[This book is a must-needed introduction to the rising
international labor movement against the neoliberal wage and labor
regime.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

“WE ARE ALL FAST-FOOD WORKERS NOW”:  
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Thomas J. Adams
May 1, 2019
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
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_ This book is a must-needed introduction to the rising international
labor movement against the neoliberal wage and labor regime. _

,

 

“We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising against
Poverty Wages
Annelise Orleck
Beacon Press
ISBN: 978-080708177-8

In the decade since the global financial crisis there has been a
noticeable increase in attention to contemporary labor militancy,
particularly on the part of workers in industries that many
commentators have not traditionally associated with workplace
militancy. Workers in home health care, discount retail, and food
service, particularly fast food, among other industries have seen
their struggles for better wages, conditions, and security garner, at
the very least, a broader understanding of the workplace dimensions of
contemporary American inequality. Despite an ongoing rise in deeply
punitive immigration enforcement, undocumented immigrants have
remained heroically undeterred in their labor activism. Beyond the
national borders of the United States, the demands of capital that
link uprooted farmers, sweatshop laborers, fast-food workers, and
consumers of all backgrounds into an interlocking web of global profit
making, inequality, and exploitation have also come into sharper
relief in recent years.

In _“We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”_ Annelise Orleck has gifted
scholars, students, and the general public an indispensable
introduction to these trends from the perspective of those most
affected (or rather, exploited) and those who are trying to fight
back. Structured in a manner more reminiscent of a series of
dispatches rather than a traditional monograph, _“We Are All
Fast-Food Workers Now”_ sprawls over five discrete sections and
forty relatively brisk chapters. Moving between the Philippines,
Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, and the United
States, with plenty of other stops between, Orleck’s book presents
not so much an argument as a portrait of the multitude of ways that
diverse people who make up the global working class are forced to work
for wages to (just barely) get by and how they are fighting back for
better conditions and lives.

One of the great strengths of the book is that Orleck is clearly
conscious that the stars of this study, for lack of a better term, are
the diverse cast of workers and activists organizing on the ground
against entrenched power, violence in fact and threat, and so often
the longest of odds. Her voice comes through clearly at various
moments, and she gives much needed analysis of context ranging from
the North American Free Trade Agreement’s relationship to the
declining fortunes of small Mexican farmers to the political context
of a variety of shifts in the governance of the Philippines, but it is
the voices and sophisticated analyses of workers themselves that
Orleck rightfully highlights. This style makes the book nothing less
than a godsend for the contemporary classroom. Courses and teachers
not just in labor history and studies but American, world, and global
history, sociology, anthropology, American studies, and gender and
sexuality studies will all be able to make use of this book. It would
be easy to imagine—as this reviewer indeed did while reading
it—how to use Orleck’s book as a kind of textbook or guidebook for
a whole class, taking her analysis and reporting of different trends
and events as a starting point for deeper contextual, historical,
ethnographic, and political economic study of topics ranging from
agrarian restructuring to the political and economic dominance of
antidemocratic global economic bodies to the deep interrelationship
between gender and class.

Given the book’s unique format, compelling foregrounding of worker
and activist voices, and clear pitch at nonspecialist audiences,
quibbling with its analysis would seem a bit unfair. This is a book
above all about incredibly inspiring people engaging in a range of
solidaristic actions. As the dispatches from fast-food workers,
sweatshop employees, immigrant agricultural laborers, and university
adjuncts come rapidly one after the other, readers are left with a
clear sense of the tremendous sacrifices being made for what at times
might seem to some to be relatively small gains: twenty cents more an
hour or a couple of extra minutes’ break here, an ever so slightly
less arbitrary management or a bit more accommodation for pregnant
workers there. The net effect is a clear and compelling argument that
what unites such divergent struggles beyond the global tentacles of
McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Nike, and countless other twenty-first-century
versions of Frank Norris’s _Octopus_ are two truths. First, that
around the world the power of workers to exercise meaningful power in
their workplaces and over their economic lives is exceedingly low,
and, second, the degradation of work and workplace power has made even
seemingly small but nevertheless important positive change both
incredibly difficult and dangerous.

Where I wish Orleck gave a bit more analytic commentary is in the
social and political contexts of some of these successes. One of the
book’s opening dispatches concerns the 2015 hearing before the
Brazilian Senate that brought together McDonalds workers from around
the world to tell stories of injury, exploitation, and wage theft that
bear remarkable similarity regardless of nation. This moment serves to
open the hopefulness of the stories in the book, as clear global
solidarity and collective interest develop out of the experience of
this diverse cohort of people united by their work experiences. Left
largely unsaid in this account is the 2015 control of Brazilian
politics by the Brazilian Worker’s Party (WP) that allowed for and
encouraged such hearings to take place in the first place. Similarly,
the book ends on a rightfully hopeful note regarding the success of
community benefit agreements for worker friendly development projects
in locales like Los Angeles where the “traditional” labor movement
maintains substantial power in municipal politics. There is of course
a mutually reinforcing relationship between successful bottom-up
organizing and the existence of political power that is sympathetic to
labor issues or can at least be made to be sympathetic through
instrumental means. Indeed, there is no better example than the WP’s
thirteen-year dominance of Brazilian politics. In her understandable
zeal to tell the inspirational stories of those fighting back against
the forces of unfettered capital accumulation around the world, this
institutional side of the equation occasionally fades far into the
background.

Nevertheless, in my imagined future class on contemporary global labor
struggles, such context will be the stuff of explication week to week,
while Orleck’s monumental achievement and the hundreds of voices she
highlights will guide us from the beginning to the end.

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