We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now Read online

  Why question low prices when almost everyone was feeling stretched? And that’s because they were. In 2016, British-based charity Oxfam reported that the poorer half of the world’s people had lost 38 percent of their wealth since 2010, while food, housing, and healthcare costs skyrocketed. In the same period, an ever-increasing share of wealth had flowed to the top 1 percent. By 2016, the 62 richest people on earth controlled more wealth than 3.8 billion people. Occupy Wall Street’s rallying cry no longer seemed hyperbolic. It had become cold, hard fact.4

  This was not simply a problem in developing nations. Wealth and income were more concentrated at the top in the US than in any other affluent nation. As deindustrialization, automation, and financial deregulation transformed the labor market, massive tax cuts for the wealthy deepened government deficits and provided a rationale for program cuts. The top marginal tax rate in the US during the prosperous 1950s and 1960s approached 90 percent. By the mid-1980s, it had fallen below 30 percent. Federal aid to cities and states dried up; public services were gutted. Private unions withered and public unions, already struggling, faced relentless legislative assaults.

  The Great Recession of 2008 made these inequalities worse, erasing savings for tens of millions. Spiraling healthcare and housing costs and predatory lending drove millions of Americans into bankruptcy. Many literally ended up in the streets.

  The recovery since that time has done little for the poor or middle class. Unemployment rates dropped below 5 percent in 2016, but two-thirds of the jobs created in the US since 2008 do not pay a living wage or provide benefits, job security, or potential for growth. By 2014, 71 percent of American workers earned less than $50,000 a year. More than half earned less than $30,000; 38 percent earned less than $20,000. The American middle class has evaporated.

  Unemployment is still an issue, but poverty wages are a greater problem—in the US and around the world. Growing numbers of impoverished workers (worldwide) mark a dramatic shift from the mid-twentieth-century high-water mark of liberalism with its generous government subsidies. Then incomes grew all along the wealth scale, unions and public services were strong, and public colleges were affordable for millions. The twenty-first century is starkly different, a new Gilded Age, in many ways more like the 1870s than the 1970s.5

  Since 2008, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have seen incomes increase by 31.4 percent while everyone else’s grew by less than half a percent. Six members of the Walton family control as much wealth as 40 percent of Americans. Half of fast-food workers, retail sales and nonunion manufacturing workers require food stamps or other aid programs to survive. And education is no longer a sure path out of poverty. In 2015, three-quarters of US college professors worked on term-to-term contracts. Between one-quarter and one-third needed some form of public aid—cash assistance, food, or medical services—to support themselves, especially if they had children.

  In expensive cities—New York, Los Angeles, Boston—three and four generations live together. They pool resources so that they can afford rent. Employed workers sleep on relatives’ couches. Some commute to work from homeless shelters.6

  Secure jobs are disappearing. Employees are reduced to “independent” contractors, as corporate managers relentlessly cut costs. College graduates stagger under crushing levels of debt, unable to purchase homes or even cars. Stagnant wages erode workers’ living standards. Wage theft runs rampant. Marx’s proletariat has grown scarce, replaced by an expanding global “precariat”—contingent, commodified labor to whom no one owes anything.

  Not surprisingly, many people are angered by the cruelties of the twenty-first-century economy. And their fury has fueled worldwide protest. Simultaneously, and almost everywhere, low-wage workers and small farmers began to revolt: in New York City restaurants, laundries, and warehouses, in Western Cape wineries and the garment shops of Phnom Penh, in Southern California Walmarts, and the big hotels of Providence, Oslo, Karachi, and Abuja. As capital has globalized, so has the labor movement. Marches, strikes, protests, and sit-ins from Tampa to Mali have changed the global conversation about workers’ rights.

  This book offers sketches of these uprisings. Whenever possible, I try to tell the story through workers’ eyes, using their words. If, by the end, you come to believe that we are all fast-food workers now, then you will realize that this is not a story about other people. It is our story, a history of our times.

