AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
The Fight for 15 held its first ever convention in Richmond, Virginia, this past weekend, bringing together not only fast-food workers but also low-wage workers from across the economy and the country. The convention spotlighted the movement's plan to pressure political candidates to support a living wage and to join together with clerical leaders to protest against those Republican-controlled state legislatures that have banned local jurisdictions from enacting their own minimum wage laws. The gathering showcased the energy behind both the Fight for 15 and the Service Employees International Union, which has bankrolled the low-wage worker protests. But there was a note of discord: Some Fight for 15 field organizers disrupted SEIU President Mary Kay Henry's keynote speech to demand that SEIU leaders stop outsourcing their jobs to a third-party employer, ensure that organizers are paid $15 an hour, and allow them to set up their own union.
The American Prospect sat down with Henry in Richmond to talk about where the Fight for 15 stands and where it's going, and the union's own political priorities. What follows is a condensed, edited version of that interview.
Justin Miller: First off, would you comment on the organizers' demonstration during your speech?
Mary Kay Henry: You know, I was thrilled that it was the best of a convention, in the sense of the spontaneous floor demonstrations, the chanting that happened. You've seen our statement. We're fully behind the right of workers to form a union, and we obviously have invested in making sure that every organizer on this campaign earns $15.
The Fight for 15 has had tremendous success driving the minimum wage conversation on the local, state, and federal levels, and has seen a lot progress with minimum wage hikes in some of the biggest cities and states in the country. How has the fight evolved, and how would you specifically characterize where the movement is right now?
The movement has changed the hearts and minds of the country about how wrong it is that people work for a living and cannot feed their families. So what the fast-food workers did is tear the covers off this myth that these [are] teenagers getting pocket change, and now it's moms and dads, primarily in communities of color, who [are] trying to make ends meet the best way that they can. And that multinational corporations earning record profits need to invest in the frontline workforce in the United States, just like they do around the world.
Why is SEIU making it a point now to highlight the intersection of racial justice and Black Lives Matter with economic justice and the Fight for 15?
It's a natural extension made by the leaders of the movement. It isn't a sort of institutional decision. When you follow the leaders of the movement, the leaders are taking us there. I've had many, many of the fast-food leaders, who I've known for three years, come up to me and say, "Hey Mary Kay, I'm an organizer now for the Black Lives Matter movement," as a point of pride. Or the home-care or child-care workers who've been with us for 30 years saying "I'm so proud that my union has finally linked my life."
Do you think embracing this intersection is something that the labor movement needs to be better at doing?
I don't feel qualified to speak about the rest of the labor movement. I can tell you, the labor movement at various moments has exhibited courage on this point. During the first Reconstruction [1865-1877], the union leagues fused white and black freedom fighters together. When you think about the civil rights movement, Walter Reuther of the UAW helped get behind and finance and propel that movement.
The labor movement has always intersected [with] the racial justice movement.
I'm incredibly proud that our union has had a tough conversation internally and we're on the doors and in the union halls talking to our white members about why this is about our humanity and our ability for everybody to win economically. ... There's a huge fusion that I think is incredibly potent in the linking of these fights, because race has been used to divide us and erode our politics and democracy. For us, it has a lot of dimensions that make a lot of sense and a lot of other parts of the labor movement are also having the same conversation.
With $15 and a union as the rallying cry, the former has had much more success than the latter. In terms of the unionization part, do you see it coming through consistent outside pressure where you have a corporation like McDonald's voluntarily recognizing a union or is it something that will have to be fought through the courts like with the National Labor Relations Board joint employer case that's currently underway? How do you envision navigating that very narrow path?
We don't see it as one path, we see it as multiple paths. The beauty of a movement is that you could imagine the companies making a decision, you could imagine a city or state doing something, you could imagine the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, who pledged a caregivers initiative as a means to create a way for home-care and child-care workers to have an organization and advocate not just for themselves but for the parents and kids they serve or the elders and people with disabilities. So for us, the movement creates the ability for us to imagine not a single way to do it, but there's enough momentum that allows us to be incredibly creative.
Do you ever see McDonald's willingly recognizing a union without being forced to by the NLRB?
