The Geographies of the $15 Wage Movement: New Union Campaigns, Mobility Politics, and Local Minimum Wage Policies Megan Brown A dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Kim England, Chair Michael Brown Mark Ellis Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Geography ÓCopyright 2017 Megan Brown University of Washington Abstract The Geographies of the $15 Wage Movement: New Union Campaigns, Mobility Politics, and Local Minimum Wage Policies Megan Brown Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Kim England Geography The $15 wage movement has grown substantially since the first $15 minimum wage initiative was passed in SeaTac, Washington in 2013. This dissertation investigates the geographies of the $15 wage movement that has developed in the years since. Taking the form of a three-part comparative case study, this dissertation traces the connections and disconnections between $15 minimum wage campaigns in Seattle, Washington, Chicago, Illinois, and two cities in North Carolina, Greensboro and Durham. Drawing on one year of fieldwork and 101 interviews with policymakers, labor union staff, and activists, it argues that the $15 wage movement is an example of a broader shift in labor organizing that has taken root in the last decade, which takes labor organizing out of its traditional location within workplaces and into broader social, political, and economic geographies. This geographic shift in the location, scale, and organization of labor politics is a long-awaited response to the spatial reorganization of work that occurred gradually beginning in the 1970s, which has changed the potential spatiality of workplace solidarity. This study analyzes the discursive contestations of the $15 wage movement, both nationally and within local campaigns, as the campaign seeks to contest dominant understandings of how the low-wage labor market functions. It investigates the spatial organization of the Fight for $15, SEIU’s signature organizing campaign, noting how national- level coordination is carried out (or not carried out) on the local level and arguing that mobility between local campaigns is a central spatial strategy. Lastly, it investigates the politics surrounding the $15 minimum wage policy itself, using a historical view of minimum wage policy to argue that cycles of mobilization are tied to electoral politics and to the politics of rendering policies technical, ostensibly apolitical, and therefore mobile. Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING THE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE $15 WAGE MOVEMENT 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW: THE SPATIAL REORGANIZATION OF WORK AND NEW UNION CAMPAIGNS 10 Introduction 10 The Spatial Reorganization of Work 11 Spatial Strategies of New Union Campaigns 25 Importance of the City in New Union Campaigns 30 Scalar Politics and New Union Campaigns 35 The Geographies of Policy in Class Politics 37 Socio-Spatial Positionality in New Union Campaigns 40 Mobilities and the Labor Movement 43 Conclusion 48 CHAPTER 3: CONTEXT AND METHODOLOGY 51 Introduction 51 Mobilities & Labor Geography as Methodology 53 The ‘Overflows:’ Defining the $15 Wage Movement 56 The Fight for $15: SEIU’s Community Organizing and Fast Food Union Campaign 57 $15 Now: Socialist and Third-Party Politics 59 Expansion and Diffusion of $15 Wage Movement 61 $15 Wage as Policy 62 Methods 65 Case Study Site Selection 65 Seattle, Washington 66 Chicago, Illinois 70 The Triad and the Triangle: North Carolina’s Industrial Center 74 Data Collection 82 Interviews 83 Participant Observation 87 Document Review and Website Review 89 Data Analysis 92 CHAPTER 4: CONTENTIOUS CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE LOW-WAGE LABOR MARKET 92 Introduction 92 Economic Theory and the Minimum Wage 96 Resubjectification of Low-Wage Workers into (Pre)Middle-Class Consumers 102 Racial Economy Framework and the $15 Wage Movement 110 Identifying Racial and Gendered Disparities: Policy Discourses vs. Activist Discourse 114 “I’ve worked on myself really hard to just no end:” Fast Food Worker Narrative Resistance to Regimes of Self-Improvement 119 “We Deserve a Future:” Local Campaigns’ Moral Economies 126 Conclusion 136 CHAPTER 5: IN THE STREETS: PROTEST TACTICS AND THE SPATIALITY OF NEW UNION ORGANIZING 137 Introduction 137 Labor Unions and Social Movements 139 Labor Geography: Multi-Scalar Strategies and Union Bureaucracies 141 Geography of Social Movements: Horizontal Organizational Forms 144 Geographies of the Fight for $15 147 The Development of the Fight for $15: SEIU’s Community Organizing Foray 148 The Geography of the Initial Canvass 151 Organizing Geographies: Coordinating a Demand, National Strike Days, and Inter-Campaign Mobilities 154 National Days of Action: National Coordination