Stop fighting over CRUMBS, Join the #Fightfor15!
This radical fight will be won, and we won’t stop here. We are coming for the whole pie.
Shout out to the #FightFor15 strikers and protesters. This movement is brilliant, courageous, and needed. The fight for a living wage is heavily gendered and racialized. If you look to see who’s getting paid the least, who occupies the most jobs, and who has the most to gain from pay equity, it’s women of color. Unlike other movements, the #FightFor15 boasts the leadership of everyday black women demanding dignity and respect and holds the potential to bring an immediate improvement to the living conditions of black people, communities of color and working people everywhere.
When I organized in Pittsburgh, black organizers led the charge exclaiming that #BlackWorkMatters. Many of them came straight from the hood like me and they pulled from the radical black organizing tradition of our ancestors. Throughout this struggle, haters have sought to delegitimize this movement; statements like “those burger flippers don’t deserve $15/hr, I don’t even get paid $15/hr, and my favorite, well why don’t you just find another job,” have sought to pit workers against each other usually by convincing white working men to put their boot on someone else’s neck rather than their corporate overlords.. Well ladies, gents, and gender nonconforming folks, prepare for this drag.
Who has the right to tell people what pay they deserve? Does the person making your McSandwich not deserve to be able to eat healthy and have a warm place to lay their head at night? In fact if minimum wage had kept up with overall worker productivity and income growth , those burger flippers would be getting paid a lot more than a modest $15 an hour. There is no place in the U.S. where individuals, let alone families, can afford rent making a minimum wage without working well over 50 hours per week and in DC it’s 100 hours! How could that leave time for anything in a person’s life besides work? It is inhumane to work people this way. No matter the work, everyone deserve a living wage and deserves a life off the clock.
Instead of fighting over crumbs, we must unite in resistance to the forces of greed, racism, and sexism that keep all of us from getting paid fairly. In the words of white Appalachian #FightFor15 organizer, Nic Smith, white workers have a responsibility to reject “the notion that the color of our skin makes us more politically valuable or our issues more pressing.” Capitalists deceive us into fighting over crumbs, while walking away with the whole dessert. We must decolonize our false sense of scarcity and realize that we have an abundance of people power and a world designed to provide us with an abundance of resources.
The path begun by the #FightFor15 is for a fighting labor movement tasked with distributing resources equitably and sustainably. Ultimately, the workers are the producers and the wealth belongs to us. This radical fight will be won, and we won’t be stopping here, we are coming for the whole pie.
