by Nicholas Hefling
In 2014, we won a $15-an-hour minimum wage in Seattle. One year to the day before it passed, Nick Licata, then the most “progressive” city council member in Seattle, told us, “There’s no way that $15 can win in Seattle.” I was working as a community organizer with Working Washington, a nonprofit created out of a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) campaign. What passed was a watered-down version, phasing in the minimum wage over time according to employer size and other factors. Still, Seattle became the first major city in the country to enact a $15 minimum wage, amidst hysterical cries from the far right that the city would immediately crash (surprise, they were wrong).
We had been organizing worker committees in the fast food sector, a tough industry by conventional union standards. One of the workers I organized with Beatriz, was an undocumented woman whose third language was English, after her Indigenous language and Spanish. She had left rural Mexico close to a decade earlier in search of economic opportunity to provide for the two kids she had to leave behind. She worked full time at two McDonald’s, one corporate-owned (rare for the company) and one owned by a franchisee. At the corporate store, she’d gotten regular, though extremely meager, raises over the years. At the franchise, she hadn’t gotten a single raise in the seven years she’d worked there. In the weeks before the vote, she had been organizing her coworkers to share their testimonies with the city council and the press about why being frozen at the state minimum of $9.32 was ruinous for workers in Seattle. After the news broke that we’d won, she called me to say, “Now I will finally be able to see my children for the first time in seven years.”
That story is so potent because it shows the power of organizing, even for something that was, in the end, an extremely modest, incremental increase to the minimum wage. When unions reach out to the unorganized, and when workers come together in solidarity, they change the trajectory of their lives, their workplaces, and the world. She and her coworkers had done more than fight for a raise; they had united for a shared vision of dignity. Organizing is itself the work. It is the shared sacrifice of our individual time and energy in order to collectively struggle towards dignity for all
Over a decade later, there’s ludicrous raving about AI destroying all work. The billionaire class pontificates on how this technology will usher in some sort of socialism, but first we just have to give up everything to the richest people on earth because “they know what they’re doing.” In this evolving context, I can’t help but think of Beatriz’s story. The relationships we build with one another will always yield tremendous discovery about ourselves and others as we penetrate the mystery of existence together. Machines can never take away what is most central to our being — solidarity.
Union organizing is more pertinent than ever. It’s a direct challenge to the AI and environmental crises we face with the billionaire scourge destroying the planet, and it’s available to all of us, right now. Whenever and however we work, we interact with coworkers, bosses (or algorithms, in the case of gig workers), and clients of one kind or another. Organizing simply requires fellow workers to come together toward a common goal despite the differences between them, differences that are necessary for democracy.
This is why union organizing lends itself so beautifully to political organizing, or rather, why they are the exact same thing. We do not choose our coworkers, and they can represent a wide swath of society, but it is through organizing that we learn to bridge the supposed barriers between us to build toward dignified wages and working conditions. This means actively listening to and cultivating sincere relationships with people who don’t already think as we do, not relegating ourselves to the politics of identitarian “purity” that cynically perpetuate the crisis we find ourselves in.we do, not relegating ourselves to the politics of identitarian “purity” that cynically perpetuate the crisis we find ourselves in.
One thing is clear — there will never be a shortage of work, only a shortage of imagination. That we can envision the end of the world before we can imagine the end of capitalism is telling. Our collective imagination is depleted, and the machines, with their attention-capturing algorithms, risk making this symptom even more acute as we outsource even our most trivial thinking to them. Getting rid of tedium isn’t inherently a bad thing; forfeiting our ability to understand our world is. Real thinking and organizing orients itself towards conflict. This is diametrically opposed to the notion of a perfect frictionless life sold by AI firms. Struggle is infinite and is a necessary condition for being human.
Nicholas Hefling is a longtime union staffer and local area labor organizer.