  CHAPTER 2

  ALL WE’RE ASKING FOR IS A LITTLE RESPECT

  IN JULY 2015, Bleu Rainer, a twenty-six-year-old Tampa, Florida, McDonald’s worker, opened his mail and found an invitation to testify before the Brazilian Senate. “I was kind of shocked,” he laughs. McDonald’s workers in Brazil had filed charges of wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and violations of Brazil’s labor laws. This moved the Senate Human Rights Commission to convene an unprecedented hearing. Their goal was to determine if McDonald’s, with operations in more than a hundred countries, was driving down wages and eroding safety conditions worldwide. So they invited fast-food workers from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia to testify about Brazil’s and the world’s second-largest private employer.1

  Legislators from many nations were also invited to offer their views on whether McDonald’s adversely affected wages and labor conditions in their countries. McDonald’s was then being investigated by the European Parliament. European unions had accused the company of tax evasion, overcharging franchise owners, and illegally suppressing worker wages.2

  On August 16, 2015, Rainer and colleagues from the Philippines, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, and many other countries came to tell their stories. They were greeted by cheering crowds at the Brasília airport. “People from different unions and politicians from all over Brazil and all over the globe were coming to talk about how McDonald’s tries to keep us at the bottom,” Rainer recalls. “It was amazing. Because McDonald’s has employees everywhere, everything they do has a global impact that affects all workers.”

  Rainer’s life had been marked by starvation wages, uncertain scheduling, and boiling oil. “In eight years, I made no more than eight dollars and five cents an hour. I witnessed the torture of not having enough to afford rent, which led to me sleeping from house to house. I even had to sleep at bus stops because I was homeless. There have been nights that I had to go without food so I could buy a bus pass, so that I could get to work the next day. I have had to rely on food stamps to get a good meal and when those food stamps run out, it’s back to square one—which is nothing at all. Sometimes I think: I’m working so hard every day. Why am I not making a living wage? Why can’t I feed myself? Why am I still hungry?”

  Though Rainer had already joined the fight for a living wage, he experienced moments in Brazil that opened his eyes. “I met this really cool guy from Japan, another McDonald’s worker. He showed me his arm full of burns.” Rainer raised his arm and held it alongside. The men were burned in the same places. Stripes. Rainer knew how his colleague had been scarred. “They make you get orders out in ninety seconds,” he explains. “You’re constantly behind. So, you’re not thinking about safety. You’re worried that your manager is going to push you.”

  A chill passed through him when he saw the matching burns. The men had more in common than their injuries. “Me and him have the exact same story,” Rainer learned as they talked. “I didn’t know it would be that way.” Both men had enrolled in college but had to drop out. “He wasn’t earning enough to pay tuition and neither was I. It was my whole story except he was in Japan.” Rainer felt the pieces fall into place.

  When Benedict Murillo, from Manila, heard the men’s stories, he rolled up his sleeves and held out his arms. He had the same burns. He also had left college because he couldn’t pay tuition. Their skin colors, languages, backgrounds were different, Murillo says. Still the three were, in Murillo’s view, “McBrothers”—members of the new global working class. Later, when Murillo told the story in a union hall in Quezon City, fast-food workers pla
ced their arms on the table—fist-to-fist like spokes in a wheel. Identical lines of burns scored each arm.3

  At the hearing in Brasília, Rainer learned that some fast-food workers have it worse than he does. He heard testimony from a Seoul worker who delivered “Happy Meals” on a bicycle. “This dude had to cover his face when he testified because he was afraid of retaliation.” In South Korea, the government had been cracking down hard, Rainer learned: police clubs, water cannons, summary imprisonment, and torture. And brutal work conditions.

  “This dude told a story about one of his friends who got killed delivering meals. That guy had to deliver three or four meals every thirty minutes. That’s fast riding. And there’s a lot of hills there and lots of traffic.” Brazil’s Arcos Dorados (Golden Arches) bike deliverymen also testified. “They were going through the same thing,” says Rainer.