They've done it in Australia, in Denmark, in France, in Germany, I don't know why they can't do it here. And we had the same skepticism from [the] press when we made the $15 demand-now 20 million people are on their way. I appreciate the skepticism, but I am completely confident that it is just a matter of time before we win the union-for home-care workers, child-care workers, airport workers, fast-food workers. It won't be the same for each group, but I think we are reaching a tipping point, especially when more workers join. That is a signal to me that people feel a confidence in taking a risk, because being public brings heat on each of these people. Everybody [at this convention] has had a consequence because they stood up. It's not easy, and they're persevering against changed schedules, lost jobs, being blackballed-there's a whole range of things happening to people, yet they are still confident to keep leading.
Low-wage workers have never been a clear force at the ballot box. One component of the Fight for 15 is mobilizing these workers into a formidable and cohesive voting bloc. How do you plan to do that?
When you think about who is in this room, this room is all of the voter blocs that other rooms of people are talking about "we need young black men and women to turn out and vote in record numbers; we need the Latino vote; we need white women," and they're all sitting here. The experience of this movement has taught the leaders that our government can make a difference [in] how much money I earn. If they can increase my wages, what else can they do? So it creates a sort of swagger and confidence that if I keep acting collectively in my community and if I exercise my right to vote, I can require my elected official to do something.
The New York story of [Governor Andrew] Cuomo convening the wage board and then driving the state legislative agenda right off of it is a hugely inspiring story to Memphis, Georgia, Kansas City, St. Louis, and it's helped these leaders connect the dots between the ballot box and their day-to-day experience.
A lot of Southern states have laws that preempt localities from enacting their own minimum wage hikes, and obviously Republican-controlled legislatures aren't going to pass $15 minimum wages at the state level. How do you plan to fight back against that and get $15 going in the South?
The same way we did in New York, Seattle, SeaTac [the small city that's home to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport], and San Francisco. We are gonna organize and shine a light on the gross racial disparities. In the case of Alabama, we're linking arms with Reverend Barber and will do joint actions in state capitals to shine a light on the [minimum wage law] preemption and that the Alabama state legislature made a decision to block money going into the pockets of the residents of Birmingham from their duly elected city council-and that's wrong. So we're going to use legal action, we're going to take direct action, and we're going to keep organizing. I believe that we will create a tipping point there eventually.
What is SEIU's role in pushing back against Trump?
The movement building that we're doing and the hope we create that there's an alternative. And confidence that through collective action we can make crystal clear that there's a different America that we can fight for.
Our biggest antidote to Trump is educating people on the connection between racial justice and economic justice and defusing the fear-mongering he's doing in white working-class neighborhoods.
I've been on doors where I've had a white home-care worker and a black child-care worker talk to a white working-class voter about what's being discussed and help deconstruct how Trump makes no sense for our shared interest. It's an incredibly powerful role that we will play in white working-class communities and in communities of color.
If Clinton wins the White House and Democrats are able to take back the Senate, what would be your top political priority?
We want the president and Senate and every candidate we elect to help workers form unions.
How would they do that?
They would do it through the child-care and home-care initiative that Hillary Clinton has talked about. They would do it through calling on McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King to sit at a table with fast-food workers and make a breakthrough on sectoral bargaining in the United States. They would do it by encouraging governors to be creative with airport workers and using the FAA to call on the top five airlines in the country to sit down and bargain with all the subcontracted workers while their earning record profits and people are living in poverty. They need to restore middle-class jobs in every airport in this country.
Would you like to see some sort of "Good Jobs" department in the White House that would work to leverage the federal government's contracting process to create safe, good-paying jobs with the ability to unionize?
We've worked with the Obama administration for the last six years on the "Fair Pay, Safe Workplace" executive order. We would very much like to see that order get implemented across the federal agencies and the four million workers that are directly contracted with the federal dollars-they ought to get good jobs and the right to form a union. And then the 20 million jobs that are connected because of those employers, like Boeing, receiving money, it would be great to then have the Boeing workers who are in South Carolina have the right to freely form a union. That's another dimension.
But the way I think about it is not through the mechanism; we want to make the demand and then force government to figure out the mechanism. We should not be satisfied with a "Good Jobs" department. We aren't gonna rest until the four million workers who receive federal dollars for their employment have the right to earn $15 and a union and be able to negotiate for themselves on all the other things that make their jobs good jobs.
