US labour: High stakes on low pay

The class struggle has come to this: the leading business lobbying organisation in the US is now preparing to step up its scrutiny of the tweets and selfies served up by burger flippers and fry cooks across the land.

The impetus for the surveillance comes from protests planned today in more than 200 cities by activists seeking an increase in pay to $15 an hour for McDonald's and other low-income workers. Funded by the Service Employees International Union, the group known as "Fight for $15", promises "the biggest mobilisation of low-wage workers in US history" - complete with one-day strikes and "die-ins" - to dramatise the plight of Americans who struggle to make ends meet on the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The US Chamber of Commerce will be monitoring social media so that it can respond to any online pictures or accounts of the action that it believes to be exaggerated. Of particular concern, says Glenn Spencer, vice-president of the chamber's workforce freedom initiative, is the possibility that union activists will quickly move from event to event, creating the impression of a mass grassroots uprising for casual observers following the action on the web.

"We pay attention to the tweets and photos the other side puts up," Mr Spencer says. "You need to be more attentive to what is going on online. If they are claiming 200 cities, we start looking through their Twitter feeds, and you gather it is more like 60. There are some where you can tell pretty clearly it's 10 guys with a selfie stick."

Whatever the offline reality, the cyber battle to gain support from the American people points to one of the more surprising developments in recent US labour history. After decades of relentless decline the push by the unions for a higher minimum wage is gaining currency. And their use of social media to rally their troops and to court public opinion is working.

The Fight for $15 effort traces its roots to November 2012, when 200 fast-food workers in New York - assisted, but not represented, by the 2m-member SEIU - staged one-day strikes in support of higher wages. Meanwhile, non-union retailer Walmart was being targeted by a similar effort, called "OUR Walmart", backed by the 1.3m-member United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The big pay-off for the campaigners came in February, when Walmart said it would spend $1bn to lift its minimum wage to $9 this year, benefiting about half a million of its workers. McDonald's then said this month that it would raise its minimum wage to $1 more than the local standard for about 90,000 workers at 1,500 company-owned restaurants, The move, however, did not affect workers at the 90 per cent of its outlets that are owned by franchise holders.

Although President Barack Obama's call for a $10.10-an-hour federal minimum wage has little chance of success in the Republican-controlled Congress, more left-leaning cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have approved measures that will lift their minimum wage to $15 later this decade.

Such successes are out of character for the US labour movement. Unionisation rates have fallen from nearly 35 per cent of wage and salary earners in the 1950s to 11.3 per cent last year. Only 6.6 per cent of private sector workers belong to a union. Even in the old industrial Midwest, the movement is losing its appeal. In March Wisconsin became the 25th state to enact a "right-to-work" law, making it harder for unions to negotiate contracts requiring that all workers belong to a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment.

Yet the minimum-wage campaigns show US unions are capable of making lemonade with the lemons available. Instead of simply protecting the prerogatives of their shrivelling ranks, they are seeking benefits for workers that they do not represent. It is a risky strategy because there is no guarantee that the workers being helped will ever wind up paying dues to any union. The achievement at this point, according to one of the architects of the successful Seattle minimum-wage campaign, is starting to repair the public image of a labour movement that has lost its lustre.

"We aren't winning dues, we are winning workers," says David Rolf, president of SEIU Local 775, representing 43,000 long-term healthcare workers in Washington and Montana. "One of the criticisms I would have about the incumbent labour movement is that it was all too often concerned about members first and not justice for all. If we want to rebuild the brand, we have to make the reality different. Too many unions were about the 400-page contract for their members and didn't care about anyone else."

The union argument today is that the minimum wage is not a living wage. A study released this week by the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the US government spends $153bn a year on food stamps and other assistance for low-wage workers, many of whom are adults raising children.

Jessica Davis, 26, who supports a son on the $9.28 an hour she earns at a McDonald's in Chicago, says she joined Fight for $15 after being approached by an organiser at the restaurant where she works. "Although I always thought I deserved better as an employee, I didn't know other people felt the same way," she says. "I went to a meeting and found a lot of people felt the same way."

The corporate case against raising the minimum wage boils down to simple mathematics; lifting wages for workers at the lowest rung means fewer people can be hired. But union arguments are being buttressed by economists who say paying more can reduce turnover, increase productivity and lure discouraged workers back on to payrolls.

