ACTIVISTS IN THE LOW-WAGE workers’ struggle are rightly proud of what they achieved between 2012 and 2016. Twenty-one states plus the District of Columbia raised the minimum wage. Thirty states passed wages higher than the federal minimum. By 2017, forty localities enacted minimum wages that were higher than the minimum wages in their states.1
In the spring of 2016, the movement won its most significant US victories when California and New York—the country’s largest labor markets—both approved a $15 state wage. New York and California are very expensive places. Fifteen dollars an hour, phased in over several years, will not give workers enough to support families. Still, these are noteworthy victories, raising wages for tens of millions of workers after decades of wage stagnation.2
As important, the movement shifted public opinion, convincing most Americans that all workers deserve a living wage. By 2016, six in ten Americans supported a $15 hourly minimum. A few years earlier, the idea of more than doubling the federal minimum seemed delusional. And that belief crossed party lines. Even in Republican-wave elections, even in red states, voters approved wage raises. On the same night that Donald Trump was elected president, voters in five states raised the minimum wage.
Healthcare workers won increases in both public and private institutions. Hospital workers in five states won $15, as did home-care workers in Massachusetts and Washington. Community care workers in Canada won Sweet $16. And the University of Pittsburgh hospital system, the largest private employer in Pennsylvania, commenced paying $15.
Large banks, insurance companies, and high-tech corporations also raised wages: Aetna, Facebook, Amalgamated Bank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and the Bank of America adopted minimums of $15 or more. Many smaller companies have too. The usually intransigent retail sector moved a little: Target, Gap, IKEA, T. J. Maxx, and Costco raised their minimum. Even Walmart and McDonald’s gestured at change. McDonald’s raised wages for corporate employees (just ninety thousand of its workforce of over two million). And Walmart raised its minimum to $10, but then cut hours and benefits and closed stores.3
Activists also saw progress in their battle to guarantee a right to paid time off. In 2015, 36 percent of US workers, forty-one million people, were ineligible for even one sick day per year. In fast food, 86 percent of women workers had no sick leave and almost three-quarters admitted handling food at work while sick. In 2016, seven states and the District of Columbia passed paid sick-leave bills, as did New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Seattle, Philadelphia, and other cities. In some city and county elections, voters approved paid “safe days” as well, allowing workers time off to recover from battering and sexual assault. There is a long way to go until paid time off is universal or even the norm in the US, but activists believe that the tide is turning.4
The period of 2016–17 even brought a new influx into labor unions, especially among airport workers. Baggage handlers in Los Angeles and airport workers in Minneapolis signed union contracts in November, seventeen years after they began living-wage protests. A month later, eight thousand New York City and New Jersey airport workers won union recognition. These victories proved that unions can win even in environments where workers are employed by many different subcontractors.5
UNITE HERE won union contracts across Indiana for Aramark food services workers. Hospital workers in Seattle formed a union in the spring of 2017, while Amazon security guards demanded that right. Facebook’s cafeteria workers unionized in the summer of 2017. Graduate students and adjunct faculty were forming unions across the country. And autoworkers began ramping up efforts to unionize, fighting automakers’ increasing use of short-term contracts to limit the number of workers eligible to join. The low-wage workers’ movement was criticized by some for not focusing on bringing workers into unions, but by 2017 that was no longer true.
Airport workers Prince Jackson and Canute Drayton say they were inspired by fast-food activists. Jackson is a baggage handler, Drayton a security guard at JFK. Both are in their forties and have lived through other social justice struggles. This feels different. “We could feel that the movement was really growing,” Jackson says. “We knew that there were thousands of underpaid service workers in New York City who don’t get benefits for doing jobs that are vital to the life of the city. Most of us have a friend or relative who works or did work in fast food. We know how hard they work, what a tough job they have, and that the pay they get is ludicrous.”
Jackson and Drayton were thrilled when President Obama signed an executive order in 2014 raising minimum salaries for workers under federal contract. As leaders in the fight, they were invited to the White House. “I went to Washington, DC, when the president signed the order giving federal workers $10.10 an hour,” Jackson says. “It was an incredible feeling, standing with the president. Something I can tell my grandkids.”
