Fight for $15, Minus the Fight

by Ray Valentine on July 4, 2016

The Fight for $15 can add another notch to its belt — the $15 wage is coming to Washington, DC in 2020, and will be pegged to inflation thereafter. Tens of thousands of low wage workers will be getting hourly raises. Remarkably, the victory arrived absent any significant public conflict: the measure to raise the minimum wage was proposed by DC’s business-friendly mayor and passed unanimously by the city council.

The wage hike is not a product of the generosity of the District’s political establishment. For more than a year, the Working Families Party and local unions has been planning to put an initiative on the ballot in the November election, and polling put support for the measure at nearly 90 percent, meaning that a $15 minimum wage is even more appealing to DC voters than legal weed. Passing this bill allows the government to preempt the ballot measure. The mayor and the city council acted so they could take control and take credit for an increase that would have happened with or without them.

Since $15 was essentially guaranteed, most of the debate over the recently-passed legislation dealt with the details. The most controversial issue was the minimum for tipped workers, which had been left at $2.77 an hour the last time DC raised its minimum wage in 2013. The ballot initiative would have raised the tipped minimum to the full $15. The mayor’s proposal would have put the tipped minimum at $7.50, and the bill that escaped the council would only raise it to $5. The compromise was difficult for DC’s left to swallow, but tipped workers are notoriously poorly organized, and there was little that could be done to overcome the strength of the restaurant lobby.

By seizing the initiative and raising the wage, relatively conservative forces may be able to outmaneuver labor and its allies on other issues. In public appearance, the mayor is already pushing back against other proposals for protective labor legislation — notably paid family leave and a “just hours” bill that would give service workers more predictable schedules — by saying that employers won’t be able to implement them along with a big wage hike. Fresh from applauding the mayor’s action on the minimum wage and endorsing her preferred candidates in the primary election, labor will have little legitimacy to attack her and her allies as anti-worker if they torpedo other reforms, or gut them on the way to passage.

Some compromises are inevitable and a wage increase doesn’t become a loss because other reforms don’t succeed. But the campaign for $15 in DC has been compromised in a deeper and more dangerous way: participation by rank-and-file workers has been extremely limited. When workers are involved they aren’t participating in militant action or learning to mobilize their coworkers or building organization at the point of production. Union and non-profit staff and functionaries seem to outnumber workers at any given campaign event.

$15 in DC is a surely a victory, but we won’t win more if we can’t be critical about what it means to win. We can’t take individual “wins” as abstract tokens we can count to measure the success of the left. Campaigns for reforms aren’t just opportunities to change a law, they are opportunities to build movements. We can change the law without changing society, and if we do, we lose while winning.

Slouching towards $15

The leadup to the minimum wage increase was a curiously tame spectacle. Three years ago, DC’s last minimum wage increase was passed on the heels of an unsuccessful campaign to impose a $12.50 minimum wage on big box retailers. In the course of defeat, the cluster of unions and community organizations backing the measure adopted a fairly confrontational approach, disrupting city council meetings, aggressively confronting local elected officials on the campaign trail, organizing large and raucous rallies, plastering the city with attacks on opponents of the bill, etc. The surprising outpouring of support for such a narrowly-targeted piece of legislation drove the city government to pass what was at the time the highest minimum wage in the country. That burst of energy did not cohere in any kind of sustainable organization form, and in 2016, no similar mobilization occurred.

Across the country, the demand for $15 was driven by high-risk, high-visibility protest actions by fast food workers and others struggling to survive on poverty wages. Critics on the radical left have noted many of the limitations of the “strikes” organized by the SEIU-backed Fight for $15: that they focus on public opinion rather than on disrupting production or exercising power on the shopfloor, that they are stage-managed by union functionaries and do not prepare workers to self-organize and take the lead in struggle, that they contain only a tiny minority of workers in any given business. But surely some organization, some struggle is better than none. In the District, insofar as minimum wage workers have been involved, they have been marched out by unions and worker centers to testify at long, boring hearings and press conferences. In recent years, there have been precious few successful unionization drives in DC’s low-wage service sector, and those that have occurred have been largely isolated from legislative efforts to raise the minimum wage or strengthen labor rights in other ways.

The official Fight for $15 campaign has eluded DC almost entirely. The closest approximation has been the Change to Win union federation’s Good Jobs Nation campaign, which has organized one-day strikes by service workers employed in federal buildings (but not by the government). Good Jobs Nation, however, has been laser-focused on the Obama administration, demanding executive orders to establish labor standards for federal contractors, and the actions have waned since some partial victories in early 2014. The impact of these actions on DC politics and the consciousness of other low wage workers in DC appears to have been minimal.

