As hundreds of low-wage workers gather in Richmond, Virginia, this weekend for a union-backed convention on the minimum wage, the organizers behind the campaign are fighting their own battle for union recognition.
During the Fight for $15 Convention, workers and organizers hope to collectively call on the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to recognize organizers behind the campaign as employees and allow them to join its workers’ union.
Labor unions such as the SEIU have been the driving force behind the Fight for $15 movement – providing it with resources and funding – in the hopes that when the fast-food workers get their higher minimum wage and decide to unionize, they will join their unions. In 2014, the SEIU spent as much as $24m to fund eight workers organizations that make up the Fight for $15 movement.
“There is not a price tag you can put on how this movement has changed the conversation in this country. It is raising wages at the bargaining table,” SEIU president Mary Kay Henry told the Guardian last year when asked about the spending.
Considering their close ties to the SEIU, the Fight for $15 organizers want it to recognize them as employees. This would allow them to join the Union for Union Representatives (UUR). In May, the International Business Times reported that more than dozen organizers signed cards wanting to join the UUR and that as many as 100 organizers should be covered.
“Our strikes have been with SEIU since the beginning. We know our organizers are SEIU. Everyone on the campaign knows,” said Adriana Laguna, who works as a cook at a Burger King in San Diego. “We are prepared to stand with them until they have their union and SEIU recognizes them as their employees.”
As SEIU makes racial and economic justice a focus point of its convention, organizers ask that they also be the focal point of SEIU as an organization.
“SEIU must be the change we want to see in the world, starting by ending their own discriminatory employment practices. With the racial and gender disparities that currently exist on the Fight for $15 campaign, it must begin with Fight for $15 staff,” said Shola Ajayi, organizational equity committee chair at UUR.
“We are engaged in a process of understanding how to support the organizers in the Fight for $15, many of whom are already represented by a union. SEIU believes that all working people should have a voice on the job and wages that they can raise a family on, which they can achieve by joining together in unions,” said an SEIU spokeswoman.