This wasn’t a big raise, Drayton says, but a humanizing act. “It felt so encouraging to see Obama’s response to workers’ organizing. We in security play a key role in keeping the city and the airports safe. We should be recognized for that. We should be treated with respect.”
Drayton gets emotional as he speaks. “The subcontractors, my bosses, treat us like garbage. It’s wrong. You have to respect the work financially, but also change the way you treat people. Sure, we need a benefits package. We need safety precautions. But we also have to let them know that we’re not garbage.” He pauses, angry, collects himself. “We’re human beings. We are the backbone of airport operations. We do our jobs well.”6
After two years of organizing, the victory was sweet. Jackson and Drayton were elected to the New York/New Jersey Airport Workers Bargaining Committee for SEIU Local 32BJ. One newly unionized JFK worker echoed Drayton’s sentiments. “It’s all about respect,” she said as she did a victory lap around the airport.
Since 2016, workers have struck at Dulles and Reagan in Washington, DC, as well as airports in Philadelphia and Denver. And Airport Workers United, a new national labor organization, has reached out to airport unions internationally. “The airline industry is global,” organizers said. “So are we.” Because, they insist, “Poverty Wages Don’t Fly.”7
Though $15 an hour is hardly a princely sum, it adds up. Between 2012 and 2016, living-wage activism earned $61.5 billion in raises for 19 million workers, twelve times what Congress gave workers when it last raised the federal minimum wage in 2007; 11.8 million workers in twenty-five states, cities, and counties won raises in 2016. On January 1, 2017, twenty-one states, twenty-two cities, four counties, and one region increased wages. After decades of stagnation, wages for the bottom 40 percent of American workers were finally starting to rise. That is a real victory.8
Workers know this is just a first step, says Laphonza Butler, president of California’s hospital and home-healthcare workers’ union and co-chair of the Los Angeles living-wage coalition. “Fifteen dollars an hour is only $31,000 a year. Nobody’s going to Vegas on $31,000 a year. It’s just enough to get by, to get the basics, but we think it is an incredible accomplishment.”9
Even small economic victories pay big psychological dividends, she says. “When you’re in communities that have been economically strangled, you see people who are broken, people who are so distracted by their everyday struggles that they are hopeless. We felt the living-wage campaign could be a ray of hope, something that could unite people around winning something for themselves, for their families. No one else did it for them.”
Pausing to savor victories is essential for activists facing a long, uphill battle. The US political landscape changed dramatically after 2008. Democrats controlled most of the country’s governors’ mansions and state legislatures when Barack Obama became president. Most were relatively union-friendly. By 2017, anti-union GOP politicians controlled thirty-three statehouses and had majorities in thirty-two state legislatures. Freshly empowered, they began a fierce war on labor. Their primary weapons: “right-to-work” bills limiting workers’ ability to form unions, and state “preemption” bills that nullified local living-wage and paid-time-off ordinances.
Right-to-work bills were first introduced amid the anti-Communist fervor of the 1950s and 1960s. For decades, they remained limited to the South and a few Rocky Mountain states. Where they became law, union membership plunged, poverty rates rose, gaps between men and women grew. In the 2010s, “right-to-work” returned with a vengeance, courtesy of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a consortium of business leaders and conservative politicians that, by 2011, included one-quarter of the country’s state legislators and eighty-five members of Congress. Their goal was to roll back the tide of wage increases and strip local governments of the right to lift wage floors or guarantee paid time off. ALEC generated model right-to-work and preemption bills. Between 2011 and 2016, they were introduced into state legislatures a thousand times.10
By 2017, twenty-five states had passed preemption laws. And right-to-work bills passed in states that had long been union bastions: Michigan, home of the United Auto Workers; Wisconsin, birthplace of public sector unions; and West Virginia, stronghold of the United Mine Workers. In January 2017, the US Congress introduced the first nationwide right-to-work bill. Trade unionists called the bill a possible “extinction-level event for American labor.”11
Then winds seemed to shift ever so slightly. The national bill stalled, and in February 2017, a GOP-controlled New Hampshire legislature killed a state right-to-work bill, citing fierce labor protest. Perhaps public opinion on worker organizing was shifting. If so, at least some credit was due those who continued to wage intense local battles. Leading the way, changing hearts and minds, were some of the country’s poorest and hungriest workers.12