FAST food workers walked out of their restaurants all around America last week for the seventh time in nearly two years – to demand a pay raise to $15 per hour and the right to unionise.
In New York City, 21 workers were arrested for sitting in the middle of the street outside the McDonald’s in Times Square. More than 50 protestors were arrested for similar acts of civil disobedience in Detroit. Another 50 were detained in Chicago.
The strikes, which began in November of 2012, have been organised by the group Fast Food Forward (FFF) and bankrolled by the Service Employees International Union, which has spent more than $10 million on the cause.
These walkouts haven’t led to any unionised McDonald’s or Taco Bell franchises yet, but are a spearhead for a broader living wage movement also seen from retail workers at stores such as Walmart.
The FFF/SEIU effort has been startlingly effective. For the cost of a few Super Bowl ads, the SEIU and some dedicated fast food workers have rewired how the public and politicians thinks about wages.
Over the last two years, 13 states have increased their minimum wage, as have 10 city and county governments.
Seattle voted to raise its citywide minimum to $15 an hour by 2018; San Francisco residents will vote on whether to do the same in November. The mayors of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have all backed a $13 wage floor. The President has come out in favour of a $10.10 national minimum.
• In Lafayette Tennessee, pressures from the big tobacco corporations, competition from cheaper tobacco grown overseas and deregulation by the federal government have driven out small growers.
The surviving farms expanded to agribusiness enterprises on hundreds or even thousands of acres, to triple the size of five years ago while the demand for labour-intensive work has far outstripped the available or willing workforce in rural Tennessee.
In the 1980s there were 36,000 tobacco farms in Tennessee, cultivating fewer than 5 acres each. By 2012, the number dropped to 935.
Gabino Luna crossed the Mexican border illegally at age 16 to rural Macon County where he heard there was work to be found in Tennessee’s tobacco fields.
Now 19, Luna is working his third harvest, a dawn-to-dusk, six-days-a-week job, his back bent most of the day machete-slicing the long, sticky stalks at their roots, impaling them onto spikes before hanging them from barn rafters to dry.
Luna represents the new face of Tennessee’s centuries-old tobacco industry — a teenage migrant worker from Mexico unaccompanied by his parents, forgoing an education and labouring long hours for little pay to produce tobacco for the nation’s big cigarette corporations.
Just a decade ago, the state’s tobacco industry was dominated by small family farms where tobacco had been raised as a small cash crop for generations.
The labour shortage has prompted growers to hire illegal workers, unaccompanied teens, in unsafe working conditions – and little or no oversight by federal or state governments.
A recent report by Human Rights Watch found ‘tobacco’s hidden children’, with some as young as nine working in Tennessee’s tobacco farms.
Efforts to regulate the industry to better protect those workers have faced pushback from agribusiness and rural lawmakers in Tennessee and elsewhere.
They argue new rules interfere with a long-standing tradition of American family farm life in which children learn values of hard work while doing chores on their parents’ farms.
Tennessee lawmakers opposed to regulation of tobacco farms are among the biggest recipients of tobacco corporation campaign contributions.
‘These are children who are resigning themselves to a second- or third-grade education to work 80 hours a week so they can send money home to their family,’ said Karla Campbell, an attorney representing minors injured on tobacco farms.
‘It’s not character building. A lot of them have severe injuries. As a 17-year-old, to experience a debilitating injury harvesting tobacco or living in substandard housing with a dozen other men is not good for you.’
Deregulation by the federal government, which used to set tobacco prices, has given cigarette corporations greater leverage. Labour remains the single largest expense.
Tobacco is one of the most labour-intensive crops, requiring 150 to 200 hours of labour per acre, and efforts to mechanise the industry have not been successful.
‘Labour is well over half the cost in producing burley tobacco. It’s difficult to find labour in such quantities. And it’s very seasonal, with high demand in the fall but less so the rest of the year. Farmers have to have a source of people coming in, and it’s mostly Mexican or Central American labour.’
Unlike every other industry, agriculture allows children to work unlimited hours, without parental permission, starting at age 14 – despite efforts by some federal lawmakers to change child labour laws.