Beyond the workplace, the campaigns for $15 have been tied to the development of independent left political forces. The most prominent of these was Kshama Sawant’s city council campaign in Seattle, which demonstrated the intensity of support for a $15 minimum wage and gave supporters of the measure a venue in which to organize themselves. Having won $15, Sawant and her supporters could turn their attention to other ambitious reforms, notably a drive to overturn Washington State’s prohibition on rent control.

Any opportunity to use the campaign for $15 to organize a similar left wing political that could ratchet DC politics to the left over the long haul was squandered. The Working Families Party has sought to find a foothold in the District for years, and it presumably launched its ballot initiative in the hope of building a local base. DC ought to be fertile ground for Working Families: it’s a liberal city governed by a fairly conservative Democratic establishment, with seats on the city council reserved for non-majority parties (although in recent years, Democrats realized they could game this system by changing their registration to Independent a few months before an election), but as of yet neither WFP nor any other left-wing formation has been able to establish an electoral alternative.

Unfortunately, the imperatives of getting a measure on a ballot and winning an election are very different from those of movement-building. The ballot initiative campaign needed to sprint to collect enough signatures, so there was no time to train a base of activists to have meaningful conversations or forge relationships with the constituency they hoped to represent. Rather than relying on supporters to do the legwork of the campaign on a voluntary basis, the campaign depended on paid canvassers. To get the minimum wage on the ballot, Working Families hired much of the canvassing operation that had successfully passed Initiative 71 to legalize marijuana in DC, with prominent pot activists assuming prominent roles in the campaign. There is no doubt that legalizing weed was a worthy cause, but this was hardly an example of working class power in action.

In recent years, DC has seen a wave of new labor protections: two minimum wage increases, paid sick days for all workers, “ban the box” legislation to restrict employers’ ability to ask applicants about a criminal record (though reforms of this type may have perverse effects), and a measure to combat wage theft. With a few exceptions, these have been achieved with progressively less conflict, and so their passage has not depended on or led to a significant uptick in self-assertion by DC’s working class.

Without a people’s army the people have nothing

Socialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries understood it was their mission to “shape the struggle of the working class into a conscious and unified one and to point out the inherent necessity of its goals.” Reforms were pursued not just to improve workers’ immediate conditions, but to organize them as a political force, educate them, and reveal those aspects of class society that were ultimately unreformable. For the classical socialist movement and for many other radicals, winning reforms was an essential running start towards taking the revolutionary leap into a different kind of society. The experience of fighting for power would prepare people to take power.

Too often, this strategic outlook is missing today. Activists play whack-a-mole with social problems, launching reactive campaigns to respond to this or that injustice without developing forms of organization that can hold ground and gather strength to win qualitatively bigger things. This is a great loss. Even those of us who do not see revolutionary transformation on the agenda need to look beyond changing policy and consider how politics can reshape the consciousness and forms of activity of ordinary people in their everyday lives.

The obstacles facing the left, however we want to define it, are far greater than bad policy; the very organizational forms that allow ordinary people to take collective action are collapsing. The labor movement is bleeding out, and if it dies, much of the institutional capacity to achieve incremental wins will be lost. In the most nakedly practical terms, the Fight for $15 costs a lot of money, and if unions continue to see their base eroded the spigot will be turned off. We cannot deceive ourselves that a legislative win here or there will reverse the slide, or that artificial growth that depends on bosses’ consent to an organized shop makes up for what is being lost.

Ultimately, the power of unions (and we can generalize this rule to any organization of the oppressed and exploited) depends on the solidarity and militancy of their members, their willingness to defy hierarchy, and their ability to fuck shit up. Developing those capacities to exercise power at a hyper-local level like the shop floor is a necessary foundation for the recomposition of the working class as a political subject. Without mass, participatory organizations we won’t get more reforms, much less revolution.

More immediately, popular power is necessary to give real force to legislative victories. Past gains are under constant attack, and formal changes in policy frequently fail to fix the problem they were designed to address. Laws do not enforce themselves, and capitalists innovate constantly to find strategies of exploitation that are not fettered by the law. We can see this play out in DC, where progressive legislation that has been passed without conflict has done little to close the yawning socioeconomic divide.

Victory in statute books, defeat on the shopfloor

The passage of a law should never be seen as a final victory, since mere existence of a law does not enforce that law: after all, it is illegal to sell cocaine or to discriminate on the basis of race. Ultimately workers must defend their own rights, and if they are unorganized they are poorly positioned to do so. A critical consideration of how existing laws are enforced is necessary to understand where the implementation of the new minimum wage could founder.

