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**JULY 27, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Our Most Successful Economic Justice Movement

What's the most successful economic justice movement of the past
decade? The Fight for $15.

In 2012, a handful of New York fast-food workers walked off the job for
a day, demanding that their hourly wages be raised to $15-hardly a
munificent sum for anyone living in the Big Apple. Organized by New York
Communities for Change (led then by the late Jon Kest) and the Service
Employees International Union, the demonstration sparked what was to
become a nationwide movement funded by SEIU.

Nine years after this relatively piddling beginning, what has this
movement accomplished? A report

out today from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has totaled up
all the municipal and state minimum-wage hikes since the movement began
to put pressure on elected officials. To date, those increases have
boosted the incomes of a little more than 26 million workers-18
million of whom are women, 12 million of whom are workers of color. Even
as the federal minimum has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, cities and
states not controlled by Republicans have been boosting their
minimums-most impactfully, both California and New York, which each
enacted $15 statewide minimums in 2016 (following the lead of such
cities as Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles).

NELP calculates that all the increases amount to $151 billion, which
comes out to an average of $5,300 per worker.

By a different metric, however, the movement hasn't been a success at
all. Its original, and enduring, demand was expressed by its slogan:
"$15 and a union." But while cities and states can legislate
increases to the minimum wage, they can't make it less daunting for
private-sector workers to try to form or join a union. By the terms of
the completely dysfunctional National Labor Relations Act, the rules
governing unionization are set exclusively by the federal government,
where Republicans and the occasional right-wing Democrat have blocked
all efforts to change the NLRA so that employers can no longer
intimidate their union-seeking employees.

When the movement began, SEIU had hopes of unionizing the nation's
immense fast-food workforce. Constrained by the unamended NLRA, however,
the union hasn't picked up a single new member in fast food.
Nonetheless, recognizing that the movement was succeeding in raising the
wages, living standards, and economic security of millions of workers
through legislated minimum-wage hikes, SEIU persisted for many years in
spending tens of millions of dollars on the campaign-for which its
president, Mary Kay Henry, would win the award for Foremost Poverty
Fighter of the Last Decade, if such an award existed. It doesn't, but
let's make one up and give it to her anyway.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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