We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now Read online

  “We are all fast-food workers now.”

  —KEEGAN SHEPARD,

  graduate student and Fight for $15 activist, 2015

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART I POVERTY WAGES, WE’RE NOT LOVIN’ IT: ROOTS AND BRANCHES OF A GLOBAL UPRISING

  PROLOGUE Brands of Wage Slavery, Marks of Labor Solidarity

  CHAPTER 1 Inequality Rising

  CHAPTER 2 All We’re Asking for Is a Little Respect

  CHAPTER 3 “We Are Workers, Not Slaves”

  CHAPTER 4 “I Consider the Union My Second Mother”

  CHAPTER 5 Hotel Housekeepers Go Norma Rae

  CHAPTER 6 United for Respect: OUR Walmart and the Uprising of Retail Workers

  CHAPTER 7 Supersize My Wages: Fast-Food Workers and the March of History

  CHAPTER 8 1911–2011: History and the Global Labor Struggle

  CHAPTER 9 People Power Movements in the Twenty-First Century

  CHAPTER 10 “You Can’t Dismantle Capitalism Without Dismantling Patriarchy”

  CHAPTER 11 This Is What Solidarity Feels Like

  PART II THE RISING OF THE GLOBAL PRECARIAT

  CHAPTER 12 Respect, Let It Go, ‘Cause Baby, You’re a Firework

  CHAPTER 13 Realizing Precarity: “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”

  CHAPTER 14 Days of Disruption, 2016

  CHAPTER 15 The New Civil Rights Movement

  CHAPTER 16 Counting Victories, Girding for an Uphill Struggle

  CHAPTER 17 Huelga de Hambre: Hunger and Hunger Strikes Rising

  CHAPTER 18 Social Movement Unionism and the Souls of Workers

  CHAPTER 19 “Contractualization”

  CHAPTER 20 “Stand Up, Live Better”: Organizing for Respect at Walmart

  PART III GARMENT WORKERS’ ORGANIZING IN THE AGE OF FAST FASHION

  CHAPTER 21 “If People Would Think About Us, We Wouldn’t Die”: Beautiful Clothes, Ugly Reality

  CHAPTER 22 How the Rag Trade Went Global

  CHAPTER 23 “The Girl Effect”

  CHAPTER 24 “Made with Love in Bangladesh”

  CHAPTER 25 “We Are Not a Pocket Revolution”: Bangladeshi Garment Workers Since Rana Plaza

  CHAPTER 26 “A Khmer Would Rather Work for Free Than Work Without Dignity”

  CHAPTER 27 “After Pol Pot, We Need a Good Life”

  CHAPTER 28 Consciousness-Raising, Cambodia Style

  CHAPTER 29 Filipina Garment Workers: Organizing in the Zone

  PART IV NO RICE WITHOUT FREEDOM, NO FREEDOM WITHOUT RICE: THE GLOBAL UPRISING OF PEASANTS AND FARMWORKERS

  CHAPTER 30 “No Land No Life”: Uprisings of the “Landless,” 2017

  CHAPTER 31 “Agrarian Reform in Reverse”: Food Crises, Land Grabs, and Migrant Labor

  CHAPTER 32 Milk with Dignity

  CHAPTER 33 “Like the Time of Cesar Chavez”: Strawberry Fields, Exploitation Forever

  CHAPTER 34 Bitter Grapes

  CHAPTER 35 “What Are We Rising For?”

  CHAPTER 36 “These Borders Are Not Our Borders”

  CHAPTER 37 After the Colonizers, RICE

  PART V “THEY SAID IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE”: LOCAL VICTORIES AND TRANSFORMATIVE VISIONS

  CHAPTER 38 “We Can Turn Around the Labor Movement. We Can Rebuild Power and We Can Win!”

  CHAPTER 39 Flashes of Hope

  CHAPTER 40 Big Ideas, New Models, Small Courtesies Build a New World

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  PHOTOS

  INDEX

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK IS A DEPARTURE FOR ME. It is the work of an Americanist thinking globally, a historian reflecting on the present and recent past. It is not a conventional work of scholarship, though it is based on abundant research: 140 interviews; government documents; foundation reports; news coverage; organizational websites and records; insights from scholars of labor, globalization, transnational capitalism, and agribusiness. I make no pretense of objectivity. This is an uneasy hybrid: data, storytelling and analysis, politics, polemics and poetry. And it is a history of sorts, I have come to realize—an urgent history of now.

  I began this work because I felt called on in a time of globalization, as an ever-spreading flood of capital transforms our world, to better understand how low-wage workers are starting to resist, to think and act globally as well as locally. Since that time, I have spoken to many workers about what moved them to rise against poverty wages. These conversations transformed what I see, think, and feel every time I buy a shirt or a flat of berries, shop at a big-box store, check out of a hotel, or drink clean water from my kitchen faucet.

  Researching this book was revelatory. I traveled across the United States and to parts of the world I had never before visited. I drove, flew, walked, rode in open-air tuk-tuks and on the backs of motorcycles. With photographer Elizabeth Cooke, I conducted interviews in windowless worker dormitories, union offices, and on the streets, at protest marches, in city council hearing rooms, in brightly lit restaurants and shaded back rooms, in elegantly shabby colonial hotels, at factory gates, by phone and via Skype.

  I interviewed in English, my native tongue, and with interpreters, in Spanish, Khmer, Tagalog, Visayan languages, Bangla, Mixtec, and Zapotec. Oxnard translator Yessica Ramirez navigated the distinct dialects spoken by indigenous Oaxacans. In Manila, Joanna Bernice Coronacion deftly switched back and forth between Tagalog and English, and Jamaia Montenegro translated from the Visayan languages spoken in the southern Philippines.

  And then there was Vathanak Serry Sim, who works for Solidarity Center in Phnom Penh. Vathanak translated from the Khmer language but also revealed Phnom Penh as an incredible text—beautiful, ugly, inspiring, devastating, punctuated by traffic circles and imposing government buildings, colorful Buddhist temple complexes and labyrinthine alleyways. He seemed to know every trade unionist in the country, along with the nuances of their politics, battles, and backstories. As a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge death camps, Vathanak also bridged the profound chasm that divides Cambodians who lived through the genocide from the young millions who were born afterward. Again and again, Vathanak tried to explain, as best he could, much that is impossible to understand.

  I learned also from those who did a different kind of translation, opening to me worker cultures of resistance and struggle: Tampa organizers Kelly Benjamin and Bleu Rainer introduced me to Fight for $15 activists; Tg Albert and Heather Nichols to Southern California Walmart activists and Providence hotel workers; Donna Foster and Arcenio Lopez to the Mixteco farmworkers of Oxnard; and Rutgers graduate student Nafisa Tanjeem to the garment worker–activists of Bangladesh. It was an enduring gift to spend time with Kalpona Akter—as she passionately, patiently, humorously, and angrily reflected on the long and ongoing struggle of the women and men who make clothing for the world.

  There were moments in the process of researching and writing this book when I felt a gnawing sense of worry as I wondered how I would tie together and make sense of all that I was seeing and hearing. I paused for a deep breath. But for the most part, I didn’t panic. Because deep inside me, I felt certain that the people I was meeting, the kaleidoscopic fragments of stories and experiences they shared, were part of one larger story.

  What I saw in New York City and Los Angeles, Manila and Phnom Penh, were ravages of neoliberalism—the brand of global capitalism that has swept our world since the late twentieth century. And the forms of resistance I encountered were, similarly, part of a larger struggle. Though rooted in and motivated by local politics and history, the activists I spoke with were all engaged in fighting the same things: poverty wages, the disappearance of public services (education, healthcare, water), the transformation of workers into independent contractors (and with that a loss of seniority, benefits, pensions), disrespect, sexual harassment and violence, mass evictions and disregard of people’s land rights. What follows are some stories of their resistance—their struggles, their losses, their victories, their visions for the future.