  Deliverymen from several countries exchanged stories. Some spoke through interpreters, others in rudimentary English. What angered Bleu was that “nobody takes responsibility for what fast-food workers go through. But someone is responsible: McDonald’s. Someone needs to take responsibility. We are starting to do that.”

  Rainer, Murillo, and other activists who came to Brasília in the summer of 2015 are part of a new global labor movement whose members connect using a mix of old-fashioned and new tactics: face-to-face organizing, cell phones, and social media. They adapt pop-culture references and embed them in local cultures and languages. Disney theme songs, Justin Timberlake jingles, even an electronic dance tune called “Barbra Streisand” are recast and repurposed.

  Their protests are not your grandmother’s revolution. Repeated one-day flash strikes have largely replaced months-long sieges that often hurt workers more than management. Activists still march, chant, go door-to-door. But they also use social media, perform street theater, and engage in pop-culture civil disobedience actions. They hold mock trials of Ronald McDonalds. Singing, dancing flash mobs invade fast-food restaurants and shopping malls, posting online about everything they do.

  Many twenty-first-century labor activists are under thirty-five and savvy about communications, social media, and popular culture. They take pleasure in subverting expensive advertising slogans, cracking the glossy shell of consumerism. McDonald’s paid pop star Justin Timberlake $6 million to sing “I’m Lovin’ It.” It was the burger giant’s first global television ad. Fast-food workers tweaked the slogan to: “Poverty Wages: Not Lovin’ It.” Anti-sweatshop activists turned Nike’s “Just Do It” into a boycott chant: “Just Don’t Do It.” Walmart’s “Save Money, Live Better” slogan became: “Stand Up, Live Better.” And when Walmart workers staged the first retail sit-in since the 1930s, their signs said: “Sit Down, Live Better.”

  Even more than a living wage, these movements are fighting for respect. In Manila, fast-food workers sing the 1967 Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin anthem as they block rush-hour traffic: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me.” I have heard that word from hotel workers in Providence, strawberry pickers in Oxnard, garment workers in Phnom Penh, airport workers in New York City. “You need to respect the job and the role we play,” says airport security guard Canute Drayton. “Bosses need to know that we are not garbage.”

  Around the world, low-wage workers are outlining a coherent vision of what a human-centered, post-neoliberal world might look like. What RESPECT means to them is this: a living wage; freedom of assembly, the right to unionize; job security, benefits; safe working conditions; an end to dispossessions, an end to deportations, and restraints on plunder of the earth for profit.

  Low-wage workers also speak in terms of freedom. But their idea of freedom is distinct from that of neoliberals, says Filipina fast-food organizer Joanna Bernice Coronacion. Freedom means a decent life for all workers, clean, free water, free time to spend with families, freedom from sexual harassment and violence, wage equity for women and men, an end to labor slavery.

  Denise Barlage, a longtime activist in Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) says: “We’re not asking to be rich. We are asking for respect, dignity, decent benefits, to be treated like human beings.” In so many ways, that sums up the spirit and ethos of the new global uprising against poverty wages.4

  Researching this book, I have met and spoken with remarkable activists from New York City to Tampa, from Los Angeles to Dhaka, Manila, and Phnom Penh, from Geneva to Brasília. Some are union officials with political clout, big budgets, and armies of members behind them. Others are on-the-ground organizers who work seven-day weeks and eighteen-hour days, for little pay, dedicated to the cause, lit by the promise of change. Most moving and profound have been my conversations with the people who make our clothing, serve our food, care for our elderly and sick, clean our hotel rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, plant and pick our food.

  These workers are the human beings behind the big abstract concepts associated with the twenty-first-century economy: globalization; free trade treaties; World Bank loans; austerity regimes; multinational capital and contingent labor. Meeting them, listening to their stories, has revealed those economic and political forces in fresh ways, from the bones out. It is my hope that they will do the same for those who read this book.

