AS SPRING CAME TO Rhode Island in 2014, Dominican hotel housekeeper Santa Brito and fellow hotel workers Ylleny Ferraris, Mirjaam Parada, and Mariano Cruz were gathering signatures for a Providence $15 wage initiative. “We had to divide up,” says state representative Shelby Maldonado. “We asked: Who speaks the best Spanish? The best Creole?” Maldonado, a child of Guatemalan immigrants and a former UNITE HERE organizer, says that Rhode Island’s immigrant workforce viscerally understood the issues at stake.
They delivered their petitions. The city council put their living-wage initiative on the November ballot. When they convened a public hearing, a hundred hotel workers came to watch. Twenty-two registered to testify. They took time off, found babysitters, and wrote their testimonies. Then, at the last minute, the hearing was canceled.1
Brito was angry. She believed city officials had been pressured by the Procaccianti Group, a hotel management and construction company that donates heavily to Rhode Island political campaigns. “The Procacciantis,” she said, made her clean eighteen rooms daily, made her work till the day she gave birth. Then “the hotel told me they couldn’t guarantee me a job. I was fired for speaking out. I know it.” She shakes her head, disgusted. “I used to be afraid, but I’ve lost my fear. What else can they do to me?”2
“I have the power, the will, and the strength to fight and take a stand,” she says. “I have a right to create a union in my workplace and fight to correct grievances. It’s very important to be united at work, to be able to confront the injustices we face.”
Her fellow organizer Mariano Cruz was also fired. He suffered a heart attack at thirty-five that he feels was caused by overwork and stress. Since it was illegal for his employer to fire him for organizing, he says, they invented reasons, told stories about him. Police served him a restraining order while he was lying in a hospital bed, legally forbidding him to speak with workers at his old workplace—the Renaissance.
What really irked his managers, Cruz thought, was his research into strange rashes on hotel housekeepers’ limbs. Workers believed it was from exposure to toxic cleansers. There was “an epidemic of women’s bodies just giving out with permanent injuries,” he says.3
It seemed for a while that the workers were winning, that the $15 wage would become law in Providence, that worker safety issues would finally be addressed. Then state legislators introduced a preemption bill, banning local governments from enacting a wage higher than the Rhode Island minimum, which was only $8 an hour. Brito was outraged. “I have to borrow money from my brothers and cousins just to pay off my bills,” she said.
The Rhode Island legislature was majority Democratic, but hotel and restaurant owners lobbied hard. They paid $100,000 to lobbyists to push the bill. “House leadership is moving to jail us in poverty,” said Brito.
Brito and Ferraris announced a life-or-death fight for Rhode Island’s working families. Seventy-three percent of jobs in the state paid too little to live on. The state’s workforce—Dominican, Guatemalan, South American, Haitian, and Cape Verdean immigrants—lived in poverty, says Maldonado, unable to feed their children decently. So Brito and Ferraris, hotel chef Mirjaam Parada, and Maldonado decided to stage a huelga de hambre—a hunger strike. Setting up camp on the steps of the state capitol, the women told reporters they were giving up food so that the state’s children might have enough to eat.
“I want to be able to buy more food for my children,” Ferraris said. Maldonado saw the strike as educational. “We had hotel workers out door-knocking. They educated other hotel workers.” And they “schooled” politicians, “who ended up being supportive because they found they had so many constituents living in poverty.”
For UNITE HERE organizer and former housekeeper Heather Nichols, the hunger strike made the invisible visible. “If legislators were going to vote for a bill taking away workers’ right to a living wage, we wanted them to walk past Santa and her child sitting there hungry on the State House steps before they voted.” Photographs of the four women, and of Brito’s young son, circulated widely. It wasn’t enough. A majority voted for preemption.4
That was a wake-up call, Maldonado says. Rhode Island living-wage activists began running for state and local office. Maldonado became the first Guatemalan-American state legislator in Rhode Island. Nellie Gorbea became secretary of state, the first Latina to win statewide office in New England. Across Rhode Island, Latinx activists won elections, promising to attend to the needs of workers and immigrants. The difference was quickly obvious. The first successful bill sponsored by Maldonado was a ban on pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. She thought of Brito, and of her own mom, when the bill passed.
