Here’s a good—and by good I mean terrible—example of the lengths to which American bosses will go to deny their workers a living wage. Low-paid contract workers in the Senate fought hard to get the word out that, while they’re serving senators, their low wages forced them to work second jobs and still scrape to care for their families. The group of janitors and cafeteria workers held one-day strikes. Bernie Sanders rallied with them before the pope’s visit. They fought hard, and they won … sort of.

The company that directly employs the workers agreed to give them substantial raises. But, the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell explains, the story didn’t end there. After the new wages were agreed on, workers started getting called into the manager’s office, where they were told they had new job titles.

“I’m a cook, and I’ve always been a cook,” said 45-year-old Bertrand Olotara. “Now suddenly he’s telling me I’m a ‘food service worker.’ ” Olotara’s duties didn’t change; he’s still cooking burgers, eggs and Philly cheesesteaks, just as he always had. But his title matters. See, wages in the new contract were occupation-specific. And lo and behold, “food service worker” falls into a lower tier than “cook.” Rather than getting the big raise Olotara expected as a cook — which would have upped his pay to $17.45 — he was entitled to just $13.80 as a “food service worker.”

Olotara isn’t the only one with this basic story. Good Jobs Nation, the group organizing the workers, has filed a Labor Department complaint. The workers may end up getting the raises they were promised, the raises they earned for the jobs they were—and still are—doing.

But they wouldn’t have gotten raises without organizing. They wouldn’t have a chance of winning without labor laws and federal employment rules that tell bosses ”you can’t do that.” And too many other workers across the country face the same kind of low wages, the same kind of rat-bastard bosses, without the attention-getting hook of working in the Senate and without the help of unions and organizing groups. As it is, these advocates are stretched too thin by the magnitude of the opposition they face from giant corporations, and the individual rat-bastards they employ and train to screw workers whenever possible.