NC Raise Up/Fight for $15
Demanding a $15 minimum wage, people demonstrate outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Durham, North Carolina, February 16, 2021.
Precious Cole first went on strike when one of her co-workers at Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers in Durham, North Carolina, contracted COVID. She and her co-workers, she said, were told they had to quarantine for two weeks, unpaid, or provide proof of a negative test.
“We didn’t think it was fair, because it wasn’t our fault,” she said. “We made our demands, and we walked out one day and we went on strike. They lost a pretty good amount of money because we literally shut the store down for a whole day.” In October, their demands unmet, the workers struck again after another employee tested positive, and that time, they won ten days of paid sick leave.
That was Cole’s first involvement with the movement known as the Fight for $15, and today she plans to join workers from around the country on another strike, this time to demand $15 an hour. This strike comes as the U.S. is reopening, as mask mandates are being rolled back following the CDC’s latest guidance, and as complaints have risen that people don’t want to work in restaurants because unemployment benefits are too generous. But it’s years of no pay raises, poor work conditions, and a lack of respect, Cole says, that drive people away from food service work.
“Why would people go back to a job that doesn’t treat them fairly, that’s paying them poverty wages, that doesn’t want to hear anything that they have to say?” she asked. “We are the ones in the trenches making the decisions for your company, we’re making the foods for your company, we’re dealing with your nasty customers with a smile on our faces. We’re the ones that go home every day tired.”
Cole is 34 and has spent many years in food service, at one point working full-time while homeless, unable to afford shelter. She’s now living with her mother, who was recently hospitalized with a blood clot in her lungs and cannot work due to her health. Cole was offered $14 an hour at McDonald’s recently, the most she’s made as a fast-food worker, benefiting from an improving economy and a new fortitude among food service workers to assert their rights. But she’s still going out on strike to demand more.
NC Raise Up/Fight for $15
Precious Cole, a North Carolina fast-food worker, advocates for a higher minimum wage.
GOVERNORS IN AT LEAST 16 STATES, as of this reporting, have decided to refuse expanded federal unemployment benefits for their residents, in order to push people back into the workplace. As complaints that “nobody wants to work anymore” have moved from taped-up signs on fast-food drive-throughs to the nation’s papers of record and halls of governance, workers like Cole are treated like pawns to be pushed around.
The narrative that governors are acting upon seems to have begun with local news outlets, which ran an almost cut-and-paste version of the same story, from Georgia to North Dakota, Montana to Texas, Alabama to Idaho: Small-business owners can’t find workers, so they might be forced to close! Unemployment benefits and competition from other businesses “makes it hard for the little guys like us,” the owner of a “high-end French restaurant” in Eagle, Idaho, told reporters. This discourse has of course been amplified by the usual suspects at the national level: Megan McArdle, Fox Business (calling unemployment benefits “no-work bonuses”), the New York Post, and of course Larry Summers, perhaps still grumpy at having been left out of Biden’s Cabinet.
In Youngstown, Ohio, not far from the Lordstown auto plant that shuttered in 2019 despite community protest, apparently now “nobody wants to work.” (The plant was bought by an electric-vehicle factory, but while its signs are out in front, The New York Times noted recently “the company hasn’t begun hiring the union workers it promised would assemble its trucks even as it recently listed openings for an executive chef and a fitness coach.”) At Lordstown, workers made from $27 to $31 an hour. The article that features local restaurant owners calling people “lazy” doesn’t tell us how much these stranded restaurant owners are offering.
What these articles tend to have in common is that they don’t ask the workers why they aren’t returning. Instead, they’re simply a complaint forum for local restaurateurs, or for editorial boards to echo those complaints, as one North Dakota outlet did, writing, “Businesses shouldn’t have to compete with government programs for workers. But that’s the situation they’re facing.”
