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Paycheck Politics: Young Workers are Fighting Back
Around the Kitchen Table Commentary
December 8, 2004
By Lenore Palladino and Heather McGhee
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Young workers today comprise nearly 50 percent of workers in the food service, grocery, and department retail sectors.
by Lenore Palladino and Heather McGhee
In 1970, when the Baby Boomers were entering the workforce, the nation's largest private employer-unionized General Motors-paid an average wage of $17.50 an hour, inflation-adjusted. Today, in Generation Broke's America, the Big Boss is Wal-Mart, and the company's average wage is $8.00 an hour. Wal-Mart's well-documented abuses include requiring off-the-clock labor, discrimination against women, and of course, their staunch anti-union practices. Locked out of higher education by financial aid cuts and tuition hikes, more and more young adults are being steered instead through the revolving doors of Wal-Mart and other low-wage retailers. Across the country, the harsh realities of work in a low-wage economy are wreaking havoc on the incomes and aspirations of young Americans-but they're starting to fight back.
Young workers today comprise nearly 50 percent of workers in the food service, grocery, and department retail sectors. Profits in the retail industry - the king of the low-wage sector-have jumped 158 percent over the average Gen X-er's lifetime. The wealth, unfortunately, has not been shared: today more than one out of every four young adults who works full-time still doesn't clear the poverty line.
Career ladders are virtually nonexistent in food service and retail jobs with few management positions and highly stratified advancement tracks. So the prevailing wage is often the federal minimum wage, which has failed to keep pace with inflation and doesn't protect against poverty. Currently $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage is 30 percent below its peak in 1968, and 24 percent lower than it was in 1979, after adjusting for inflation. This erosion affects the pockets of young workers directly: slightly over half of workers earning $5.15 or less are under age 25.
Another cause for income losses among young workers is the anti-union environment created by employers, worsened by weak and poorly enforced federal labor laws. Faced with an attempt to organize a workplace, employers use all sorts of illegal tactics to stop unionization. Wal-Mart tries to nip pro-union thoughts in the bud by showing all new employees a video that discusses how unions result in the loss of jobs. And it instructs its managers to bust any attempt to unionize.
Although employers are legally barred from interfering with workers' rights to organize, they do so routinely and with relative impunity. In 1969, about 6,000 workers were fired for trying to unionize their workplace. By 1990, that number had soared to over 20,000. Again, young workers are disproportionately affected: in 2001, only 5.3 percent of workers under 24 were union members, compared to 13.9 percent of all workers ages 16 and older.
How can we solve these problems? Some labor unions in industries with large young adult populations are now aggressively courting young workers. Says Mandie Yanasak, an organizer with United Food and Commercial Workers' youth recruitment program, UFCW Rocks, "Our generation grew up in an era of union repression, in a time when unions were blamed for the economic problems in the country. Now our union is 40 percent under age 30. Young people think that they are going to move on the career ladder, and then they get stuck in an underpaid dead-end job." Still, because of turnover, decentralized franchise structure and concerted anti-union efforts, the industries where young workers are the majority have been exceptionally difficult for unions to organize.
Congress could pass the Employee Free Choice Act, removing multiple barriers to unionization to allow millions of workers to bargain for higher wages and better benefits through simple card-check procedures. But the prospects for this legislation passing anytime soon are dim. In the meantime, faced with an intense anti-union climate, today's young workers are organizing themselves to demand their share.
San Francisco's Young Workers United is taking an innovative non-union approach to mobilizing young workers in the food and retail industry on vital issues like living wage, back-pay, and wage and hour enforcement. They were critical to the passage of San Francisco's Proposition L, raising the minimum wage for all workers, including tip workers, to the highest level in the country: $8.50, indexed annually to inflation. A major part of their operation was reaching out to young retail workers in malls and restaurants to "vote themselves a raise", as well as demanding the support of local public college trustees, who had just implemented a 60 percent tuition increase.
They have begun a new campaign to support 180 young Cheesecake Factory workers who have filed for over $1 million in back-pay compensation for denied breaks. YWU co-founder Nato Green began organizing at a Noah's bagel shop where he worked. He was fired for his efforts, but went on to successfully organize bike messengers in the Bay Area, and then founded YWU in 2002.
"In the New Economy, young workers are continually exhorted to better themselves by getting an education," says Green, "but the decks are stacked. I know a bartender whose total back pay from Cheesecake would pay his way through an EMT course he otherwise can't afford."
While the longer-term solution to income erosion is access to higher education for all, there is still a need to ensure that all jobs are good jobs with sustainable wages. Getting young workers involved in the battle for better wages and benefits adds an urgent new voice to the charge.
"Hard Times in the New Millennium: The Fate of Youth in the Bush Years," CEPR
UC Berkeley Labor Center - Research on Young Workers
"Closing the Gap" Income Security Policy Brief, 2004 Demos
Young Workers United
Employee Free Choice Act (UFCW)
UFCW Young Workers Program
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