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.
“This is a well-documented introduction to unionization efforts by often marginalized, behind-the-scenes workers.”
—Booklist
“Powerful, sobering, and timely, this is a much-needed global examination of poverty wages.”
—Foreword Reviews
“Stunning in its breadth and impact, filled with vivid characters from many countries who speak in as many languages, the book is an epic achievement—it shows us globalization from the perspective of the people who do its work. It is proof that a superb historian can reveal the often hidden present as well as the past.”
—Linda Gordon, author of The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition
“With common sense and a lot of fire, low-wage workers across the globe are building social movements. Crafted with corazón, this book is a crisply paced, panoramic labor history of the here and now.”
—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
“‘We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now’ is a vivid rendering of the human impact of free trade policies and neoliberal restructuring across the globe. Annelise Orleck tells the stories of members of the global ‘precariat’ in the Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh, the US, and elsewhere, and their struggles for a living wage. A welcome addition to courses on social inequalities, social movements, and social change, it will shift how students see the hamburgers they eat and the clothes they wear.”
—Professor Arlene Stein, Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University
“On motorcycle and foot, through crooked streets, public squares, coffee shops, and parking lots, Annelise Orleck takes us on an inspiring journey across Asia, the Americas, and Europe into the world of low-wage organizing. With an ethnographer’s eye, historian’s perspective, and activist’s passion, she not merely charts the precariousness of work under a rapacious capitalism but captures the power of protest to transform lives. A must for classes in Labor, Globalization, and Gender.”
—Professor Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
“‘We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now’ is essential reading for any law student or legal professional seeking to harness law in service of social justice. As she illuminates the precarity uniting workers around the globe, Orleck calls out the laws and legal structures that have failed them, while also highlighting creative legal strategies for demanding dignity and basic security.”
—Professor Karen Tani, Assistant Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley
“What happens when an accomplished social movement historian turns her gaze on the present? This wonderful and urgent history-of-the-present. I often struggle with finding powerful and evocative treatments of contemporary social movements that measure up to the riveting, richly contextualized histories we have for the civil rights era. This book does that—and embeds US struggles in a global movement for anti-poverty wages and humane conditions.”
—Professor Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
“From hundreds of small stories of vulnerability and resistance, Annelise Orleck skillfully weaves an inspiring global narrative of protest, coalition and empowerment—a narrative essential to students of oral history, testimony and witness, and activism in the face of a global economy of indifference and disposability. This is a model of engaged scholarship, empathic and respectful toward its subjects, enabling to its readers.”
—Professor Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University
“Bursting with the heartrending voices of the precariat—a majority of them low-wage women workers who service the world—this book captures the unspeakably inhumane working conditions and courageous determination driving the global uprisings against unrestrained capitalism. A must read for students of history, women and feminist studies, class and labor, race and ethnicity, and international studies, it is a twenty-first-century grassroots primer for social justice organizing, and a clarion call to exalt human beings over the insatiable hungry ghosts of profit and consumption.”
—Rhonda Y. Williams, author of Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century, and Professor and John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History, Vanderbilt University
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
- “The Global Struggle For A Living Wage With Annelise Orleck,” WORT/A Public Affair (Madison, WI), interview
- “#MeToo Meets McDonald’s” WNYC/On the Media, interview
- “Debra Granik’s cultural highlights,” The Guardian, listed as 2018 cultural highlight by Debra Granik
- “Annelise Orleck with Heidi Groover: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages,” KUOW/Speakers Forum, recording Seattle Town Hall event
- “Annelise Orleck and the ‘New Face’ of Contemporary Feminism,” The Progressive, interview
- “The Precariat Class: We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now,” Seattle Town Hall, correspondents’ podcast
- “The Teacher Strikes Show That Workers Are Really, Finally, Fed Up,” Fast Company, feature
- “‘We’re All Fast Food Workers Now’ author Annelise Orleck talks about the national movement for better wages,” Real Change, Q&A
- “Annelise Orleck & Liz Cooke: We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now,” Jamaica Plain Forum, recording of JP Forum event
- “A global worker uprising: ‘Things are bad enough for enough people,’” Street Roots, Q&A
- “An Excerpt from ‘We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, excerpt
- “Globalizing the Fight for a Living Wage,” WNYC/Midday, radio interview
- “Interview with Annelise Orleck,” WNHN/The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen (NH podcast), interview
- “From Vermont to the Philippines, ‘We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now,’” VTDigger, interview
- “Interview with Annelise Orleck,” WDEV/The Dave Gram Show (VT), radio interview
- “Global struggle, global action: Low wage labor organizes worldwide,” WNUR/This Is Hell!, live radio interview
- “Page 32: Short Takes on Five New Vermont Books,” Seven Days (VT), included in book roundup
- “Inside The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages,” Fast Company, feature
- The Jacobin, Q&A, 2/28/2018
- Mother Jones, Q&A, 2/28/2018
- Ms. Magazine (online), excerpt, 2/27/2018
- Bitch Media, excerpt, 2/26/2018
- Truthout, Q&A, 2/25/2018
- The Guardian (US), excerpt, 2/25/2018
- History News Network, adapted excerpt, 2/25/2018
- Salon.com, excerpt, 2/24/2018
- Off Kilter with Rebecca Vallas (Center of American Progress podcast), interview, 2/23/2018
- Talk Poverty (through the Center for American Progress), excerpt, 2/22/2018
- Truthout, excerpt, 2/22/2018
- Valley News (NH/VT), feature, 2/22/2018