Raising the Floor by Andy Stern

Author:Andy Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610396264
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

EN ROUTE TO A NEW AMERICAN DREAM

EARLIER, ANDY GROVE’S insights on the strategic inflection point helped galvanize my thinking about the impact technology was having on jobs, work, and the middle class. But then, in April of 2014, I had an experience that brought the issue home to me in a very visceral and personal way. I was at the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina and saw the premiere of the documentary The Hand That Feeds, which had been written, directed, and produced by the socially conscious young filmmakers Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick.

Lears and Blotnick tell the story of one man’s courageous fight to organize a small group of restaurant and bakery workers at the Hot and Crusty Bagel Cafe on East 63rd Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Mahoma Lopez, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, makes sandwiches at the café. The film reports that the café’s affluent clientele do not realize that Lopez and the other immigrants behind the counter work as many as twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for sub-minimum wages and without vacations, health insurance, or overtime pay. Lears and Blotnick also reported that employees risk getting fired if they call in sick.

The situation gets so intolerable that Lopez, the shy sandwich-maker, is compelled to speak out against these degrading conditions and persuade his co-workers to unionize. For two months, Lopez and his co-workers go without pay as they picket Hot and Crusty—an act of defiance all the more courageous in light of threats to turn them into the Immigration and Naturalization Service and face the all-too-likely chance that they will be deported. Members of the fledgling Occupy Movement occupy the café in solidarity with the strikers. Hot and Crusty’s owner follows through on his threat to close the café before he’ll accept a union. But in the end, with the support of a talented group of lawyers and organizers and a new owner willing to recognize the union, Lopez and his twenty-two co-workers win a contract with benefits—a rare victory for organized labor in an era when so many powerful people are trying to bury it.

Along with the rest of the audience, I jumped to my feet as the film ended and applauded the workers and organizers who had worked so hard to achieve this inspiring win. However, as I left the theater, I found myself getting overwhelmed by a different emotion—a wave of doubt and despair that was deeper than any I’d experienced since I realized that Congress would not be passing the 2009 Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for unions to organize workers. At the end of fifty-two days of some of the most brave, creative, and thoughtful organizing efforts I’d seen in decades, only twenty-three workers had benefited directly from the strikers’ victory. Multiply their efforts by a thousand—or even ten thousand—and you’d make only the smallest crack in the great wall of inequality that now divides the wealthiest 1 percent from the other 99 percent of America’s families.

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