The Fight for 15 movement of fast food workers will vote on affiliation with the Service Employees International Union, members say. They will not yet pay dues.

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Fast food workers are on the cusp of joining one of the country's largest unions, after staging years of protests that helped revive public interest in the labor movement and turned a $15-an-hour minimum wage into a national political issue. On Saturday, representatives of the Fight For 15 movement met with Mary Kay Henry, leader of the 2-million member Service Employees International Union, at a labor convention held in Detroit. After an agreement reached at the meeting, members of the Fight For 15 will now vote on official affiliation with SEIU, which has supported the movement with its money and resources since its inception. If the cooks and cashiers across the country vote "yes," the result will be an unorthodox, "twenty-first century union," in Henry's words — one formally part of the union system, but with members who will not pay dues to the SEIU, at least for the time being. "We have never let an outdated labor law stand in the way of workers being able to stand together," Henry told BuzzFeed News. "We did it 90 years ago for janitors, 40 years ago with every public employee, and 15 years ago for home care workers." In each of the industries Henry named, workers followed unconventional paths towards unionization, ultimately overcoming technical or legal obstacles to become dues-paying members of the union.

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Though there have previously been reports of grumbling within the SEIU over the union's financial support of the Fight for 15, which is made up primarily of non-dues-paying workers, Henry says that the movement has demonstrably paid off for union members since its launch nearly four years ago. "Every one of our members has had a different experience at their bargaining table as a result of this movement," she said. "At a time when they used to bargain 5-cent and 25-cent raises, they’re getting a dollar and two dollar raises. Those kind of wage increases haven’t been seen in our generation and they are a direct result of our members linking arms with fast food workers." What began as a relatively cautious, quiet experiment in supporting new organizing tactics will now be an explicit, in-house plank of SEIU, in a victory for Henry, who had championed the fight from its beginning.

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The franchised nature of the fast food industry makes traditional unionization — which ends in official recognition by the National Labor Relations Board — challenging to pull off. But the SEIU and the Fight for 15 have long committed to sitting down with McDonald's at a bargaining table, by whatever means necessary. In an interview with BuzzFeed News Thursday, Henry said that major fast food employers have long agreed to bargain with employee unions internationally, so negotiating with organized workers in the United States would not even represent a major policy departure. "This wouldn’t be a big new step," she said. "Eventually McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King should sit at the national bargaining table with them and agree to recognize their union just as they’ve done in other countries around the world." Members of the National Organizing Committee of the Fight for 15 will now return to their respective cities and begin voting among their membership to establish consensus among fast food workers on joining SEIU.

Other details of the membership structure of the national fast food workers union will be determined "democratically," said Henry, but "it's not the biggest concern."

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