Beyond the Fight for $15 in Philadelphia
Over the past few years, the Fight For $15 movement has been spreading fast around the U.S. and globally, and Philadelphia is no exception. According to a recent study by the Shift Project at Berkeley, Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among the nation’s largest 10 cities, and has about 100,000 retail and fast food workers. This creates an environment ripe for political advocacy of workers’ rights.
In Jane M. Von Bergen’s recent article in the Philadelphia Citizen, a local solutions journalism publication, she discusses a movement building off of the momentum of Fight for $15: the Fair Workweek Initiative. This movement works to address the inconsistent and volatile nature of scheduling hourly workers, which exacerbates the financial insecurity and personal instability low-wage workers already struggle under from insufficient compensation.
The article begins with a narrative of a local low-wage worker to share their struggles, and mentions the Initiative’s rally in Center City to demand that local lawmakers propose legislation to fix the issue. It then goes on to discuss the legislation enacted in Philadelphia and other states and cities revolving around shift scheduling regulations. This focus beyond the work of individuals or organizations and the greater response to the issue is one of the major elements of solutions journalism, according to the Solutions Journalism Network.
While the impact of legislation is hard-hitting for most businesses, the road to legislation is long, convoluted, and often inaccessible to everyday citizens. Bergen turns to discuss the company-based perspective of the push for scheduling solutions; automation and cutting jobs puts low-wage workers in an even more precipitous situation because they have less collective bargaining power, and jobs are in higher demand than supply. In any case, businesses tend to work out threats to their bottom line in their employee’s payroll, despite the minimum wage being far below a living wage and even further below productivity.
It seems that there are two main avenues for the consolidation and enactment of workers’ power: government legislation, as discussed previously, and unionization. Unions are often a touchy subject in America, and specifically in the media; that being said, it seems to be a perfectly valid avenue for worker representation and consolidation of bargaining power, and its absence from the article as a potential medium for solutions was intriguing. Apart from listing organizations worthy of support in these endeavors (Center for Popular Democracy, One Pennsylvania) and promoting a public display of civic engagement with the issue, it is unclear from the article what everyday actions citizens can participate in that seek to disrupt and re-balance the power inequalities of the employer-employee relationship.
The last component of a solutions journalism piece that seemed to be missing from Bergen’s article was providing insight on the effectiveness of the movement. It provides in great detail what types of regulations New York state has enacted to provide scheduling benefits to low-wage workers, but the tangible effects on those worker’s lives were sparse. This point in the article, before moving to the effects on businesses, would have been a great moment to re-introduce the narrative and provide a real-life example of what this kind of legislation would have on workers, perhaps even in the subject’s own words.
Overall, the Philadelphia Citizen does great investigative and solutions-based journalism, and this article is no exception. However, by the definitions of solutions journalism provided by the SJN, there are some missing elements that could have really helped to bring home an already insightful and well-researched article.