Labor laws are not proactively enforced. In DC, as in most American jurisdictions, there are no factory inspectors dropping in on employers to ensure that they pay the minimum wage, obey workplace safety rules, and actually deliver mandated benefits. To exercise those rights, a worker must take their case to the Office of Wage-Hour, which may investigate and adjudicate the claim, and then only after an invariably lengthy wait during which the boss continues to control their livelihood. Formally, workers are supposed to be protected from retaliation; practically, it is nearly impossible to stand up to the boss without a network of support.

Protections for low-wage workers are deeply deficient: an investigation of labor markets in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago found that two thirds of workers have their rights violated on a weekly basis and that roughly $3 billion worth of wages were stolen each year in those cities alone, with the average poor worker losing more than $2,600 over the course of a year. The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that wage theft costs Americans more each year than all criminal thefts, robberies, and burglaries.

In DC, a wage theft prevention act passed in 2014 is supposed to crack down on non-compliance with labor law, but local government’s track record does not inspire confidence. After DC mandated paid sick days for all workers, 42% of employers surveyed by the District’s auditor self-reported that they were non-complying. A survey of workers by an employment rights nonprofit placed the figure closer to 70%.

In some cases, low wage workers may find satisfaction from state administrative apparatus, but it can be just as effective (and far, far faster) to self-organize and take the law into one’s own hands. Unionized workers are best positioned to take advantage of any advance in labor law, since they are most likely to be prepared to take action in the workplace and they are connected to an institution that has the resources to mount a long legal challenge to the boss. But even as labor wins political victories, fewer and fewer workers are connected to unions or any other form of social organization that can help them fight.

This is why winning reforms without building organization that can promote creative participation, solidarity, leadership development, and direct action is a not a complete victory. A law that cannot be enforced by the people it is supposed to protect is just a piece of a paper. For politicians, journalists,volunteer activists, and professional advocates the recent march of progressive legislation is a basis for pride and burnished resumes, but people who actually have to live with results may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about.

Raising the property question

Capital cannot abide a limit, and it adapts rapidly to any regulation that threatens profitability. Even if employers find it difficult to avoid paying the $15 minimum, they can adapt their business practices in other pernicious ways. If workers have no say about how workplaces are run, higher minimum wage may accelerate many of the trends in the degradation of labor that are already visible. Ultimately, it is extremely difficult to resist these strategies without “bringing the property question to the front,” and challenging capitalists’ unquestioned right to organize production and with it the lives of the workers. Needless to say this is only possible when workers are organized enough to call the boss’s absolute power to govern the workplace into question.

In the absence of powerful working class organization, bosses have an arsenal of strategies to keep a higher hourly wage from hitting their bottom line. Some in DC are likely to have hours cut back and workloads increased, as other low-wage workers have after high profile wage increases by prominent low wage employers. Others will have their jobs automated away, without any concurrent expansion of social insurance to protect them. More and more workers in some of DC’s most dynamic industries, from construction to parcel delivery to pet care, will find themselves misclassified as independent contractors and falling into the burgeoning “1099 economy.”

The breakdown of the implementation of labor law is one of the most glaring examples of the state’s class character. The United States has built a vast carceral state to punish some lawbreakers, but it does not turn its coercive powers on the owners of capital. And it’s not just labor protections that go unenforced; America is a lawless place for poor people being plundered.

DC is a particularly good example, since the breadth of formal legal protections for ordinary people is matched by the dysfunction of the systems designed to deliver those protections. While the District boasts of some of the strongest tenant protection laws in the country and a public office dedicated to advancing tenant rights, landlords systematically ignore the housing code, allowing slum conditions to persist for years, even in developing neighborhoods, without fearing serious repercussions from the city regulatory agency. Meanwhile, creative ways to wiggle out of rent control are some of the most impressive innovations in the real estate sector. DC banned payday loans, but “payday advances,” auto title loans, and other exploitative financial instruments designed to separate the poor and desperate from their money are still widely available, Despite a highly publicized years-long campaign by the local water authority to replace the city’s lead pipes, school kids are still drinking tainted water. And the list goes on.

There really is no substitute for the self-organization of workers that can regulate and contest the evolving techniques of exploitation capitalists roll out on the shop floor and throughout society at large on a day to day basis. Certainly, the capitalist state cannot be trusted to do the working class’s job for it. Should it be so surprising that the institutions that prosecutes the drug war against black and brown communities and deports hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year decline to turn around and defend those people when they enter the workplace?

There is no change in policy that can substitute for real organization that helps ordinary individuals stand together and protect themselves. The unions and other expressions of popular power are as weak as they have ever been, and we cannot assume they are coming back in a form we would recognize. If the left is going to be relevant, it needs to struggle constantly to rebuild these institutions, or to develop new ones that can take their place. If we participate in struggles, advance legislation, and fail to build that kind of organization, we can claim victory, but we have already set our future defeats in motion.