“This has to be a path for the new labor movement,” the energetic young legislator says. “It gives us a voice that we must have.” Maldonado became co-chair of the state black and Latino caucus. In 2017, she sponsored successful legislation forbidding Rhode Island state police from assisting federal ICE agents seeking to arrest undocumented immigrant workers.5
Brito continued Cruz’s investigation of hotel workers’ injury rates. In 2015, they released a study called Providence’s Pain Problem, showing that housekeepers in hotels run by the Procaccianti Group had injury rates from 69 to 85 percent higher than the national hotel average. More than three-quarters worked in pain and had to take pain medication to perform their jobs. Brito testified: “I have difficulty using my arms and suffer from nearly constant pain in my neck, arms and hands.” Ninety-five percent of workers she surveyed worried that they would never be free of pain again.6
Brito helped organize “End Our Pain, No Más Dolor” rallies that drew hotel workers from across the region. Housekeepers showed up at city council hearings when the Procaccianti Group sought permits to construct new buildings. In October 2015, when workers at the Renaissance voted to unionize, Brito felt victorious. She still struggles with pain, but life is now getting better, she says. Union housekeepers clean fewer rooms and have more time to finish their work, so they no longer feel like cleaning machines. Union organizing has also made Brito feel more human, she says. She enjoys speaking at rallies, bargaining, helping other workers give their children a brighter future.
By 2017, with Rhode Island’s minimum still only $9.60 an hour, service workers seeking raises began reaching out to sympathetic business owners. Jeremiah Tolbert, owner of Jerry’s Beauty Salon in Providence, became a spokesperson. He upped his workers’ wages to $15, then invited the press to explain why. When small businesses pay more, local workers have money in their pockets to spend. For Tolbert, raising wages has been “a win-win.” He has urged other local businesses to follow suit.7
Mirjaam Parada agrees that organizing on many fronts at once is the only way forward. She does face-to-face work for UNITE HERE and uses social media to talk with worker-activists around the world, sharing news, debating strategy. Parada says she’s also writing an annotated English-Spanish translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. “Workers still need it,” she argues. “Communist dictators and capitalist politicians have so distorted and misrepresented Marx. But I think his interpretation of history is correct and I want to explain Marx so that workers can understand.”8
Nine months later and three thousand miles away, another group of hunger strikers from Walmart battled for a living wage. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti had long insisted that he would only support raising the city wage to $13.25, says Denise Barlage. In April 2015, she and seven other women workers sat down outside LA City Hall. They sat there for two weeks, consuming only tea and water. Though temperatures hovered in the 60s, Barlage felt cold by the sixth day without food. Her blood pressure was low. She donned a hat and gloves to keep it from falling further.
“We were ready to be arrested,” she recalls. “We were going to handcuff ourselves to the building.” Then they saw the mayor walking toward them. They held up their sign: “Women Fast for $15.” The mayor stopped. He looked at them, leaned down. “Then he told us he was on board with 15,” Barlage remembers. Weak from days of fasting, some of the women began to cry.9
Before breaking their fast, the hunger strikers testified before the city council at a minimum wage hearing. The strikers were mothers and grandmothers who worked two or three jobs to survive, Barlage says, but still had to choose “whether to feed their children or themselves. That’s just wrong.” The women spoke of their fears of eviction and homelessness. They told of kids who didn’t have decent clothes for school or bus fare to get there.
“I am Mary Carmen Farfan, mother of four. I work at Burger King,” one woman began. “I decided to make a fast for my kids, for my family, for my coworkers. These are single mothers. We have struggled to pay rent, to feed our kids. . . . I can’t . . . because I have only $9 for a minimum wage.” No one can afford to live in LA on less than $15 an hour, Mary said. She also told city officials how she shared a home with nineteen people from three families who earned between $9 and $13 an hour. By hearing’s end, LA’s City Council had voted for the $15 wage, says Barlage. “What that felt like, I can’t describe.”10
Barlage is one among many living-wage activists for whom hunger strikes have become a way of life, a potent weapon because it crystallizes the moral bottom line of this struggle. “So many workers today are used to being hungry,” Barlage says. “Hunger doesn’t scare us. It only scares people who aren’t used to it.”
Seven months after their successful fast in LA, Walmart workers fasted for ten days on Manhattan’s most famously wealthy boulevard, Park Avenue. They chose the Thanksgiving holiday—a ritualized celebration of American overindulgence—to highlight hunger among Walmart workers. Barlage came. So did workers from Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, and Maryland, their neon-green OUR Walmart shirts glowing in the gray November chill as they sat outside Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s penthouse. Walton sits on a personal fortune north of $33 billion, and her apartment was rumored to have cost $25 million.
