Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Morning demonstration
at McDonald’s (photo: Charles Nelson)
March arrives from
City College
Workers stand tall as
backdrop for rally speakers
MeCHA contingent
shows Latino solidarity
Drummers added energy
to the speeches, but sometimes made them hard to hear
Simone Fillmore
(center)
LaTanya Klein
LaShayne Harris
Joanne Apuro Hester
While the 12
remaining Republican presidential candidates were debating in Milwaukee on
November 10 over which one could do more to screw America’s working people and
make our tax system even more favorable to the rich than it already is,
millions of Americans were taking to the streets in over 200 cities to demand
an increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15. The
three-year-old “Fight for 15” movement organized a nationwide day of action
November 10 that included several protests in San Diego, beginning with a march
targeting fast-food outlets and ending with a noisy, inspiring rally at the San
Diego Civic Center.
The “Fight for
15” movement began in 2012 with a one-day strike against McDonald’s, Jack in
the Box, Wendy’s and other national fast-food chains. According to “Fight for
15” advocates, the fast-food industry has built its economic success on the
relentless underpayment and exploitation of its workforce. Now that it’s a
major sector of the economy, activists say, it needs to give back a fair share
of its profits to its workers — especially now that, contrary to the public
image of fast-food workers as primarily young people on their first job,
learning how to function in the work world, an increasing number of them are
mature adults trying to raise families on the pittances fast-food outlets pay.
Simone Fillmore,
whose impassioned words led off the evening rally at the Civic Center, is one
such person. “I am a mother, a wife and a fast-food worker,” she told the crowd
of over 500. “I’m tired of being held back from things I can’t afford. We are
tired of being targeted for being poor and Black. My life should be respected
as much as a white person’s. … Families like mine cannot survive on the poverty
wages the big corporations pay. … We deserve to live our daily lives without
public assistance.”
LaTanya Klein,
whose speech — punctuated by drums and other noisemakers from the union
representatives and others stationed behind the speakers — was even more fiery
than Fillmore’s, represented another chronically underpaid group of workers the
“Fight for 15” movement has mobilized: in-home caregivers. “My primary client
is my husband, a Navy veteran with severe eye problems and impaired mobility,”
Klein said. “Is it fair that our veterans are not getting quality care? Is it
fair that home care workers make less than $10 an hour, with few benefits and
no sick leave? Our clients are mostly poor people, and government is trying to
balance the budget on their backs. That’s why we need to join the Fight for
$15.”
Though three
elected officials — California Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, Assemblymember
(and former labor leader) Lorena Gonzalez, and San Diego City Councilmember
David Alvarez — addressed the rally, the focus was on ordinary workers and labor
organizers. One African-American man, who didn’t identify himself when he
spoke, said he was there “to represent different faith traditions” and had
participated in one of the early “Fight for 15” events in City Heights.
“Some people
said our movement wouldn’t make it, that we would lose hope, our movement would
not last,” he said. “Today our movement is standing tall. We are standing for
$15 an hour and the right to form unions. We are tired of people getting up
early, going to bed late, working more than one job and still not having enough to pay rent. … We are saying to
McDonald’s and all the corporate giants making record profits off our backs
that we will win!”
This speaker
mentioned some of the other cities and states that have raised the minimum wage
to $15 per hour. The same day as the nationwide mobilization, New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo signed a bill raising that state’s minimum wage to $15. It’s also
passed in Los Angeles and Seattle. But in the November 3 election, after the
city council in Portland, Maine voted to raise the city’s minimum wage to
$10.10 per hour, a voter initiative to take it to $15 lost. In Tacoma,
Seattle’s neighboring city, dueling initiatives to raise it to $12 and $15 both
passed, but because the one for $12 got more votes, it’s the one that will take
effect. California’s statewide minimum is scheduled to go up at the end of
2015, but only to $10 per hour.
In San Diego,
thanks largely to opposition from the business community and the Republican
Party, workers can’t even get the minimum wage up to $12. City Councilmember
Todd Gloria took his minimum-wage proposal down from over $13 an hour to $11.50
and got it through the Council on a party-line vote, with six Democrats in
favor and three Republicans opposed. Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer vetoed
it, but the six Democrats were able to override. (Since then one of the
Democrats has left the Council and been replaced by a Republican.)
But the business
community didn’t accept even the increase to $11.50. Instead, the San Diego
Regional Chamber of Commerce (currently headed by former Mayor Jerry Sanders,
another Republican) and other business groups spent lavishly to get a measure
on the June 2016 ballot reversing the hike in the minimum wage. So San Diegans
will have a chance to vote on whether the city’s minimum wage should be raised
— and given what happened the last time the business community put an issue
before voters, when they spent huge sums of money to propagandize against the
Barrio Logan community plan and won an overwhelming victory against it, the
odds would seem to be against minimum-wage advocates making the former
Council’s action stick.
