Fight for $15: The Limits of Symbolic Power—Juravich Comments on Ashby

Steven Ashby is right to mark the achievements of the Fight for $15. As he reminds us, this national campaign brought wage increases to nearly twenty million American workers during a time when union density fell to below 7 percent. Equally important is the way in which the Fight for $15 forever redefined low-wage work in the United States. Much like the occupy movement altered the discourse on inequality, I would argue that Fight for $15 forever changed how Americans think about low-wage work.

As Ashby laments, despite these accomplishments, there has been no shortage of ad hominem critiques of the Fight for $15. Many are rooted in a larger critique of the Service Empoloyees International Union (SEIU), which is a major backer of the Fight for $15. Ashby wants to look past these dismissals and take a sober look at the prospects for Fight for $15 moving forward. Here, he brings his training as a labor historian to bear along with his work chronicling both the fight at A. E. Staley and the win by the Chicago Teachers Union.

Looking first at the tactics of the Fight for $15, he makes a strong defense for the use of one-day strike as effective to maximize impact while minimizing potential harm to workers. He underscores not only the media attention they have garnered—which he sees as a fundamental part of the campaign—but that they are transformative for the workers involved which is at the core of any social movement. In addition, he suggests that these one-day strikes have in some cases resulted in real improvements to local working conditions.

Critics have argued that too few workers are involved in these one-day strikes to build a real foundation for organizing in fast food. Ashby responds by looking historically and arguing for the role of a militant minority in organizing. Drawing from the Flint sit-down strike, and the more contemporary fights at Republic Windows and by the Chicago teachers, he argues that movement building always starts with a militant minority.

Finally, Ashby sees community solidarity as pivotal for the success of the Fight for $15. Here, he chides organized labor for being less than supportive of the Fight for $15 and underscores the need for increasing levels and more militant support from labor and community allies alike. His analysis suggests that massive labor and community efforts will be necessary to transform the Fight for $15 into a vital social movement.

Beyond a brief mention in his introduction, Ashby does not articulate the efforts by the Fight for $15 in raising wage through referendums and legislative action at the state and local level. To date, many of the biggest victories have been when local community–based efforts have been used to fuel larger campaigns at the municipal or state level to increase wages. In many ways, his article explores extending the Fight for $15 beyond these current political efforts to workplace ones moving forward.

But by looking primarily at the tactics of Fight for $15, Ashby backgrounds an analysis of the larger strategy of the Fight for $15. The closest he comes is when he suggests that “The Fight for Fifteen goal is to create such bad publicity that a company like McDonald’s chooses unionization to end the protest and to gain the positive publicity of the first food chain to treat its workers with respect.” Unpacking this argument requires us to step back and interrogate conceptions of power and theories of change.

Drawing on Wright (2000) and Silver (2003), it is important to distinguish between structural power that is a result of the firms’ location in the economic system and institutional power—a product of the state and other regulatory processes. They also identify associational power that derives from working with other organizations. Brookes (2013) has updated this concept in the current context to the notion of coalitional power. Finally, drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu Jennifer, Chun (2009) adds the role of symbolic power in contemporary labor and community struggles.

To date, the Fight for $15 had largely worked building symbolic power through one-day strikes and media campaigns. As I suggested above, they have been very successful in changing public perceptions of low-wage work, and in the Gramscian sense of changing hearts and minds of Americans. They have then very effectively used this symbolic power along with short-term coalitional power to affect change to wage laws and other employment standards. In the process, they have realized the power that this “naming and shaming” around the poor wages and horrific working conditions of low-wage workers has over progressive politicians and those striving to be considered progressive.

To date, we have seen these changes in the most progressive state and municipalities. The question that remains for the Fight for $15 is how far can this movement expand beyond the low hanging fruit on both coasts? We have also seen more than beginnings of a fight back in more conservative states passing preemption statutes preventing municipalities from setting local wage levels and other employment standards (National League of Cities 2017). Funded by the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is spearheading preemption legislation across a large number of states.

Ashby is less interested in this political question, but focuses more on how to continue the Fight for $15 as a workers’ movement. Here, I concur with Ashby that this will not be possible without massive support by labor and community–based organizations. While this increased militant support is necessary, I am not convinced it will be sufficient as long as the strategy of the Fight for $15 remains only on symbolic power and the creation of bad publicity on a firm with thirty-three thousand facilities, and sixty-eight million customers in 111 countries. While Ashby refers to a decline in McDonald’s sales since the beginning of the Fight for $15, there are a number of factors affecting the fast food industry and their sales, and a causal argument can’t be made here. And while McDonald’s officials have not taken the low road in terms of their rhetoric about wages and their worker, this is still a very long way away from the creation of jobs with dignity, respect, and fair wages.

While the “naming and shamming” approach may have been successful against politicians, I would argue that it will take real structural (economic) leverage to bring massive companies like McDonald’s to heel. The success of the Flint strike that Ashby writes about was not just about the militancy of the workers, but that the union had targeted Fisher Body Plants 1 and 2 because they were the only facilities that manufacture body parts, and a strike there had a direct economic impact on the firm.

Bringing economic pressure against a firm like McDonald’s is not simple but needs to be central to the strategy of the Fight for $15 moving forward. Given the size of the firm, both creative research and strategic thinking will be necessary to develop focused, targeted approaches, exploring secondary targets, the supply chain, and a myriad of possibilities. Building on their successful tomato campaign against Taco Bell, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers scored a victory against McDonald’s. Paying a few cents more for tomatoes is very different from organizing McDonald’s workers, but there is much to be learned from the campaign. And while the Fight for $15 has from the beginning rejected individual union elections, it may be time to focus resources and attention to organize a specific “union city” rather than to continue low-level campaigns across the country.

Peter Olney reflects on the limits of bad publicity in his postmortem of the OUR Walmart campaign that the United Food and Commercial Union (UFCW) pulled its support for last year.

OUR Walmart was a public relations irritant to the company, but it never was a strategic challenge to Walmart’s power or its business model. Perhaps the campaign contributed to recent increases in minimum wages; perhaps it contributed to the growing national conversation about increased inequality; perhaps Walmart’s recent increase in its starting hourly wage to $10 was result of this campaign (though it may also have been the result of tightening labor markets because other employers have raised their wages as well). But none of these is “organizing,” and none builds a powerful union. (Olney 2015)

Ashby, like Rolf (2016) and Rosenblum (2017), argues that the Fight for $15 offers a model for a different kind of unionism. Both Rosenbaum and Rolf are very articulate about what this new model of union is not – a bureaucratic, slow moving instituted rooted in the post-war accord – but they are much less clear about what this new labor movement will look like. That efforts at using symbolic power and short-term coalitions have been effective in impacting minimum wages cannot by itself be the basis of a new labor movement, as Olney suggests.

Ashby alludes to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as a possibility for a new model of unionism. But twenty-first-century mega firms like McDonald’s are fundamentally different from the local employers that the IWW organized in the later part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twenty-first century, which sets real limits on what can be achieved workplace by workplace without a contact or larger institutional framework. As Steven Ashby has articulated, the important work on the ground by the Fight for $15 has built an important foundation for a new workers’ movement, but there is still much work to be done.