Sacramento activist Tyfani Faulkner says she came because “people don’t realize that many Walmart workers are starving.” She says it galls her that her colleagues are hungry. “You’re working at this huge grocery store and workers are living off ramen noodles and chips because they can’t afford to eat better. I thought fasting was a great way to show that and to be in solidarity with those who aren’t eating, not because they don’t want to but because they don’t earn enough to eat well.”11
“We didn’t see Alice Walton the whole week,” she says. The doorman told Barlage that Walton had groceries delivered rather than walk past the hunger strikers. “He told us she was up there drinking Scotch and smoking cigarettes, rather than talk to us.” Meanwhile, the protesters lived on donated broth and tea. “I stayed and fasted for ten days,” Barlage says, “because I didn’t have a job to go back to. Walmart had closed our store. They said it was plumbing problems but it was because we were too loud and strong.”
The Park Avenue hunger strike was part of a nationwide “Fast for $15.” A thousand people across the US forswore food for two weeks leading up to the shopping frenzy that is Black Friday. Some fasted in front of the Carmel, California, mansion of Walmart chairman Greg Penner. Bleu Rainer fasted in front of a Tampa Walmart. Fasting workers could be seen outside many Walmart stores. Finding a thousand people to fast might have been hard except that hunger is a condition that low-wage workers know too well. “I have had to rely on food stamps to get a good meal,” Rainer says. “And when those food stamps run out, it’s back to square one, which is nothing at all.”12
Millions of workers are hungry in today’s world. In Asia, labor activists say they know garment workers who consume just 150 calories daily. That’s why some Cambodian and Bangladeshi union leaders have redefined the idea of a living wage to mean pay sufficient to purchase 2,500 calories of food daily for a worker and two children. That is the minimum required to sustain life.
Hunger is also widespread in the US. In 2016, more than sixty million Americans qualified for food aid. That’s nearly 20 percent of citizens in the richest country in the history of the world. Forty-five million Americans that year received assistance through SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), the federal program that used to be called Food Stamps. (Most people who receive it still do call it that.)
But in some US counties, as many as two-thirds of hungry citizens do not receive aid. Toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and at the beginning of Barack Obama’s, expansions in federal food aid cut the numbers of hungry Americans significantly. But then, Congress and state legislatures slashed budgets and tightened eligibility. And the number of hungry Americans rose again. Many of the hungriest are children.13
Hunger is endemic in places you’d least expect, in affluent states like New York and California, and even more so in the nation’s most expensive cities and suburbs. Forty-two percent of students in the University of California system did not have enough to eat in 2016. Forty-five percent of UC employees said they were frequently hungry. Twenty-five percent ate substandard food because they could not afford better. Seventy percent skipped meals to save money.
And these are the winners: students and employees at one of the world’s great university systems. Fifty-eight percent of surveyed employees held bachelor’s degrees or higher. Ninety-six percent worked full-time and were the primary earners for their families. Clearly, they represent just the tip of the iceberg of hunger in America.14
“The thing that so many Americans just don’t seem to get,” says Barlage, “is that Walmart workers and McDonald’s workers and so many other working people in this country are really, actually hungry all the time.” OUR Walmart activists ask workers who bring lunch to “pool what we have so everyone can get a little—chips, some sandwich. Otherwise a lot of people won’t have anything to eat. We take Walmart’s line about how we’re all family seriously—even if they don’t.” Pooling food has become part of what the movement does. “That’s why we do hunger strikes. Two weeks without food. I might feel a little cold. My blood pressure might drop a little. But I can do it. Hunger doesn’t scare me.”15
The practice of fasting to protest injustice is very old. Hunger strikes appear in pre-Christian Irish and ancient Hindu texts. In both traditions, hunger strikers often fasted outside the door of the person they felt had cheated them. If the hunger strikers died before winning their due, the person at whose door the fast took place was dishonored before the community. Walmart workers’ fasts at the homes of Walton family members and CEOs fit that ancient frame.
Women used hunger strikes in early twentieth-century Britain and the United States to demand the right to vote. Mahatma Gandhi completed seventeen fasts during the Indian independence struggle. Irish Republican Army activists launched prison fasts in the 1970s and early 1980s. (IRA leader Bobby Sands starved himself to death in 1981.) Since 2000, detainees at Guantanamo have gone on hunger strikes to protest violations of their human rights, as have Palestinian prisoners in Israel and women detainees at immigration prisons in Arizona and Texas.16
Maria Elena Durazo and UNITE HERE have long mounted hunger strikes. Partly, they were an homage to United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, who staged a month-long hunger strike in 1968 to draw attention to violence against farmworkers. Durazo says she and other UNITE HERE and SEIU leaders learned their craft in the UFW. “They knew how to build a movement,” she insists.