  CHAPTER 3

  “WE ARE WORKERS, NOT SLAVES”

  IN MARCH 2015, tens of thousands of indigenous berry pickers walked out of the vast agribusiness fields of the San Quintín Valley in northern Mexico, launching the largest agricultural strike Mexico had seen in decades. Strikers carried signs that explain much about the world in which twenty-first-century workers operate. “Somos Trabajadores, No Esclavos. We Are Workers, Not Slaves.” When police cracked down violently, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada ran a cartoon of police beating strikers. “Haven’t thirty years of neoliberalism taught you anything?” the caption asked. The answer, in short, is: Yes. A lot.

  As neoliberalism has spread, so have mass evictions, involuntary migrations, and many forms of unfree labor. Among those who grow grapes for the global wine market, pick berries, apples, and tomatoes for global grocery chains, are many who would rather have stayed on their own lands, growing their own food. In China alone, tens of millions of farmers were displaced by agribusiness, factories, and real estate development in the 2010s. Many became factory workers, in vast export zones, making products for export. In 2015, China unveiled a plan to move 250 million more farmers to cities by 2025. Meanwhile, food multinationals Cargill, Monsanto, and John Deere sell maize and soybeans grown in Brazil to Chinese consumers.

  On Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines, farmers flooded the cities in the early twenty-first century as two-thousand-year-old rice terraces fell into disrepair, says rice activist Vicky Carlos Garcia. Indigenous farmers on the southern island of Mindanao, forced off their lands at gunpoint to make way for banana and palm oil plantations, also have resettled in the vast shantytowns at the center of Manila—the infamous slums of Tondo. “Ask them why they are there,” says Garcia. “No one ever asks them. They just call them problems.”1

  In South Africa, more than two million farmers and farmworkers were evicted between 1994 and 2013. Cambodia, Taiwan, India, Japan, and Indonesia passed new laws in the 2010s opening their countries to foreign ownership and leasing, leaving tens of millions of farmers landless. After the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, an estimated two million Mexican farmers left their lands as corn prices plummeted and common lands were privatized.

  Displaced farmers have become cheap labor for global industry and for agribusiness farms. Some become “guest workers”; many endure slave labor conditions. Undocumented migrants, laboring in the shadows, unprotected by labor laws, live in fear of deportation.

  These migrants fill the mega-slums of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, living in cardboard shacks and tin huts along polluted rivers. They survive on food scavenged from fast-food Dumpsters, recooked and resold. They pick and resell garbage—waste from the global economy. Profiteers sell them water
and access to illegal electric lines at exorbitant rates.

  Increasingly fed up, farmers and farmworkers have been organizing globally. In 1993, they created La Via Campesina—“The Peasant’s Way.” By 2014, the group represented 164 farmers’ organizations in 72 countries and held conventions from Indonesia to Turkey. Its headquarters move every few years—from Brussels to Honduras to Zimbabwe. In 2015, Zimbabwean organic farmer Elizabeth Mpofu became “coordinator of the international peasant movement.” She is leading the fight against transnational corporations grabbing land and water, making people landless, poisoning the earth, destroying traditional farming practices. Via Campesina has helped to tie farmers, farmworkers, and landless and indigenous activists together around the world. “We are organized,” she said in 2016, “and we know what we want.”

  In China, protests that the government calls “mass incidents” have skyrocketed, from a few thousand annually in the early 1990s to more than 180,000 per year in the 2010s. Most have been sparked by evictions and land expropriations. It’s the same story around the world. In 2012, Via Campesina began to push the United Nations to adopt an International Declaration of the Rights of Peasants to enshrine rights to land, clean water, and freedom from violence.2

  “In most regions where Via Campesina is present, the leaders are women,” Mpofu says. Women are “the backbone of agriculture” and have been at the forefront of farm protests. In South Africa in 2012, women grape pickers sparked the largest farmworker strike the country had seen in decades. In the Western Cape Winelands, thousands laid down their hoes and scythes to demand gender and race equity in pay, clean water, decent housing, and an end to sexual harassment and violence. By strike’s end, they had nearly doubled their wage to $10 daily. Most importantly, they overcame their fear and learned they could win gains if they fought.3