Street Roots • April 13-19, 2018
News
Page 4
w o rk e r
Poverty wages
and unsafe
working conditions
worldwide have sparked
topic
o f Annelise Orleck’s new book
P H O T O B Y E L IZ A B E T H C O O K E
McDonald's worker Bleu Rainer, a Fight fo r 15 activist in Tampa, Fla., said the movement is linked to the fig h t against police brutality.
BY EMILY GREEN
S E N IO R S T A F F R E P O R T E R
nside a crowded café in Tampa, Fla.,
Annelise Orleck first heard the words
that would eventually become the title of
the book she was there to research.
“We are all fast-food workers now,” said
Keegan Shepard, a graduate student at the
University of South Florida.
Shepard was sitting among a diverse
alliance of professors, students, fast-food
workers and community activists who had all
met at the café that day to talk about
Florida’s Fight for $15 campaign.
His words reflected a globalization-
spurred trend that’s led to a world in which
billions of people struggle to survive on
poverty wages, often while working at unsafe
jobs, without any security or benefits.
Tampa was just one of many stops on
Orleck’s journey around the globe as she
researched what she says has become a
massive, unified, global uprising of these
workers.
Her book, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers
Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty
Wages,” took her to Bangladesh, Cambodia
and the Philippines, where workers are
fighting for safer working conditions in
clothing factories and farmers are rising up
after being displaced.
But much organizing and outcry is taking
I
P H O T O B Y JO E L B E N J A M IN
Annelise Orleck
C O U R TESY OF
B E A C O N PRESS B O S T O N
place right here in the U.S., where Orleck
says conditions for low-wage workers are not
all that different from those in developing
nations.
She traveled between Los Angeles and
New York City, interviewing those with the
courage to go up against the world’s two
largest private employers - Walmart and
McDonald’s - as well as farmworkers, hotel
and home care workers, and even college
professors, who have all reached their
boiling point and have begun to demand
living wages, safety and respect from their
employers.
From Orleck’s bird’s-eye view of this
burgeoning global labor movement, she
shows readers that where there is despair,
there is also hope, because when workers
come together and rise up, positive change
often follows.
Orleck will be at Powell’s Books on
Hawthorne at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 19,
for a book signing and reading.
She has a written five books on the
history of women’s issues, activism,
immigration and politics, including
“Storming Caesars Palace: How Black
Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty”
and “Rethinking American Women’s
Activism.” Orleck, who was born and raised
in Brooklyn, resides in Vermont and is a
professor of history at Dartmouth College.
Emily Green: What conditions set the
stage fo r this worker uprising?
Annelise Orleck: I think there are a few:
Workers started to be scheduled by
computer algorithm in many places. Nobody
had set schedules anymore. People could be
called in at the last minute if the place was
busy, but they could also be told as they
were on their way to work and had already
paid for a babysitter, “Sorry, you’re not
needed now.” That complete erosion of any
sense of stability for workers, I think, set the
stage for an uprising and a feeling that
people had nothing to lose.
Bleu Rainer, the fast-food worker I
profiled in Tampa, Fla., showed me a
paycheck for $109. He said, “That was my
paycheck for two weeks because the
algorithm decided that it wasn’t busy and
they didn’t need me.”
Additionally, wages have been stagnant for
40 years. And by 2016, 70 percent of
American workers were earning less than
$50,000 a year; 50 percent were earning less
than $30,000 a year. So you have 50 percent
of employed Americans in poverty.
And we’re seeing that: A recent study
showed 10 percent of Disneyland workers
are homeless; the study that came out very
recently that showed 36 percent of college
See WORKERS, page 5