  When I began this book Donald Trump had not yet been elected president of the United States. As the book goes to press, the US and many parts of the world are just coming out of a period of shock and mourning that followed the election. Listening to the activists whose words animate this book has been healing for me, inspiring.

  US activists, especially African American and Latinx workers, reminded me that their battles had begun long before Trump, and that they planned to keep on struggling as they had for centuries. Outside the US, activists facing crackdowns by the murderous Duterte regime in the Philippines, as well as the brutal regimes of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh and Hun Sen in Cambodia, put our inward-looking American grief in perspective. The world is both bigger and smaller than I ever knew before I began work on this book. And though the forces arrayed against low-wage workers are powerful, and often violent, the spirit, creativity, courage, and stamina of this global uprising are seemingly endless. With all that I have learned as I researched this book, I am left with feelings of hope and possibility. I hope you will be too.

  This book is arranged in four parts. The first is a broad view, a sweep, an attempt to frame how our world has changed and to sketch the roots and spreading branches of global rebellion. The second traces the rising of the global precariat. The third examines garment organizing in the age of fast fashion. And in the fourth section, I trace local and global activism by farmers and farmworkers. I try to cast some sparks o
f light by sketching small successes that can be seen as models. Finally, I reflect on some quite ambitious visions for a more humane future in which a system based on poverty wages gives way to a living wage and dignified work for everyone.

  PART I

  POVERTY WAGES, WE’RE NOT LOVIN’ IT

  Roots and Branches of a Global Uprising

  PROLOGUE

  BRANDS OF WAGE SLAVERY, MARKS OF LABOR SOLIDARITY

  IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, a fifty-eight-year-old Oaxacan immigrant shows her knees—scarred and swollen from years of picking strawberries. In Vermont, a twenty-four-year-old dairy worker from Chiapas rolls his pants up, revealing knees bruised and painful from long nights of milking and mucking out stalls. Thai berry workers in Scandinavia and women grape pickers in South Africa rub the ache from their limbs every night. In Boston and London, Manila and the Maldives, hotel housekeepers struggle to stand after scrubbing twenty bathrooms on their knees. Their scarred limbs are a bane and a bond.

  In Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, India, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, garment workers have taken to the streets. They are sick from breathing toxic fumes and tired of factory owners who flee to other countries owing workers months of back pay. Hundreds of thousands have joined these protests.

  Many of the Cambodian protesters bear a diagonal white scar on their foreheads. Some were beaten by angry foremen who thought they were working too slowly; others had their skulls smashed by rocks—punishment for organizing. Undeterred, these workers—mostly women—rally before imposing government buildings, face off against steely guards, unflinchingly demand their rights. The jagged indentations on their foreheads are combat ribbons, marks of struggle, badges of quiet courage.1

  On a hot August day at a conference in Brazil, three young men in their twenties roll their sleeves up. Their arms are scored by burns that have blistered, then healed, leaving darkened scars, symmetrical stripes. They are fast-food workers—from Tampa, Tokyo, and Manila. And each has been branded by the labor they do for McDonald’s. Expected to turn around orders in ninety seconds, they do a dance all day over boiling oil and searing grills. The men have come to Brazil to speak with politicians and with workers from other countries, to share stories, strategize, compare scars. As they speak, each feels a sense of purpose and shared struggle. A new global labor movement is awakening.

  CHAPTER 1

  INEQUALITY RISING

  SOMETIME AROUND 2011, people began talking again about poverty and inequality. A sense of urgency seeped into our collective consciousness with smoke from the campfires of Occupy Wall Street. As Occupy encampments arose in financial districts from New York to Hong Kong, people who had been made homeless by medical bills, student debt, or predatory mortgages began to tell their stories.

  They spoke with a ragged eloquence that sometimes even broke through the cynicism of jaded reporters. Or maybe their tales resonated because most of us already understood. Almost everyone, everywhere, was being screwed—one way or another—by the twenty-first-century economy and by the widespread belief that increasing shareholder value is more important than any other collective human endeavor.