When former
Mayor Sanders spoke at the Chamber’s October 2014 press conference announcing
their success in stalling the minimum-wage increase and putting it before
voters, he made one of the most common arguments against raising the minimum
wage: that it would threaten the survival of small businesses. “Many small
business owners would have joined me here today, but decided not to,” he said.
“Some have come forward in the past but have suffered through their businesses
being picketed and their livelihoods being threatened because they stood up and
expressed concern. It’s time for the City Council to fight for the city’s job
creators, or at minimum, listen to them.” Indeed, Sanders asked the City
Council to repeal the minimum-wage increase themselves instead of putting it
before voters.
Councilmember
Gloria, who was the Council’s president when the minimum-wage increase passed
but was later removed from that office in a palace coup engineered by the
Council’s Republican members in association with Democratic Councilmember
Sherri Lightner, was incensed at the delay in the minimum wage increase.
Workers earning the minimum wage “will not have additional help to keep a roof
over their heads and put food on the table for themselves and for their
children,” he said. Gloria also savaged the hypocrisy of the Chamber and other
business leaders. “It is surprising that the very same people who led the
(referendum) effort and advocated for placing this on the ballot are now asking
this council to rescind and to not let the voters decide,” Gloria said. “That
is very disappointing.”
(Source for the
last two paragraphs: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2014/oct/20/city-council-decide-whats-next-san-diego-minimum-w/.)
Raising the
minimum wage remains controversial among economists. Depending on their overall
political orientation, economists differ as much as elected officials do about
whether minimum-wage increases are good or bad for the economy. The November 10
edition of the PBS NewsHour featured
Alan Kreuger, former chair of the federal Council of Economic Advisors under
President Obama, arguing that the economy could sustain a raise in the minimum
wage to $12 per hour, but $15 would be too much.
“An increase to
$12 at the national level [from $7.25] is a considerable increase,” Kreuger
said. “It would put the minimum wage above where it’s been in the history of
the United States. And if you move it up to $15 an hour nationwide, I’m
concerned that that is well beyond what we’ve seen in past research. And if I
were advising the President today, I would say I think that’s a risky level.”
(Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/?post_type=bb&p=162159.)
The candidates
running to succeed Obama as President in 2016 break on the issue pretty much as
you’d expect them to. Insurgent Democrats Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley
both favor $15 per hour. In fact, Sanders was shown on the same NewsHour as Alan Kreuger thanking the “Fight for 15” movement
for raising the issue. “They have had the impact of moving Los Angeles, San
Francisco and other cities to raise the minimum wage.” Democratic front-runner
Hillary Clinton takes the same position as Alan Kreuger — she’d support $12 per
hour but not $15.
No Republican
Presidential candidate favors raising the minimum wage at all. Indeed, one
early Republican Presidential candidate who has since left the race, Wisconsin
Governor Scott Walker, publicly questioned whether minimum-wage laws should
exist at all. In two different comments, Walker said, “I’m
not going to repeal it but … I don’t think it serves a purpose. … The
Left claims that they’re for American workers and they’ve just got just really
lame ideas — things like the minimum wage.” (Source: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/walker-dismisses-minimum-wage-lame.)
The economic arguments for and against raising the minimum
wage are relatively simple. Opponents say a higher minimum will discourage
businesses from hiring new workers and will lead them to cut the hours of
people they already have. Supporters say a higher minimum will actually benefit businesses because higher wages mean that people have more
money to spend, which will create new customers, stimulate the economy and thus
allow businesses to make more money.
But the people who turned out for the “Fight for $15”
actions weren’t concerned about economic theories or dueling studies and
statistics about what a higher minimum wage would accomplish. They turned out
because many of them are workers making minimum wage themselves and are tired
of the day-to-day struggle involved in attempting to live on it. “How can you
pay people below what they’re worth?” asked African-American activist and
minister LaShayne Harris. “Fifteen dollars is important, but it’s also
important to build a progressive San Diego.”
The last speaker, Joanne Apuro Hester, national president
of the Asian-American Political Alliance and a union organizer for home-care
workers, said, “Home-care workers are mostly women and people of color, and
they make one of the lowest wages. About 50 percent of African-Americans and 60
percent of Latino workers are paid less than $15 an hour. We join all workers in this effort. We must win, not just for home-care
workers but all low-paid workers in
this country.”