But this inverts the reality. What these businesses are expecting is for government to ensure that they have a workforce ready and willing to accept the low wages that restaurants pay and the customer abuse that comes along with the job. And they rarely acknowledge that this is far from the optimal time to work in food service, as mask mandates are disappearing while the percentage of people who’ve been at least partially vaccinated varies widely from state to state. (The vaccination percentages are lower in the Republican-dominated states where governors are slicing away at unemployment benefits; as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted, higher vaccination rates correlate positively with increased employment.) As one Miami chef-restaurateur noted to The Washington Post, “I feel that after the last 18 months the toll that this whole pandemic has taken on people mentally is huge. I feel like there are real trust issues now between the employees and employers and I understand it.”
Governors in at least 16 states have decided to refuse expanded federal unemployment benefits in order to push people back into the workplace.
We can’t entirely blame this on an irritating media trend. Conservatives are doing what they’ve wanted to do since the beginning of the pandemic. Back in March of 2020, as Congress debated its first rescue package, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) complained, “This bill pays you more not to work than if you were working.” Now his state is returning to pre-pandemic levels, when its average weekly unemployment benefit was below $300. (North Carolina, where Precious Cole works, is at the very bottom, with an average benefit of $236 before the pandemic expansion.) The move is reminiscent of the refusal by many Republican governors of the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act—essentially, cutting their constituents off from federal funds out of ideological dedication to the idea that said constituents should suffer if they weren’t lucky enough to be born rich, and particularly if those federal funds are being handed out by a Democrat.
“State legislatures and state governors have been allowed to whittle Frances Perkins and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unemployment insurance program back basically to nothing over time,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The wins in the federal level, it’s kind of filled the gaps. But you can see, as soon as the states feel emboldened they slash it right back. People like to have the army of the unemployed available.”
That attitude gets intensified, Stettner explained, by the fact that in many of these states, workers in the service industry and on unemployment tend to be Black and Latino. Fifty percent of South Carolina’s UI recipients are Black, rising to a whopping 66 percent in Mississippi. “The idea is to keep people in a very weak position, so they can’t have leverage at work,” he said. “Because if you don’t have unemployment, how can you hold out for a better wage?”
In a report at the Century Foundation’s website, Stettner noted that unemployment claims have been dropping for five straight weeks. Yet those states that decided to cut benefits would kick 895,000 additional workers off the rolls, costing their states’ economies nearly $5 billion. Money from federal benefits flows to the very same local businesses that are complaining about not being able to find workers, while costing the states nothing. Most states, aided by encouragement from President Biden, have already reinstated the temporarily waived requirement that workers receiving unemployment benefits must be actively looking for work. And nationwide, the country still has far fewer job openings than it has jobless workers. Put all that together, and it’s a recipe for a kick in the teeth to the nascent economic recovery, in the name of helping small businesses survive.
The pandemic is causing major shifts in the U.S. economy, particularly in service industry businesses that had erratic openings and closings for more than a year. Women’s labor force participation is still down, in large part because of closed public schools and child care responsibilities that still fall on a mother’s shoulders. (Blame patriarchy for that one.) “Of the twelve states that have cut off pandemic benefits,” Stettner wrote, “only two allow for state unemployment benefits in situations when child care is not available—leaving no safety net for many working parents.”
Food service work is at once women-dominated and low-paid, and requires irregular scheduling, which left its workforce struggling with child care issues, even before the pandemic. And that’s made worse, Stettner noted, at this time of year. “Summer is always the hardest time to find child care, because schools are closed and centers tend to offer less hours. That’s why this is, I think, a particularly painful move.”
NC Raise Up/Fight for $15
The February 16 strike outside a McDonald’s in Durham, North Carolina
Unlike other countries, the U.S. chose to issue pandemic support for workers through the unemployment system. Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz at EPI estimated that essentially half of “accommodations and food services sector” workers from February 2020 were let go in the next two months, sent to collect unemployment. In the United Kingdom and France, meanwhile, governments instead chose a furlough program, keeping workers attached to their jobs but paying for them to stay home. In the U.K., the government paid 80 percent of wages directly to the employers, who then continued to pay their staff. In France, the government paid 84 to 100 percent of the salaries of lower-paid employees. Such programs were based off of Germany’s “Kurzarbeit,” or shorter work, programs during the 2008 global economic crisis.
