[ Something remarkable is happening in fast food establishments,
retail stores, and restaurants across America. You may have seen
photos of it go viral. You may have even experienced it and the
hostess apologizes for extra-long wait times.] [[link removed]]


‘WE ALL QUIT’: HOW AMERICA’S WORKERS ARE TAKING BACK THEIR
POWER  
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Lauren Kaori Gurley
July 23, 2021
VICE Motherboard
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_ Something remarkable is happening in fast food establishments,
retail stores, and restaurants across America. You may have seen
photos of it go viral. You may have even experienced it and the
hostess apologizes for extra-long wait times. _

From the Sisters, Oregon Facebook page, April 22, 2021., Wildfire
Today

 

“WE ALL QUIT, SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE,” disgruntled employees
[[link removed]] posted
in giant letters on a sign outside a Burger King in Lincoln, Nebraska
earlier this month. 

"Almost the entire crew and managers have walked out until further
notice," Chipotle workers wrote in Philadelphia on a sign posted on
the glass doors of their restaurant. 

“Closed indefinitely because Dollar General doesn’t pay a living
wage or treat their employees with respect," retail workers scribbled
in Sharpie
[[link removed]] outside
a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, after the entire store quit en
masse.

In recent months, these mass resignations have been part of a national
reckoning over a so-called "labor shortage." On one hand there are the
businesses that want to continue to pay workers what they've always
made (which is very little). On the other, workers and those who
support them say there needs to be a fundamental reassessment of what
work looks like in the United States.

WHY ARE LOW-WAGE WORKERS QUITTING THEIR JOBS NOW? 

For the first time in more than two decades, fast food, retail, and
hospitality workers have the leverage to resign from their jobs in
protest of decades of deteriorating working conditions, which often
include stagnant wages, unpredictable schedules, and no health care or
paid sick leave.

A better social safety net during the pandemic and a tight labor
market in the fast food, leisure, and hospitality industries is
allowing this to happen. Historically, these sectors are among the
least protected by labor laws and the most precarious workers in the
country; many of them were deemed "essential" during the worst parts
of the pandemic.

"It's an act of protest against abuses and exploitative conditions,"
said Patricia Campos Medina, executive director of the Worker's
Institute at Cornell University. "It’s a sense of empowerment that
workers don’t have to tolerate that kind of abuse."

For decades, large swaths of low wage service work have proved
difficult to unionize because of fissured workplaces and aggressive
union-busting by employers. Now these workers, many of them women of
color—have taken the next best option, protesting through mass
resignation. 

Many conservative pundits have blamed unemployment and stimulus checks
for the labor shortage. In 2020, a relief bill added $600 per week to
state unemployment benefits. This year, that has fallen to $300 per
week, and is set to expire on September 4. But recent academic
[[link removed]] studies
[[link removed](1).pdf] show
that extra stimulus money and unemployment insurance doesn't seem to
have kept low-wage workers from reentering the job market more than
usual. Many workers have just found other jobs, retired early
[[link removed]],
and even died
[[link removed]].

Employment benefits have given workers a little more time to find jobs
and higher expectations in their job search. "Workers have seen during
the pandemic that when lawmakers choose to step in and act and protect
people [via stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, healthcare], work
doesn't have to suck as much. When workers are asked to do tough jobs,
they want to be paid more," David Cooper, senior policy analyst at the
Economic Policy Institute said. "For the first time since the late
1990s, low wages workers have the leverage to demand higher pay. The
workers who walk out of Burger King are using this to their
advantage." 

Historians say this is one of the few moments in modern US history
when precarious, low-wage workers have really had this leverage. "The
other really obvious example of this was World War II when you had
even more government payments to people," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a
history professor at UC Santa Barbara. "It was money to [use to] go
out and find jobs that pay better wages." Then—as today—those
fleeing their jobs in the greatest numbers were people of color and
women.

"Real wages for Black people in Mississippi went up four times,"
Lichtenstein continued. "Some left for jobs in the ports of
California. Women also left lousy jobs and white collar work opened up
which was better. Domestic workers fled their jobs as maids and
cleaners and got steady jobs in hospitals. When you give people an
alternative, they seize the opportunity."

The National Labor Relations Act
[[link removed]] of
1935 grants workers in the United States the right to form unions and
bargaining with their employers for better wages and working
conditions, but fast food and retail workers have long faced enormous
barriers to forming unions thanks to franchised, contracted, and high
turnover jobs. For example, there have been concerted efforts to
unionize McDonald's and Walmart, but these have failed. McDonald's,
for example, maintains that the vast majority
[[link removed]] of
its workers are not employees of McDonald's but work instead for
franchises, and unionization would have to go franchise by franchise,
or McDonald's would have to agree to sit down at the bargaining
table. 

"The workers who are walking out today are at the margins of formal
labor law and standards," Jennifer Klein, a professor of labor history
at Yale University said. "They don't have access to bureaucratic
mechanisms of the state and law to resolve grievances and they don't
have collective power through a union. Low wage workers have so often
been rendered invisible but now they're making themselves incredibly
visible through informal means." 

