"We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now" The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages

The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage.

Tracing a new labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from across the globe, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now” is an urgent, illuminating look at globalization as seen through the eyes of workers-activists: small farmers, fast-food servers, retail workers, hotel housekeepers, home-healthcare aides, airport workers, and adjunct professors who are fighting for respect, safety, and a living wage. With original photographs by Liz Cooke and drawing on interviews with activists in many US cities and countries around the world, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, it features stories of resistance and rebellion, as well as reflections on hope and change as it rises from the bottom up.

Annelise Orleck is professor of history at Dartmouth College and the author of five books on the history of US women, politics, immigration, and activism, including Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. She lives in Thetford Center, Vermont.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PART I
POVERTY WAGES, WE’RE NOT LOVING IT: ROOTS AND BRANCHES OF A GLOBAL UPRISING

PROLOGUE
Brands of Wage Slavery, Marks of Labor Solidarity

CHAPTER 1
Inequality Rising

CHAPTER 2
All We’re Asking for Is a Little Respect

CHAPTER 3
“We Are Workers, Not Slaves”

CHAPTER 4
“I Consider the Union My Second Mother”

CHAPTER 5
Hotel Housekeepers Go Norma Rae

CHAPTER 6
United for Respect: OUR Walmart and the Uprising of Retail Workers

CHAPTER 7
Supersize My Wages: Fast-Food Workers and the March of History

CHAPTER 8
1911–2011: History and the Global Labor Struggle

CHAPTER 9
People Power Movements in the Twenty-First Century

CHAPTER 10
“You Can’t Dismantle Capitalism Without Dismantling Patriarchy”

CHAPTER 11
This Is What Solidarity Feels Like

PART II
THE RISING OF THE GLOBAL PRECARIAT

CHAPTER 12
Respect, Let It Go, ’Cause Baby, You’re a Firework

CHAPTER 13
Realizing Precarity: “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”

CHAPTER 14
Days of Disruption, 2016

CHAPTER 15
The New Civil Rights Movement

CHAPTER 16
Counting Victories, Girding for an Uphill Struggle

CHAPTER 17
Huelga de Hambre: Hunger and Hunger Strikes Rising

CHAPTER 18
Social Movement Unionism and the Souls of Workers

CHAPTER 19
“Contractualization”

CHAPTER 20
“Stand Up, Live Better”: Organizing for Respect at Walmart

PART III
GARMENT WORKERS’ ORGANIZING IN THE AGE OF FAST FASHION

CHAPTER 21
“If People Would Think About Us, We Wouldn’t Die”: Beautiful Clothes, Ugly Reality

CHAPTER 22
How the Rag Trade Went Global

CHAPTER 23
“The Girl Effect”

CHAPTER 24
“Made with Love in Bangladesh”

CHAPTER 25
“We Are Not a Pocket Revolution”: Bangladeshi Garment Workers Since Rana Plaza

CHAPTER 26
“A Khmer Would Rather Work for Free Than Work Without Dignity”

CHAPTER 27
“After Pol Pot, We Need a Good Life”

CHAPTER 28
Consciousness-Raising, Cambodia Style

CHAPTER 29
Filipina Garment Workers: Organizing in the Zone

PART IV
NO RICE WITHOUT FREEDOM, NO FREEDOM WITHOUT RICE: THE GLOBAL UPRISING OF PEASANTS AND FARMWORKERS

CHAPTER 30
“No Land No Life”: Uprisings of the “Landless,” 2017

CHAPTER 31
“Agrarian Reform in Reverse”: Food Crises, Land Grabs, and Migrant Labor

CHAPTER 32
Milk with Dignity

CHAPTER 33
“Like the Time of Cesar Chavez”: Strawberry Fields, Exploitation Forever

CHAPTER 34
Bitter Grapes

CHAPTER 35
“What Are We Rising For?”

CHAPTER 36
“These Borders Are Not Our Borders”

CHAPTER 37
After the Colonizers, RICE

PART V
“THEY SAID IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE”: LOCAL VICTORIES AND TRANSFORMATIVE VISIONS

CHAPTER 38
“We Can Turn Around the Labor Movement. We Can Rebuild Power and We Can Win!”

CHAPTER 39
Flashes of Hope

CHAPTER 40
Big Ideas, New Models, Small Courtesies Build a New World

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX