No one wakes up one morning and chooses to be homeless. No one says to themselves, “How fun would it be for my kids and my family to live in a tent without food, water, school, or transportation?”
When workers begin the battle to unionize, they are making a tremendous choice about their lives. This decision is never made lightly; oftentimes they struggle against apathy, false promises from management, and the very real threats of dismissal.
Home health aides, retail salespersons, fast-food workers, and public school teachers are essential to the economy and society, yet their wages fall far short of the cost of living.
When it comes to wages, baseball’s billionaires give stadium workers peanuts. Yet since 2011, the teams’ average value has tripled — from $523 million ($680 million in today’s dollars) to $2.1 billion.
“I’m not disposable,” said one Chipotle worker, “and neither is my labor and neither are my coworkers.”
The capitalist system doesn’t just drive wealth inequality—it is designed to exploit and undermine the working class and to protect the power and economic interests of the wealthy.
Now, with vaccinations on the rise and summer approaching, a lot of employers are going back to business as usual. Workers have leverage at this moment.
Traditionally, organized labor has backed establishment Democrats even in the face of diminishing returns. But when it comes to a $15 minimum wage, Democrats should not expect unionists and their allies on the front lines to “dance and be happy.”
No Evil Foods created products like El Zapatista and Comrade Cluck, but workers say its conduct doesn’t live up to its leftist branding.
People are dying from poverty wages in the richest country in the world,” she said. “The question before us is not can we afford to pay workers more. The question is can we afford not to? Raising the wage to $15 would save lives.”
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