  Scholarly tomes on the subject became surprisingly popular. Economists probed the sources of unequal wealth distribution. Historians and geographers argued that galloping capitalism had become the “new imperialism,” that Exxon, Walmart, and McDonald’s were the global empires of our age. Then Occupy changed the conversation forever, burning a simple indelible image into our collective psyches. There were always haves and have-nots. But the idea of a 1 percent and a 99 percent endured long after the ragtag Occupy camps were broken up by militarized police. The notion that 1 percent of the world’s people dominated and exploited the rest of us was a call for broad coalition-building to which people have responded around the world.1

  There have been true believers in the power and glory of capitalism for hundreds of years. But by the mid-twentieth century, most people agreed that some regulation was necessary, that governments must protect people as well as property. Even in that heyday of liberalism there were those who argued that any regulation of trade and commerce, any government programs to diminish economic inequality, constrained and weakened individual freedoms. Ronald Reagan popularized that view in his critical 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” a clarion call to cut “big government.” But that argument did not become dominant until the 1980s, with the elections of Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in China. The new era they heralded did more than limit progressive taxation and shred the social safety net. The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 institutionalized the “neoliberal” vision that profit-taking was a virtue in and of itself. Over the next two decades almost all the world’s countries joined the WTO. But it always was—and still is—run by and for the wealthiest and most powerful nations.2

  The global economy that neoliberals celebrated did not emerge overnight. But by the twenty-first century, the idea that unrestrained global capitalism is the best way to reduce poverty and expand freedom had become dogma for political and economic elites worldwide. Still, they only espoused certain kinds of freedom: from trade barriers and labor regulations; from robust taxes to redistribute wealth and fund education, infrastructure, and healthcare; from environmental regulations that might limit profits as they slowed climate change and reduced poisons in our air and water. This new regime sparked fierce global protest, beginning with the Battle of Seattle in 1999 in which trade unionists, students, and environmental groups took to the streets to highlight the dangers posed by World Trade Organization tribunals and secret negotiations. This resistance moved world leaders to place some environmental and human rights limitations on the new global economy. But they were often weak and ineffectual, by design.

  In a twenty-first-century update of Andrew Carnegie’s nineteenth-century “Gospel of Wealth,” corporate titans espoused a gospel of global profit-taking. Politicians—many with ties to global corporations—signed on, passing tax cuts for the wealthy, slashing labor and environmental protections, Social Security, education and healthcare programs. Like Carnegie, they have argued that philanthropy obviates the need for rights. But from Donald Trump to the Walton family, the 1 percent has given selectively and stingily.3

  In many ways, Trump’s election as president of the United States in 2016 was a culminating moment in the rise of the twenty-first-century Gospel of Wealth. The oil-magnate Koch brothers had long worked to dismantle welfare-state provisions and worker protections. They continue to. Walmart had long used government food and cash aid programs to supplement poverty wages, while arguing that corporate employers should not have to pay into workers’ compensation programs for those injured on the job. Trump railed against global trade agreements on the campaign trail, promising to help American workers harmed by neoliberalism. But after his inauguration, he and a GOP-run Congress quickly moved to slash federal programs for the poor and the sick and to restructure US political and economic institutions to serve the wealthiest few (even more than they already did).

  In the twenty-first century, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and select transnational corporations have become more powerful than many, if not most, nation-states. Buying the debt of poor nations, they have pressured governments worldwide to cut or privatize essential services: water, transportation, education, healthcare, housing, social welfare, and energy. Indigenous lands have been mined and logged, rivers dammed. Wholesale land grabs by agribusiness and mining, energy, and timber companies have driven hundreds of millions from farms to urban slums, export-processing zones, and migrant worker camps.

  It all happened so fast, and in so many parts of the world at once, that it took time for people to grasp what was happening. Far-flung supply chains linking myriad subcontractors obscured the role that global brands played in gutting worker wages, safety protections, smallholders’ land rights, and environmental regulations. Many workers no longer knew who their employers were. Consumers did not know where and how their clothes were made, where their food was grown and harvested, and under what conditions. They enjoyed the low prices and chose not ask uncomfortable questions.