WHERE ARE WORKERS GOING AND ARE THEY ACTUALLY GETTING PAID MORE? 

While some professionals are quitting because of burnout or
existential crises
[[link removed]],
according to a _New York Times_ article about the phenomenon from
April, low wage workers don't have the savings or other financial
cushion to leave the job market for extended periods of time to
explore passion projects and travel, Cooper says. 

But people are finding better jobs in the same industries, or entirely
new ones. Cooper says the expanded social safety net has left workers
wanting and expecting more, and has allowed them to spend a little
more time out of the workforce looking for the right job. "In general,
unemployment benefits give workers the ability to wait for better jobs
and better working conditions," said Cooper. "They're taking time to
pick the right jobs. Those jobs might be closer to their interests,
closer to what they studied, jobs that are a career rather than a
means to pay the bills."

Still, while employers in certain regions may in fact be offering
higher wages than they usually do, there's no data yet showing that
employers across the board are paying workers more. 

Instead, many companies have resorted to offering hefty sign-on
bonuses and other perks, such as free meals or cash for interviewing.
In recent weeks, Amazon—where workers too are quitting—has offered
enormous sign-on bonuses to warehouse workers across the country. For
example, an Amazon warehouse in the Hudson Valley, New York recently
offered a $3,000 sign-on bonus
[[link removed]] if
workers start before August 1 and work certain shifts.

"Employers are smart too," said Lichtenstein, the history professor at
UC Santa Barbara. "What they don’t want to do is establish a
permanent higher norm, so instead of $15 an hour, they say here’s a
bonus. You can have free lunches. We'll pay for your tuition.
Employers will do anything to not improve wages in a permanent
fashion."

THE MYTH OF AT-WILL EMPLOYMENT

Conservative pundits love to belabor the point that in America,
employment is at-will, and workers and employers alike have the right
to call it quits at any moment. "If you hate your job so much, why not
leave? This is a free country after all," they say.  

In reality, for decades saying "take this job and shove it" to
McDonald's or Burger King has become increasingly hard thanks to the
stagnant wages, a lack of benefits, non-compete clauses, and long
stretches of economic recession that make it very difficult for
workers to build up the kind of savings or emergency fund needed to
quit without going through serious financial distress.  

For the last 40 years, low wage workers across the United States have
seen their pay, benefits, guaranteed hours, and schedules get
progressively worse. Unemployment benefits have been harder to access.
Companies such as Jimmy John's
[[link removed]], McDonald's
[[link removed]],
Carl's Jr., and Amazon
[[link removed]] have
required workers to sign non-compete clauses and no-poach agreements
that extend for months that legally bar workers from going to
competitors in search of higher wages. Low-wage workers don't have the
luxury to quit and wait six months to start working again, as a
recent executive order
[[link removed]] from
the Biden Administration is attempting to address by banning and
limiting such clauses.

"Flexibility to look for better jobs has been eroded intentionally
through policy choices and campaigns to undermine workers' leverage
and ability to expect more from employers," said Cooper. 

 Raising expectations?

 When Ieshia Townsend signed up to work at a McDonald's on the South
Side of Chicago in 2015, it wasn't because she loved the idea of
flipping burgers and working the take out window. She had just had a
baby, and was caring for her mother who had Alzheimer's disease and a
brother with epilepsy. It seemed like the best job she could get. "I
couldn't pay rent," she said. "I couldn't pay lights or gas or cable,
so I went into McDonald's and I said, 'God please make a way to
provide for my mom, son, and brother.'"

 Fast forward six years to this spring, after a year of working in a
pandemic, Townsend quit her job after a bout of panic attacks that
landed her in the emergency room and a recommendation from her doctor
that she quit McDonald's to take care of her health. "It was the
anxiety and the heat. I worked all the way through the pandemic. It
was very stressful knowing I can’t touch my kids when I get home,"
she said.

Part of the mass resignations can be attributed to the fact that the
pandemic has raised expectations for safety and benefits in the
workplace. Jobs that don't offer health insurance and paid sick days
have never been desirable, but now some workers are saying they're
done putting up with them.

"I think the most fundamental fact is that the fast food and
restaurant industries are having a structural shift in how people see
the jobs and what workers and consumers expect of the industry," said
Campos Medina at Cornell University. "Fast food has always been
portrayed as the job of teenagers, not women sustaining families, but
that is what it is. The pandemic revealed that people in these jobs
have no job security, or health insurance, and couldn’t qualify for
Medicaid." 

Townsend, the McDonald's worker in Chicago who resigned, said she's
found now work in the gig economy—which also has its drawbacks
[[link removed]]—and
is testing out different food delivery apps, UberEats, DoorDash, and
Instacart, to see which she prefers. 

"It got to the point where I was having chest pains, my chest was
throbbing and my manager would say 'you're fine' and wouldn't let me
leave, so I just quit," she continued. "I would never work at
McDonalds ever again."

_[Lauren Kaori Gurley a senior staff writer for Motherboard. Writer
her at [email protected]]_

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