Our Most Successful Economic Justice Movement

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What’s the most successful economic justice movement of the past decade? The Fight for $15.

In 2012, a handful of New York fast-food workers walked off the job for a day, demanding that their hourly wages be raised to $15—hardly a munificent sum for anyone living in the Big Apple. Organized by New York Communities for Change (led then by the late Jon Kest) and the Service Employees International Union, the demonstration sparked what was to become a nationwide movement funded by SEIU.

Nine years after this relatively piddling beginning, what has this movement accomplished? A report out today from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has totaled up all the municipal and state minimum-wage hikes since the movement began to put pressure on elected officials. To date, those increases have boosted the incomes of a little more than 26 million workers—18 million of whom are women, 12 million of whom are workers of color. Even as the federal minimum has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, cities and states not controlled by Republicans have been boosting their minimums—most impactfully, both California and New York, which each enacted $15 statewide minimums in 2016 (following the lead of such cities as Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles).

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NELP calculates that all the increases amount to $151 billion, which comes out to an average of $5,300 per worker.

By a different metric, however, the movement hasn’t been a success at all. Its original, and enduring, demand was expressed by its slogan: “$15 and a union.” But while cities and states can legislate increases to the minimum wage, they can’t make it less daunting for private-sector workers to try to form or join a union. By the terms of the completely dysfunctional National Labor Relations Act, the rules governing unionization are set exclusively by the federal government, where Republicans and the occasional right-wing Democrat have blocked all efforts to change the NLRA so that employers can no longer intimidate their union-seeking employees.

When the movement began, SEIU had hopes of unionizing the nation’s immense fast-food workforce. Constrained by the unamended NLRA, however, the union hasn’t picked up a single new member in fast food. Nonetheless, recognizing that the movement was succeeding in raising the wages, living standards, and economic security of millions of workers through legislated minimum-wage hikes, SEIU persisted for many years in spending tens of millions of dollars on the campaign—for which its president, Mary Kay Henry, would win the award for Foremost Poverty Fighter of the Last Decade, if such an award existed. It doesn’t, but let’s make one up and give it to her anyway.

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