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But would the boat parties be reinstated?

Tapia laughed. Bruce Colley was famous for taking his employees
on an annual summertime cruise on the Hudson. Tapia had to
admit that they were a blast. Colley danced with all the women.
But last year, she said, she had not been invited. She blamed her
activism. And this year there had been no boat party at all, as far as
she knew.

More important to Tapia—far more important—was her friendship
with La Dominga. Things between them had cooled lately, she said,
but not really, not in her heart. It was only this situation at work.
On Dominga's birthday, Tapia and some of her co-workers had
given her a big bunch of flowers. Dominga understood the
message: none of this conflict was personal. When the fight for a
union was over—after the workers had won their rights—"things
between me and Dominga will be just like they were before."

T

he modern American labor movement rose out of the struggle
over the eight-hour day. Mary Kay Henry, the president of the
Service Employees International Union, told me, "This fight for

fifteen is growing way beyond fast food. It's getting to be what the
eight-hour day was in the twentieth century." That may be so (or it
may be a stretch), but labor unions, the centerpiece of the
movement to improve working conditions in the last century, have
definitely shrunk to the margins. Fewer than seven per cent of
private-sector workers are union members today—that's the lowest
density in nearly a century. The landscape of American business
has changed, reflecting the shift from a manufacturing to a service
economy, but unions have not changed with it. The S.E.I.U., with
more than two million members, has probably done the best job
among large unions of adapting to the new workplace, organizing
health-care workers and janitors, for instance, in circumstances that
did not allow for traditional industrial organizing.

The Justice for Janitors campaign of the nineteen-nineties offers a
good precedent for the current fast-food campaign, Henry said.
The janitors were fissured by the broad move of commercial
property owners to subcontracting, much as fast-food workplaces
are fissured by franchising. Their nominal employers, small
cleaning companies, had no power and thin profit margins. The
tactics of the janitors were unorthodox, and included mass civil
disobedience: closing freeways in Los Angeles; blocking bridges
into Washington, D.C. Their goal was to get building owners to the
table, and in time they succeeded, in some cases nearly doubling
with their first contract the compensation they had been earning.
The movement was largely Latino, and crucially strengthened by
undocumented immigrants who stepped up, risking deportation.
But big-city janitors had been unionized, historically—and in some
cities, like New York, still were—so the fight was really to
reorganize and rebuild. There is no comparable history in fast food.
More important, the fast-food workforce is just under four million
and growing, and the main companies are so rich and powerful that
the stakes are higher than in any labor struggle in recent memory.



October 14, 2013

To date, it's been "more air war than
ground war," as Ruth Milkman, a
sociologist of labor movements at the City
University of New York Graduate Center,
puts it. The one-day strikes, which aren't
really strikes, since they don't usually close
shops or try to shame (nonexistent)
strikebreakers, get larger each time. This
May, the fast-food workers staged simultaneous protests in two
hundred and thirty cities worldwide. They have gathered
endorsements from a very long list of labor groups and others,
including the seventy-six-member Progressive Caucus in the
United States Congress and the Boston Wobblies. For the fiftieth
anniversary of the March on Washington, an editorial in the Times
declared, "The marchers had it right 50 years ago. The fast-food
strikers have it right today." The percentage of the workforce
actually committed to the movement still seems quite small,
however, and the organizing tactics still decidedly nontraditional.
None of this acclaim will translate anytime soon into a shop-floor
union vote presided over by the National Labor Relations Board.

The S.E.I.U. leadership sometimes suggests that it is merely
following the lead of a spontaneous workers' movement, but it
invested about two million dollars in organizing in New York
before the first public protest, in November, 2012, and it has
continued to fund organizing nationwide—to the tune of more
than ten million dollars. It has retained the services of BerlinRosen,
a progressive political-consulting firm that helped propel Bill de
Blasio from dark-horsedom into the mayor's office.

In the vacuum left by the subsidence of labor unions, a rough
movement sometimes known as Alt-Labor—community groups,
"worker centers"—has emerged. New York has an abundance of
such groups, including the New York Taxi Workers Alliance,
launched in 1998, which has successfully defended drivers against
exploitation by medallion owners, and the Restaurant

Opportunities Center, or ROC, which was originally founded as a
help center for displaced restaurant workers after the September
11th terrorist attacks and has since grown into an all-purpose
resource for food-sector employees, offering training, conducting
research, and filing complaints and lawsuits. Thirty-two cities now
have their own ROC. The group has thrown its energy behind the
fast-food movement. The National Restaurant Association has
targeted ROC, apparently considering it a serious threat.