and the Geographies of Fight for $15 Strikes 155 Geographic Dispersion of Campaigns 156 National Coordination and Naming: The Importance of the ‘Fight for $15’ 157 Strike Days: National Days of Action 159 Inter-Campaign Mobilities: Resource Sharing and Campaign Autonomy 169 Conclusion 174 CHAPTER 6: AT THE TABLE: POLICY NEGOTIATIONS AND THE POLITICS OF POLICY MOBILITY 176 Introduction 176 Policy Mobility and Politics: Techno-Rational Approaches 179 Minimum Wage Policy: Brief History of a 20th Century Idea 183 Minimum Wage Policy Moves to the Local Level 187 Electoral Politics and the Minimum Wage 190 Minimum Wage Activism in Chicago, 1995-2015 191 The Fight for $15 in Seattle 199 $15 Minimum Wage Policy Negotiations: Defining the Problem 204 Conclusion 217 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION 219 Reports on Policy Effects: Crucial to Continuing Policy Mobility 221 Importance of Racial Economy Approaches to Models of Working Class Solidarity 224 Reconsidering the Sustainability of the Emerging Organizing Strategies 230 Conclusion 235 APPENDIX A: ORGANIZATIONS AND ACRONYMS, WITH DESCRIPTION 238 APPENDIX B: INTERVIEW PROTOCOL 241 APPENDIX C: PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION GUIDE 243 APPENDIX D: TOPOS PARTNERSHIP REPORT 245 REFERENCES 247 List of Tables and Figures Table 1.1: Cities with Minimum Wage Ordinances Table 2.1: Union Membership by Industry, 1983 Table 2.2: Change in Union Density and Membership by Industry, 1983-2015 Table 2.3: Spatial Praxis of Different Union Forms Table 3.1: Interviews by Interviewee Affiliation Figure 4.1: Topos Partnership Suggested Images Figure 4.2: Chicago Minimum Wage Working Group Report Images Figure 4.3: Chicago Working Group Table Figure 6.1: Map of $15 Referendum Results Table 6.1: Minimum Wage Policy Comparison Figure 7.1: Signs from North Carolina’s 11/10/2015 Fast Food Strike Acknowledgements In the five years I have been working on my PhD, the people who have given their time, their resources, and their insight to this project are too numerous to count. First, I need thank the more than 100 people who gave freely of their time to talk with a graduate student who approached them more or less out of thin air. In particular, I am grateful to Sarah Finken, Andrew Beane, Sejal Parikh, Sterling Harders, Sage Wilson, Jonathan Rosenblum, Leonard Smith, Michelle O’Brien, and Memo Rivera, who are not only collaborators in this project, but colleagues and friends. The work you do is inspiring, and I hope I have done it justice here. Without funding support from the Harry Bridges Labor Center, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Martin Travel Award from the UW Department of Geography, and the Center for Engaged Scholarship, this project would not have been completed. The SeaTac/Seattle Minimum Wage History Project is an important project that I was lucky to be part of. I am so grateful and privileged to have been able to spend the last few years of my life entirely dedicated to this project because of this support. To my colleagues in the UW geography department over the years who read drafts and watched first run-throughs of presentations: thank you. To Arianna Muirow, who got me started on this last year thinking we could both finish: thank you. To Tim Palmer, whose insights into labor movement history and strategy are peerless: thank you. Others along the way have supported this project in so many ways. We are the sum total of the people with whom we spend our days, and I am lucky to count you all as my friends. I would like to thank my committee (Michael Brown, Mark Ellis, and George Lovell) for comments, nudges, and course work that have been foundational to this project. I would also like to thank my advisor, Kim England, for thoughtful comments, long hours on Skype, and constant advocacy on my behalf. Advising a dissertation is an ultimate act of care, and I appreciate all that you have done to help me get to this point. Finally, measureless gratitude to my family: Austen, for your Sunday dinners in Chicago and endless arguments about art and activism; Kate, for your thoughtful contributions to said arguments about art and activism; Mom for being proud of me no matter what; and Dad, for always asking me how life in the Comintern was going. And to Naihomy, who gave me a great reason to stay in North Carolina, and the support I needed to finish. THE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE $15 WAGE MOVEMENT | 1 Chapter 1: Introducing the Geographies of the $15 Wage Movement In 2012, the US federal minimum wage was $7.25. The highest minimum wage in the country was the $12.06 minimum wage in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Washington State, which had pegged its minimum wage to inflation in the late 1990s, had the highest