The work has left Luna, who hasn’t been to school since he was 12, occasionally sick, nauseated from pesticides and the nicotine that seeps into his skin through constant contact with tobacco leaves. He is short changed at times, when employers don’t pay him promised wages.
‘It’s the chemicals,’ Luna said. ‘You have to pick up the leaves with a special stick to hang them and the drops sting your arms. Sometimes they get into the back of your throat. There’s a burning sensation and nausea and vomiting after a long day in the fields.’
Tobacco is particularly hazardous to minors. Green tobacco sickness, a form of nicotine poisoning acquired through contact with wet tobacco leaves, can cause extreme nausea and vomiting, although the long-term consequences are unknown. It is illegal to hire undocumented workers, but immigration officials rarely conduct enforcement actions on Tennessee farms.
Other tobacco-growing countries, including India and Brazil, have made it illegal for anyone younger than 18 to take part in tobacco harvesting or production because of such hazards.
In response to the Human Rights Watch report, the Council for Burley Tobacco passed its first resolution on child workers, stating, ‘We do not condone anyone under the age of 16 for work in tobacco anywhere in the world.’
Two years ago, the Department of Labor proposed regulations to limit the work of young people on farms not owned by their families. Fatality rates are higher for children on farms than in any other industry.
But the efforts drew the ire of rural lawmakers, including US Representatives Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Brentwood, and Diane Black, a Republican from Gallatin.
Senator Lamar Alexander proposed a bill to prevent the Department of Labor from enacting rules regarding child labour in agriculture, saying they take ‘job opportunities from our nation’s youth’.
Alexander, Blackburn and Black are among the top recipients of tobacco PAC money this year, bringing in respectively $20,500, $15,000 and $26,500.
Black called the proposal a ‘ridiculous regulation that just shows how out of touch bureaucrats in the Obama administration are … Many families with farms use chores as a way to instill a strong work ethic in their children and do so in a safe learning environment.’
Black’s congressional district encompasses some of the biggest tobacco-growing counties in the state, including Macon County and is the single-largest recipient of tobacco subsidies in the state.
• Meanwhile, with the wealth gap in the United States growing – greater already than in any other major country – US Sen. Bernie Sanders has called for a progressive estate tax on multi-millionaires and billionaires.
‘A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little. We need a tax system which asks the billionaire class to pay its fair share of taxes and which reduces the obscene degree of wealth inequality in America,’ Sanders said at the Vermont AFL-CIO annual convention.
He said the fairest way to reduce wealth inequality, lower the $17 trillion national debt and pay for investments in infrastructure, education and other neglected national priorities would be to enact a progressive estate tax on the wealthiest Americans, the top 0.25 per cent.
Under his proposal, 99.75 per cent of Americans would not pay a penny more in estate taxes. For those who would pay more, the tax rate on estates valued from $3.5 million to $10 million would be 40 per cent.
There would be a 50 per cent tax on estates worth $10 million to $50 million and a 55 per cent levy on estates worth more than $50 million.
A 10 per cent surtax would be applied on estates worth more than $1 billion, a category that includes fewer than 500 American families.
The bill also would close estate tax loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid an estimated $100 billion since 2000. On all estates, the first $3.5 million for individuals and $7 million for couples would be exempt from federal taxes.
Sanders’ proposal won praise from leading economists. Robert B. Reich, a former US Department of Labor secretary who is now a University of California at Berkeley professor said: ‘America is creating an aristocracy of wealth populated by heirs who don’t have to work for a living yet have great influence over how the nation’s productive assets are deployed.’
Thomas Piketty, a Paris School of Economics professor, said the US is on the verge of becoming even more unequal than pre-World War I Europe.
Bernie Sanders is the independent US Senator from Vermont, the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.
The growing wealth gap in the US is worse now than at any time since 1928, the year before the Great Depression began. The top one per cent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent.
The richest 400 Americans have amassed more than $2 trillion in wealth, a sum greater than all of the assets of the bottom 150 million Americans combined. One family, the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 per cent of Americans. Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in savings. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty – 22 per cent – than any other major country.