Alt-Labor groups, by legal definition not unions, will never be
bargaining units. Fast Food Forward and its numerous allies in the
fast-food campaign, though all closely tied to their funding source,
S.E.I.U., are in many ways Alt-Labor, which makes the
movement's path forward rather difficult to picture. Mary Kay
Henry told me that the S.E.I.U. is supporting the movement
"because it helps our members." She said that "6.5 million workers
have already had their wages increased owing to minimum-wage
increases" driven by fast-food activism. Minimum-wage legislation
is great, she said, but "collective bargaining can set a standard that
obviates legislation."

So is she hoping to sign up millions of new members from the food
industry?

"Membership is not our foremost question," she said. "Our first
concern is winning fifteen dollars and a union. The workers will
then choose whom they want to represent them." That answer
seems to dodge the question. Henry, like other labor leaders, likes
to sketch a climactic meeting with the big fast-food employers:
"The Big Three"—McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's—"are going
to have to see the union part, and not just the minimum-wage part,
and get their heads around that, before they come to the table."

T

he golden arches glowed at dawn above Danville,
Pennsylvania, and, later, above other towns—Sharon, Mercer.
For Tapia, they were a familiar touch in an unfamiliar land. Also
Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts. Tapia napped on and off all
morning. She was near the front of the charter bus. It had departed
from downtown Brooklyn at 2 A.M., in a convoy with another bus.
It got stuck in 3 A.M. traffic on Canal Street, but now they were
flying westward. The driver and his alternate were chatting in
Chinese. Tapia was the only person from her McDonald's going to
the conference. Across the aisle was Corina Garcia. She worked at
another McDonald's—at Broadway and 145 th—that was owned by
Bruce Colley. Garcia, who is fifty-six, looked very put-together,
with a sweet smile and a sharp little travel bag. She had been an
executive secretary for ten years in the Dominican Republic, she
said. Stacked on the seat next to her were cases of water, bags of
apples, and a box full of small cans of Pringles. People from farther
back in the bus, which was packed, made occasional raids on the
supplies.

Tapia was excited about going to Chicago. She had never been
west of New York. The cornfields of Ohio seemed to go on forever.
It was so different from el campo back home. No grasslands, rain
forest, cane fields, coffee farms. She wondered about the cost of
living out here. It was surely cheaper than New York. But you
would probably need a car, which was expensive. Hearing that
South Bend, Indiana, had a famous Catholic university, she made a
mental note—possible college for Ashley. At the rest stops, the
younger men sauntered across the strangely wide Midwestern
forecourts, wearing baggy basketball shorts, neck pillows still in
place. But most of the conferencegoers were older. Alvin Major, the
father of four teen-agers, was from Guyana and worked at a K.F.C.
in Brooklyn. His oldest was going to college upstate this fall. He
sometimes worked three jobs, collecting three paychecks, all from
K.F.C.—but no overtime, which wasn't right. Jorel Ware worked at
a McDonald's in midtown. He was thirty-one. He still made
minimum wage, after two years. "They say the franchisee is just a
small man in the middle," he said. "If that's true, then who am I?
I'm just a dot on the wall. I just want to be able to get an unlimited
MetroCard. I can't afford nothing."

Shantel Walker, who works at a Papa John's in Brooklyn, jumped

up as the bus approached Chicago. She wore a gold-billed cap and

a big crucifix. She had a microphone. "I work too hard," she
chanted, "for a little income." The bus erupted, workers chanting
the lyrics after her. "Your story is an inspiration / People are with
you / New York is proud of you, HEY."

Tapia, who speaks little English, chanted softly: "People are with
you / New York is proud of you, hey." She was looking pretty sharp
herself, in form-fitting jeans, black suede loafers, a black shirt with
a cheetah-print panel, long gold earrings.

Walker: "You got to work hard, HEY / To get a union and fifteen."

Tapia: "You got to work hard, hey / To get a union and fifteen."

Walker: "Detroit's gonna be there, remember. Chicago. We gotta
represent. We the original starter of this movement."

Cheers, shouts,whistles.

Chicago, to Tapia's disappointment, never appeared. Was it a very
small city, then? No, the conference was in a convention center out
in a western suburb, Villa Park, and the bus took a route that never
went near Chicago proper.

October 18, 2010"Looks like someone's eyes are bigger

than his liver.

The conference, however, did not
disappoint. Buses pulled in from every
direction—St. Louis, Detroit, Greenville,
North Carolina. Delegates in red T-shirts

practiced their chants in the late-afternoon
sun. Inside the convention center, twelve hundred workers filled
one end of a vast space. There were elaborate shout-outs from each
delegation, a ritual that seemed to go on for hours. But the energy
stayed high. There were videos, rappers, a driving beat. The

proceedings were directed by an organizing committee of a dozen-
plus people on a stage. They never seemed to call for order. They
just drove the thing forward. The New York rep, Naquasia
LeGrand, a twenty-two-year-old K.F.C. employee from Canarsie,
said, "I got to be on my feet all day, and you don't want me to go to
the foot doctor? You want me to smile at customers, but you won't
give me a dental plan?" Mary Kay Henry gave a passionate speech,
declaring, "I am proud to bring into this room two million workers
who are in this with you to win it!" After Henry's speech, Tapia was
on her feet, along with the rest of the crowd, chanting, "We believe
that we can win!" She was rocking, clapping, smiling excitedly.