The minimum wage issue is also gaining prominence in other developed economies as they struggle with the weak average wage growth that has followed the financial crisis. Germany has introduced its first national minimum wage in response to a rise in low-paid jobs over the past decade. In the UK, low pay will be a key issue in next month's general election.

The US campaign to increase the minimum wage has clearly been aided by the emergence of social media. Even as the influence of the institutional labour movement is eroding, wage earners today only need a smartphone to shape history - and shake up the Chamber of Commerce.

Without this means of communication, for example, minimum-wage employees would be difficult to organise. Many work irregular shifts and some lack a fixed address, "couch surfing" with friends or relatives or sleeping in shelters or on the streets, according to Kendall Fells, organising director of the Fight for $15. Yet with a mobile phone, such employees can keep in touch with each other and influence people in places they could never afford to visit.

"I have been fascinated seeing workers spontaneously engaging in actions in different parts of the country because they see workers doing things," says Ken Jacobs, chair of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley. "There are some places where no organisers have been."

This transformation of workers into opinion shapers can also hit businesses where it hurts. Gone are the days when corporations such as Walmart or McDonald's could dominate the discussion about their brands with a stream of 30-second advertisements on a small number of television networks. Consumers, particularly of the millennial variety,are relying on social media contacts for information about brands, and that increases the incentives for employers to keep their workers from complaining about their lives - either at work, or on Twitter or Facebook.

The name of the game in corporate public relations today is to be seen as a "progressive employer", says Marian Salzman, chief executive of Havas PR North America. Raising the minimum wage or granting other benefits makes workers less likely to join a union and more inclined to sing the praises of their company. "It's almost like the greatest defence is an offence," she says.

Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble and now chief executive of an eponymous consultancy, says brands benefit from employee "advocates". He adds: "High-growth companies look at their people in a different way - as an extension of the brand. Advocacy is great marketing. Now, when it is very complicated to get a mass audience, it is very important."

Walmart raised its minimum wage because it was worried about the quality of service in its stores, believes Brian Yarbrough, analyst at the Edward Jones brokerage. "They have come to realise that having happier and more engaged employees will lead to better customer service, less turnover, fewer training costs," he says.

The question facing the unions is what they will make of the opportunities created by the appeal of the minimum-wage campaign.

Mr Fells - who is "on loan" from SEIU, as he puts it, to help Fight for $15 - emphasises that the effort has two goals: raising the wages of low-income workers; and securing the rights of such people "to form a union without retaliation from their employers".

The US Chamber of Commerce believes the latter reason is the true purpose of the movement. Mr Spencer said the protests are the "public relations offshoot" of a broader campaign to end the current legal separation between fast-food franchises and their corporate parents and push them to negotiate with the SEIU. "I would suggest these new protests are not a new movement," he says. "They are a means to an end and that end is for the SEIU to get collective bargaining rights for fast-food workers."

However, more sympathetic observers hold out the possibility that the labour movement is evolving, becoming more of a social movement that might one day unite low-wage workers from various sectors into a unified force.

Nelson Lichtenstein, history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sees parallels with the strategy of unions in the Progressive era of the early 20th century, before legislation in the 1930s made it easier for them to secure collective bargaining rights.

"We are dealing with one labour market now," he says. "If they improve the labour market at the bottom, it makes it easier to negotiate their next contract in some hospital, or organise janitors somewhere else. That was the idea of the Progressive era - let's improve the situation for the entire working class."

The challenge, he adds, is to find an institutional framework that will support such new activity, an assessment that is shared by Mr Rolf of the SEIU in Seattle. He believes unions need to engage urgently in a variety of experiments - "rapid prototyping", he calls it - to find new ways of raising revenue now that collective bargaining units have lost so much of their influence. "We can debate whether the labour movement was assassinated or committed suicide," Mr Rolf says. "It was probably some combination of both. But we need new models."

It could turn out to be an impossible dream. New business models could elude Mr Rolf and his fellow campaigners and the long decline of the US labour movement might gain pace. But until their fate becomes clearer, it is a good bet these activist-unionists will retain their Twitter followers in high places. They could be on to something.

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