Hunger strikes garner sympathy. Civil disobedience draws media coverage. Durazo has strategically used both. In 1994, she led hotel workers blocking traffic in downtown Los Angeles to protest the opening of nonunion hotels. In 1999, she joined baggage handlers as they blocked access to Los Angeles International airport to demand union recognition. That same year, she fasted for eleven days to support cafeteria workers and janitors at the University of Southern California who were trying to keep their jobs as the university brought in more temporary nonunion workers.17
Since 2010, hunger strikes have grown increasingly common. After a two-year battle to prevent Disney from cutting healthcare benefits, eight Disneyland workers fasted for a week in 2010 outside “the cathedral of happy.” Standing where frolickers in the Never Land swimming pool could hear, fasting workers told reporters: “If they could whip us like in the old days they would.” It took two more years, and they didn’t win all they hoped for, but they did get a new contract and preserved benefits. Hunger strikes are, as they always have been, a desperate act.18
In the spring of 2012, workers at the Station Casinos in Las Vegas struck the city’s third-largest employer, an anti-union boss in a resolutely union town. Hunger striker Norma Flores knew that union workers made 30 percent more than she did and paid nothing for health insurance. By contrast, Station employees paid $55 per week. This was a lot for Flores, a single mother of six. Station managers also threatened activist workers, she said. Flores knew she had a legal right to organize and she was determined that managers not stop her from exercising it.
So, she and sixteen colleagues went on hunger strike. They pitched tents outside the Palace Station, where they sat in 100-degree desert heat. For a week, they consumed only water as they explained to passing tourists why they were fasting.
The press described the protesters as a cross between Occupy Wall Street, Cesar Chavez, and Mahatma Gandhi. Casino managers called the hunger strikers union terrorists. Not until March 2017, after numerous protests and an NLRB suit, did the Station Casinos agree to let their workers unionize. In March 2017, Norma Flores signed her first union contract.19
One month later, amid festivities for accepted students, Yale University graduate research and teaching assistants began a hunger strike in front of the office of university president Peter Salovey. They joined thousands of graduate students and adjunct professors across the US who were no longer willing to provide free (and underpaid) labor to wealthy colleges and universities. In 2016, their lawsuits and activism had won an NLRB ruling that students are also workers and have a legal right to unionize.
Graduate teachers in eight Yale departments voted to form a union. They wanted medical and dental coverage, child care stipends, spousal insurance, and an end to sexual harassment.
On April 5, 2017, they delivered a petition signed by twelve thousand faculty, students, New Haven residents, and elected officials calling on the university to negotiate. Messages of support came in from New Haven’s mayor, both of Connecticut’s US senators, numerous state representatives, and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Yale appealed the NLRB decision, bargaining that board members appointed by Trump would reverse the ruling.20
Comparative literature student Julia Powers refused to budge. “As contingent and replaceable workers . . . we’re very vulnerable,” she said. She was fasting to show that this was a communal struggle. They were standing for graduate student workers everywhere.
Union co-chair Aaron Greenberg said the fasters saw themselves as part of an honorable tradition of hunger strikes for worker justice. Yale dean Amy Hungerford replied in a Chronicle of Higher Education essay that these students were too privileged to rightfully compare themselves to Chavez or Gandhi. Ignoring the vast power imbalance between students and the university, Hungerford insisted that “what is starved in this fast is the commitment to principled disagreement.”21
Yale was not alone. Across the country universities had begun spending vast sums on law firms that specialized in breaking campus unions. Yale’s students were leading an important struggle, said UFW cofounder and many-time hunger striker Dolores Huerta. Her protégée, Maria Elena Durazo, wrote to the students: “Those in power always want the rest of us to wait. Your brave actions speak louder than all of Yale’s noise.”22
Yale reacted defensively. Prospective students and their parents received a letter from Yale in the spring of 2017 explaining away the hunger strike. Graduate assistants had no reason to protest, the letter soothed. They were treated very well.
Fasting student Julia Powers disagreed. “We’re really at the origin of something new,” she said, “a new possibility, not just for resistance but for actually building something.” From Providence to Los Angeles, Las Vegas to New Haven, vulnerable workers are reclaiming a millennia-old weapon for justice. And in the process they are staking out the moral high ground and holding their own in dramatically unequal fights.