On the second day, delegates were directed to sit at tables with
people from other cities. Tapia found herself at a Spanish-speaking
table with workers from Denver and Chicago. The best part of the
conference, she told me later, was sharing stories with Martina
Ortega, who was originally from Guerrero State, in Mexico, and
Otilia Sanchez, from Denver, about raising families on minimum
wage in El Norte, and what their respective union committees were
doing. Tapia filled a notebook with names and contact information.
Each table was asked to report to the conference as a whole, and
Otilia Sanchez rose and delivered a forceful speech, in Spanish,
about how this would be not an armed struggle but a political fight
waged by peaceful means—strikes, boycotts, media—and how if the
workers stayed strong they would make history.

Tapia said afterward that she was surprised to see that the
movement was predominantly African-American. "That's good,"
she told me. "Because they're not afraid. They have nothing to lose.
We're all afraid of getting deported. They're not."

The history of the civil-rights struggle was constantly invoked. The
N.A.A.C.P. had just formally endorsed the fast-food workers'
movement at its national convention (without mentioning the
central demand for fifteen dollars an hour, possibly to spare the
fast-food franchisees among its leadership the shock of that stark
figure). The Reverend William Barber II, the head of the North

Carolina N.A.A.C.P., gave a stand-up-and-shout sermon after
lunch. Barber talked about President Franklin Roosevelt's belief
that a minimum wage should allow American workers to "live
decently," then offered his own gloss on that idea. "I want to be able
to live," Barber said. "I want to be able to pay my rent, feed my kids,
put gas in my car, maybe buy a house—and every now and then fix
my hair!" Representative Keith Ellison, co-chair of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, was on hand. "Income
inequality is an existential threat to the American Dream," he told
me. "And these people are doing something about it." In his
conference speech, he said, "In the richest country in the world, you
should not be working full time and still be on food stamps."

I noticed Tapia nodding seriously when this was said, as she did
when Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City with
three children, said, "Most of us are doing this for our kids. For the
next generation. If somebody was hurting your kid, you would
crush them. And that's how we need to think about these
corporations. They're trying to destroy our families, hurt our kids."

The return bus left that afternoon, arriving in New York at nine the
next morning. Tapia took the subway directly to work. She stashed
her travelling bag under a storage bin, where the manager was
unlikely to see it and ask questions. Fortunately, it was Sunday, La
Dominga's day off.

T

apia applied to ten charter schools for kindergarten for Ashley.

She got into none. She was wait-listed at three, though,
including at Tapia's first choice, a new Success Academy school
opening on Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights. The
school's Web page wouldn't load on Tapia's phone. "I need to get
Internet," she said. We were in her apartment, and she pointed out
an old Dell desktop wedged among other appliances on the dresser
she shares with Ashley. Internet access is about twenty dollars a
month. Something would have to give. It could not be her
unlimited-ride MetroCard. That was a hundred and twelve dollars
a month—a giant bite out of her paycheck, and a purchase that

many people couldn't manage, but it was indispensable. If she rode
the train or the bus (she preferred the guagua, as everybody in her
neighborhood calls the bus) eighty times a month, it cost less than
half what it would for individual rides.

If she got a raise to fifteen dollars an hour, she could buy new work
shoes, help her mother, get Ashley a good winter coat. Even so,
fifteen dollars an hour is not considered adequate for a basic
household budget by economists who study the matter. Not in New
York City, anyway. A recent study found that, assuming you get
forty hours a week, which Tapia never does now, it might be
enough for a single person living in Montana. In New York, the
bare minimum comes to $22.66. For a single parent with a child, it's
$30.02. I didn't mention these figures to Tapia. We were sitting in
her tiny railroad kitchen, talking in whispers, because the other
renters might be asleep. A message came in on Tapia's phone. It
was a photograph of her son, Steven, now a strapping fifteen-year-
old and a serious baseball player. He was a lefty, looking snappy at
bat, in full uniform. "I could not live without Facebook," Tapia said.
"I'll get a photo of Steven when I'm at work, and McDonald's
cannot bother me."

She had told La Dominga about Chicago, after all. "She
understands," Tapia said. "We're not fighting her. But she's getting
all this pressure."

I had asked La Dominga for an interview. When we spoke, on a
busy Saturday afternoon at the store, she had agreed that her own
story was a good one for McDonald's. But she needed Mr. Colley's
permission to talk, and that had not come.

