Organize, Stand Up, Fight, Win

The working class in this country - and fact it: if you're not filthy rich, you're working class - never got a damn thing we didn't fight for.

 

The great part is that when we finally do fight, we win.

 

Gabriel Thompson at The Nation:

Like many students at San Jose State, Castro came from a household where low wages weren’t an abstract injustice. Her parents had labored in California’s fields, and Castro was putting in long hours at an after-school program to help pay for college. At work she kept seeing kids swipe extra snacks because food was running low at home. “Their parents were working nonstop but only making the minimum wage,” she tells me.

Castro knew that San Francisco had raised its minimum wage in 2003 and saw no reason San Jose couldn’t do the same. She pitched the idea, and two other students joined her group, mapping out a plan.

Professor Scott Myers-Lipton, who teaches the Social Action course, estimates that 80 percent of his students work at least thirty hours a week. “I’ve been struggling with paying rent and bills for years now,” says Leila McCabe, a student who joined Castro’s group and eventually became an organizer with the Campus Alliance for Economic Justice. “Something’s wrong when you work hard but can’t make a real living.” This is a common complaint in San Jose, home to Adobe, Cisco Systems and eBay, and recently named the sixth-most-expensive city in the country, with rents increasing at a faster pace than in any other metropolitan area.

Although the students were dead serious, their efforts flew under the radar at the beginning. “As college students, we were able to find our way around a really confusing system,” McCabe tells me. “We weren’t looked at as being a powerful group. We went to all of these meetings, met with City Council members, but many people didn’t take us seriously. That was in our favor.”

SNIP
To qualify for the November ballot, the campaign needed to turn in nearly 20,000 signatures. In a five-week period, with help from the Labor Council, it collected 36,000. This spring, dozens of students gathered on campus at the statues of John Carlos and Tommie Smith, San Jose State alums who had raised their fists when accepting track and field medals at the 1968 Olympics. The students took off their shoes—Carlos and Smith had done the same to protest poverty—and marched barefoot to City Hall to hand over the signatures.

SNIP
Down the home stretch, the Labor Council provided many of the foot soldiers to push the message home, knocking on 80,000 doors and making more than 200,000 phone calls. Also important was the simplicity of the message. “Don’t get into long arguments about statistics,” a trainer told precinct walkers the Sunday before election week. “Keep it simple: if you work hard you deserve a fair wage, and eight dollars isn’t enough.” There are detailed studies showing that increases in the minimum wage don’t cause job loss, but the campaign wouldn’t get bogged down in a complicated fight over data. The strategy worked beautifully: despite being outspent, the coalition crushed the opposition with its message of economic fairness.

On November 6, the movement that began with three students brainstorming in a classroom notched its victory. Nearly 59 percent of San Jose voters backed Measure D, which increases the minimum wage from $8 to $10 an hour (and, just as important, it will rise with the consumer price index). San Jose thus became the fifth city in the country—and the largest—to raise its minimum wage, boosting the earnings of tens of thousands of workers by $4,000 a year. 

They - the plutocrats - think we're stupid.  They think we're lazy. They think we're good for nothing but serfdom. Proving them wrong is easy. All we have to do is organize, stand up and fight.