This year’s Super Bowl LIV in Miami, Florida, was, by all accounts, a successful event. One team’s fans were filled with victorious joy, the other’s with the agony of defeat; the bombastic halftime show with megastars J.Lo and Shakira got tongues wagging; and the NFL raked in the kind of eye-popping profits that are inconceivable to normal people.

It was, in other words, business as usual for the biggest night in American football, which had fans paying upward of $1,000 per ticket—$214,749 marked 2020’s priciest resale ticket—for the privilege of watching a heavily marketed clash of the titans. And that’s without even factoring in all those inflated prices for food, travel, and accommodations: Flights to Miami jumped 50 percent for that weekend, and the price for an average hotel room in the city catapulted up to $500 per night.

At its gilded core, the Super Bowl is an annual carnival of excess that makes the bread and circuses of Roman antiquity seem quaint in comparison. But this baroque celebration of America’s favorite not entirely lethal combat sport made for a stark contrast with the struggles experienced by Miami locals far outside the orbit of the glittering Hard Rock stadium. And so it came to pass that the airport catering workers of Unite Here Local 355 decided to take a stand against the garish, confetti-strewn backdrop of Super Bowl LIV.

On January 27, 2020, workers represented by the local launched a campaign they dubbed “Fast for Our Families” at Miami International Airport, in order to draw some of the eyes trained on the city toward their plight. Nine workers from Miami as well as New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis set up an encampment in the airport’s Terminal D departures area. This contingent of strikers pledged to forgo all food for the entirety of Super Bowl week. As Sky Chefs worker Ibis Boggiano Santiesteban said on the second day of the campaign, “We are doing a six-day fast so that American [Airlines] listens to us and knows about our sacrifice to win fair health care and a living wage that we deserve for the work we do for them.”

Most airport workers in Miami-Dade County are covered by a living wage mandate that passed back in 1999 and expanded in 2018 to include workers at various establishments within the airport. But catering workers are an unhappy exception. Through a quirk in its permit with the county, Sky Chefs is bound only by the state minimum wage, which, at $8.46, is $5 below the number set for an hourly wage by the county’s living wage commission. According to Unite Here, the average hourly salary for a Miami Sky Chefs worker is $12.25.