Cutting workers loose from their employers meant that those same workers had less incentive to return to that same job; as one Grub Street article noted, many former food service workers did what the unemployment system encourages them to do, finding other work that they might prefer to riskier food service. The system incentivized bosses to treat workers as if they were disposable, but those same bosses are angry that their workers seem to view them the same way.
Standard economic theory backs up what Precious Cole and her co-workers are fighting for. When labor supply is short of demand, rapid wage growth should follow. Functioning labor markets, noted Bivens and Shierholz, should make up for the lowered quality of food service work by paying a premium to induce workers to accept those worsened conditions. And most importantly, they noted, “The goal of economic policy should not be to chase as many adults into paid work as possible; it should be to provide good options and economic security for all.”
IT’S WORTH REMEMBERING THAT our unemployment system and most of our social welfare policy is, in fact, designed to push people into paid work. The complaining employers are actually reflective of the long-standing goals of elected officials.
As political scientist Melinda Cooper writes in her book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, the tradition of personal and family responsibility in American welfare policy is rooted in Elizabethan and early Colonial-era poor laws, which placed strict conditions on who could get help and who had to yank on those proverbial bootstraps. In Regulating the Poor, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argue that relief policies, particularly in periods of crisis like the pandemic, are designed to tamp down the possibility of civil disorder, and also reinforce work norms: not just that one must work in order to be worthy of money, but to maintain inequalities and determine “how some people are made to do the harshest work for the least reward.”
The massive protests and riots last summer in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis reminded us of the kind of civil disorder that policymakers wanted to avoid in expanding unemployment and sending out stimulus checks. Now that employers want to reopen (and the protests have shrunk), the paring back of unemployment benefits was entirely predictable. But the interaction between these two needs—order and cheap labor—also means that the pared-back benefits also work to punish those who might have been part of those protests. In other words, it’s not an accident that Black workers will bear the brunt of the cutbacks.
Our unemployment system and most of our social welfare policy is designed to push people into paid work.
We see this as far back as the Depression, as historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes in Hammer and Hoe. Black women were removed from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief rolls when demand for household labor grew, pushing them to take the kind of work that administrators thought they were naturally suited to. In 1996, “welfare reform,” a collaboration between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, built on this tradition. The welfare system was already punitive and, like the unemployment system, required recipients to jump through hoops, search for paid work, and submit to surveillance policies; once “reformed,” its effect was to increase extreme poverty, and to push mothers into low-wage work—much of it in food service, retail, and care. Those jobs, as Precious Cole and the thousands of fast-food strikers remind us, don’t pay, and given any other choice, workers might avoid them.
There’s not that much that can immediately be done about the governors yanking back benefits. Joe Biden, who voted for that welfare reform plan, has undone some of its damage with his child tax benefit, but that program too is temporary, and may disappear just when people gain some stability. Further policy changes are possible if Congress is willing to act, by creating federal standards for unemployment, with more funding and stricter requirements for minimum benefits.
Until that point, the workers are on strike again. As Precious Cole and her colleagues prepared to walk off the job, another new report from EPI noted that “a loss of $10/hour in the typical worker’s compensation is the result of employers’ successful efforts to keep wage growth down over the past 40 years.” Low wages, authors Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens note, are a policy choice, or rather, the result of combined policy choices over decades that have contributed to the weakened position workers are in today.
The minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009; it’s worth 17 percent less now than it was that year thanks to inflation. Raising the minimum wage is popular, but Congress—including some Democrats—still refuses to give Cole and 32 million others what they’ve asked for. Even $15 an hour is not a living wage in most of the country.
“It’s a start,” Cole said. “We’re gonna stand in solidarity, we want the $15. We want a union, so that stuff like this can’t happen and that we have a voice. This is us letting them know, ‘We’re here to stay and we’re going to be in your face. Every time you turn around, we will be there.’”
Prem Thakker contributed reporting.
