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Street Roots • April 13-19, 2018
News
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WORKERS, fro m page 5
minimum wage that will increase to $14.75 by
2022. That was considered a big win. I
couldn’t imagine trying to get by on that - even
now - if I were a single mother or even a single
person, really, with how high rents are. Do you
think by fighting for such small concessions,
the movement is failing to combat the root
cause, as you describe it, of neoliberalism?
to equalize distribution of wealth so that the
wealthy can’t be wealthy anymore, but I
think it s time to simply limit it so that you
don’t have the world’s three wealthiest men
owning the same amount of wealth as
almost the bottom half of the human race.
That’s just obscene, and I don’t think it’s
sustainable in terms of healthy economies.
E.G.: Your book highlights success stories,
where workers came together, rose up and
demanded better treatment, and in many cases
won in some respect. What can we learn from
successful campaigns? What works?
A.O.: One thing that’s worked is that
wages have increased. When this campaign
started, wages had been stagnant for 40
years. As of 2016, we started to see some
increases. American low-wage workers
between 2012 and 2016 won for themselves
$61.5 billion in wage increases. To get some
perspective, that’s 12 times what Congress
gave them the last time it raised the federal
minimum wage in 2007.
Mexican berry pickers, in a huge 2015
strike, doubled their wages. One way they
did that was they walked off the farms and
blocked the flow of berries into the United
States. And berries are the fastest-growing
and most wealth-producing sector of the
produce industry.
I think blocking the doors to Walmarts on
Black Friday, blocking the Transpeninsular
Highway where the berries came into the
U.S. and just walking off the job - all of
those were successful.
Lobbying with city governments has been
extremely successful. City governments are
the most progressive in the country right
now, and you’ve begun to get minimum-wage
laws. New York passed a regulation last
summer that workers are hoping will go
global, and that was a scheduling ordinance.
It mandated that New York City employers
must give their workers two weeks’ advance
notice of their schedules.
(Oregon passed similar legislation in 2017,
mandating retail, food service and hospitality
employers with 500-plus workers worldwide give
employees their schedules at least one week in
advance. This law goes into effect July 1, 2018.)
A program called Jobs to Move America
has already made deals with the transit
.
P H O T O B Y E L IZ A B E T H C O O K E
Cambodian garment workers Thareth Sok and Vun Em are organizers for United Sisterhood
Alliance in Phnom Penh.
authorities in New York, Los Angeles and
Chicago. In these deals, city governments
make agreements with local community
organizations and unions when they buy
buses, trains and trucks for city fleets. (The
agreement is) that they are going to award
contracts to companies that agree to make
those vehicles in the cities where they’re
going to be used, to hire local people to be
the manufacturing workers, to make these
union shops, to hire women, people of color,
veterans, ex-cons, and also to pay attention
to environmental ramifications. The
question is, will it then go to places like
Portland, Seattle, other cities where there’s
a chance that you could make those kinds of
deals with city governments? I think that’s
also an extremely promising strategy, and
unlike Donald Trump, who promised to
bring manufacturing back to American
cities, this movement is really doing it.
Another successful strategy was
pioneered by the Farm Labor Organizing
Committee in the 1970s, and that is to say
you don’t just target your direct boss on
farm, in a garment shop or in an electronic
shop. You target the corporation at the top
of the supply chain.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers -
tomato pickers - started traveling the
“Verselandia! is an amazing and inspiring night. Every Portlander should be
enthusiastically rushing forth to be in this year’s audience!”
—Anis Mojgani, National Poetry Slam Champion
country and protesting in front of fast-food
stores and Whole Foods and Walmart. They
said, “You guys buy all the tomatoes. If you
paid a penny more a pound for tomatoes,
awarded farmers who paid their workers a
little more, paid a little moré to fund
inspections, by workers, of safety, and to
investigate claims of sexual harassment and
abuse and enslavement, you would create a
better, safer industry.” And indeed, where
they started, in the Florida tomato fields,
which were described by one federal judge
as ground zero for modern slavery, are now
some of the best agricultural workplaces in
the world.
We’ve seen that same strategy has won
with the garment industry. The Bangladesh
Fire and Safety Accord, a consumer-labor-
worker alliance, convinced 225 of the largest
clothing producers in the world to sign an
agreement that said, “We will pay more to
make sure that our factories are safe, and
that workers’ wages go up, and that violence
against workers does not happen, and we
legally bind ourselves to be sued in our own
countries if we break this agreement.” In
Vermont, recently, farmworkers won the
same kind of agreement from Ben and
Jerry’s.
E.G.: Here in Portland, we’ve got a
A.O.: I think that questioning
neoliberalism, this idea that profit and
increasing shareholder value is the highest
achievement of collective human endeavor, I
think that this movement is questioning
that.
I think it’s questioning this idea that
neoliberalism is essential for freedom. It’s
asking, what is freedom? For us, freedom is
freedom from sexual violence, freedom from
hunger. It’s free water, free education, and
free heating and energy assistance. This
movement is, in fact, questioning the
underpinnings of neoliberalism. But these
are poor people. This movement is the 3.5
billion poorest people on Earth, not the top
wealthy few, and not even the middle class,
except it does now include, increasingly,
educated people. So the fact that they have
won victories that we see as relatively small
is remarkable.
As someone who’s always written about
poor people’s movements, I’m always asked
this question: What did they really achieve?
How much did they really win? The war on
poverty didn’t end poverty in our time, no -
but it cut it! The war on poverty cut
childhood hunger by half in 10 years. There
were significant victories, and I think what
we need to do is look at these victories and
say th a t th e y a re a fo u n d atio n fo r m o re.
Obviously, as Laphonza Butler, who was
co-chair of the L.A. living-wage campaign
and president to the health care workers
local there, said to me, “Nobody’s going to
Vegas on $15 an hour.”
But, she said, people who are literally
strangled by impoverishment and by the
sense that nothing was ever going to get
better, the psychological benefit and the
emotional benefits, even of these small
wages, are important. Because they gave
them to themselves, and they see that if we
struggle, we can win.
emily@streetroots.org; Twitter @greenwrites