Tapia pointed to the light switch on the kitchen wall. It wasn't a
sign from God, but it was, in her opinion, close. Under many layers
of paint, there was, still discernible, a raised plaster decoration
around the switch which, after a moment's study, revealed itself as a
traditional depiction of Christ. Tapia carried a photograph of this
odd little miracle in her phone.

August 3, 1998"Its not enough that I succeed. My
friends must also be drawn and quartered."

We took a walk through Inwood. Her
church, the Church of the Good Shepherd,
stands above Broadway. It is big, imposing
yet sedate, Romanesque Revival,
beautifully maintained. Wooden
confessionals are built into the walls, along with a poor box with a
brass door. Many of the Masses are in Spanish. Tapia tries to come
every Tuesday evening. "They welcome you especially, and
individually," she whispered. "It's a community of brothers." She has
done a great deal of crying here. "I had so much rancor toward my
ex-husband," she said. "It has finally left me now." One of the best
things about Good Shepherd was the number of young people it
attracts. "I came here to pray when my mother said that my kids
were becoming impossible teen-agers. I prayed for help. Now my
mother says they are acting better."

We stopped at a McDonald's on 207th Street. Tapia had worked
here, long ago. We started talking about local politicians who now
reliably show up at fast-food protests, and also at the next-morning
"walk-backs," when strikers are escorted by sympathetic crowds
back to their restaurants. Some of the politicians are sincere; all
want the media attention. Then Tapia shushed me. She texted me
from across the table: Don't talk union—the store manager had
spotted her, and he was eavesdropping on us. I saw that she was
right. Her expression was strangely mixed: fear, paranoia, mischief,
pride. What could this manager possibly do to her? Her activism
wasn't a secret. But struggles for dignity are complex. We talked
about Ashley. Tapia was praying hard for that charter school.

S

peaking at a Laborfest rally in Milwaukee on Labor Day,
President Obama declared, "All across the country right now,
there's a national movement going on made up of fast-food
workers organizing to lift wages, so they can provide for their
families with pride and dignity." The President was blunt about the

central issue. "You know what?" he said. "If I were looking for a
good job that lets me build some security for my family, I'd join a
union. If I were busting my butt in the service industry and wanted
an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, I'd join a union."

A few days later, the fast-food campaign mounted actions in a
hundred and fifty cities. In New York, there was an early-morning
sit-in outside a McDonald's in Times Square. Nineteen strikers
were arrested for blocking traffic. Tapia missed it, because she was
busy taking Ashley to school. (Her prayers had been answered.
Ashley was admitted to Success Academy—a high-powered bete
noire of New York's teachers' union.) Among the several hundred
protesters, there were a fair number of labor organizers, but many
more fast-food workers. I noticed Jorel Ware, Naquasia LeGrand,
Shantel Walker, and other activists from the conference in Chicago,
and an all-female delegation from the Washington Heights
McDonald's. Workers were also being arrested in Detroit, Chicago,
Little Rock, and Las Vegas. Among those arrested in Times Square
was an eighty-one-year-old McDonald's janitor named Jose
Carrillo.

Tapia made it to the day's second sit-in, a few hours later, outside a
McDonald's at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street. The
protesters first marched up Eighth, beating on drums, blowing
vuvuzelas and kazoos, and chanting, "What do we want? Fifteen
and a union!" There were rabbis, priests, preachers, a Buddhist
monk, and a full complement of local politicians. Some of the
marchers wore their McDonald's uniforms. Tapia was in civilian
clothes. It was midday, hot. She and the rest of the protesters were
steered by police into a containment pen, built of interlocking metal
barricades, on the east side of Eighth. Diners on the second floor of
the adjacent McDonald's looked out on the scene, chewing
distractedly, and returned to their phones. Cars honked. Then
fifteen protesters, quietly avoiding the pen, made their way into the
center of the intersection, which was in full blazing sun, and sat


down in a circle on the asphalt. Most were dressed in black. Most
were women. Nearly all looked to be African-American. Shantel
Walker was among them.

Tapia, at the front of the pen, watched closely, her face full of anger
and admiration, as the demonstrators were brought to their feet
one by one, not roughly, by police, and had their hands cuffed
behind them. The police used disposable restraints—white plastic
"flexicuffs." They led their captives toward two large white vans,
herded them inside, and shut the doors. The energy level of the
protest dropped. Tapia and the other women from the Washington
Heights McDonald's checked their phones. Some had shifts to
work. Tapia had to pick up Ashley from school. ♦

William Finnegan has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1984 and a staff

writer since 1987.

 

RELATED STORIES

ANNALS OF EATiNG

FAST-FOOD NATION

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL


w THE FiNANCiAL PAGE
LABOR IN AMERICA
BY JAMES SUROWIECKI

 


 


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