poor families. “It is cruel to tell a person with no shoes to pull herself up by her bootstraps,” their leader Ruby Duncan used to say. Sanders agrees. And yet he feels that living-wage activists are doing that: picking themselves up by their bare, naked feet. Like the fast-food activists of Manila, Sanders is a radical Christian. He believes that God is on the side of the poor. “The struggle for freedom is a struggle for justice. And God will deliver justice.” He pauses. “If we work for it.”5
“Change is starting to come,” says Bleu Rainer. “We’ve had wins across the board with fast food. We’ve had wins in Seattle. San Francisco. New York. LA. The McDonald’s CEO resigned. We’ve had support from our friends in other countries. That only comes from workers standing up and applying pressure. Me and my colleagues here, we’re going to stand up and fight back and we’re going to keep fighting until they give us what we want.”
Stretch Sanders credits worker protest for Carl’s Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder’s decision to withdraw from consideration to be Trump’s secretary of labor. “The people have the power and ability to run fast-food companies better than he does. And to run the world. And I believe, I really do, that one day we will.”6