While Stand Up KC pushes for higher wages, fast-food companies still have it their way

When Terrance Wise is not working his fast-food job at the Burger King where Troost Avenue meets Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard — he’s a “team member,” which means he takes orders and serves food and paints the building’s exterior when told — he’s often talking about the plight of those who work fast-food jobs.

Wise has emerged as one of the most visible ambassadors of Stand Up KC, the local chapter of the national movement to unionize fast-food workers and raise their wages to $15 an hour. The role calls for a salesman’s combination of charm and hustle, and Wise, 35, is well-suited to it. He knows how to talk to the media (he has been interviewed in the past year by NBC, NPR, Democracy Now and The New York Times), and he’s adept at recruiting fellow fast-food workers to the cause.

Those workers are easy to spot. In August, heading home from work on the Troost Max 28 bus, Wise approached a young man who was wearing black slacks, a black polo shirt with the Sonic label, and a black Sonic hat. Wise told him about the rallies that Stand Up KC had held, and said there were more to come. He talked about how he had recently attended the first-ever fast-food-workers convention, which drew 1,300 people from across the United States to an expo center in suburban Chicago. He asked his fellow bus passenger about his work hours, his wages, how he pays his bills. After about five minutes, Wise glanced out the window and realized that he had missed his stop. “Look for us out there,” he told the Sonic employee before getting off the bus.

“I just approach everybody,” Wise told me as we doubled back south on Troost. “I have no feelings of rejection. I don’t walk past a McDonald’s or Sonic or Wendy’s employee without saying something. It only takes 30 seconds to drop that knowledge. If they don’t have 30 seconds, I just say, ‘Look for us.’ Because we’re growing every day. They’re going to see us sooner or later. Everybody’s going to see us sooner or later.”

Wise had the next day off, but he would be heading to a Burger King in south Kansas City to talk about Stand Up KC with workers there on their way in and out of the restaurant — an idea that he’d taken from the Boston chapter of the movement. He always wears his Burger King uniform on such trips. “It’s important that they know I’m a Burger King employee because otherwise, they think they can get in trouble for talking to me,” he said. “So when they see me in my uniform, it lets them know they can be involved in the movement. Lots of folks don’t know that it’s illegal for employers to punish you for participating in a workers’ strike.”

We took a right on 41st Street and continued walking toward the two-bedroom apartment that Wise shares with his fiancée and their three children, near Gillham Park.

“I love heading west off Troost on my way home,” he said. “I used to live on the east side of Troost. It’s not so bad. But it is more dangerous. There are wild dogs running around sometimes. There’s more crime on that side of Troost. Being able to walk this direction, it feels nice to me. I feel very fortunate.”

Fortune is a relative thing. Working as many hours as Burger King allows him (usually around 35 a week) nets Wise roughly $230 a week, after taxes. His fiancée works full time, as a certified nursing assistant, and makes $10.71 an hour. It’s not enough. The kids are on Medicaid, and the family is on food stamps.

“We would love not to be on food stamps,” Wise said. “We would love to be able to pay our own way. But it just doesn’t work out with what we’re paid. We have to put food on the table.”

Until earlier this year, Wise also worked at Pizza Hut. He reported to Burger King for day shifts and punched in at Pizza Hut nights. He would leave the house at 8 a.m. and not return home until 11 p.m. weeknights, sometimes 2 a.m. on weekends. He regularly worked seven days a week.

“I couldn’t keep it up,” Wise said of the two jobs. “I was doing 70 hours a week and still not getting ahead, and I wasn’t seeing my children grow up.”

He leaned back on his couch, which, like the tables, the lamps and the television, were rented from Aaron’s, a lease-to-own furniture store that charges sky-high interest rates. The kitchen and the hallway to the bedrooms were closed off, with towels under the doors to preserve the cold from the air-conditioning unit in a window.

“Look around,” he said. “This is our life. We both work hard. And we still can’t make it, still can’t get ahead even a little. Bread has gone up. Milk, eggs, gas — all up. Every year. But not our wages. I keep making the same wage.”

He went on: “That’s what the movement is about. It’s about all of us getting together and saying that if you’re willing to work full time, you shouldn’t have to live a life of poverty. You shouldn’t have to work two jobs seven days a week. That’s the way it is for fast-food workers in this country right now. It’s not right.”

On Thursday, September 4, Wise was arrested.

He and 51 other Kansas City fast-food workers had staged a sit-down in the middle of the road at 14th Street and Prospect, just after noon. Many wore work hats printed with the logos of their employers: McDonald’s, Burger King, Jimmy John’s. Hundreds more supporters, standing in front of a McDonald’s across the street, cheered them on as they were cuffed with white-plastic ties and led to police wagons.

It was the highest-profile day yet for the fast-food workers’ movement, which has held seven coordinated demonstrations across the country since November 2012. One hundred fifty cities participated in the September 4 strike, the result of conversations at the July fast-food workers’ convention in Chicago. Civil-disobedience arrests also occurred in Detroit, Chicago and New York.

“We’ve been looking to the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement for inspiration,” Wise told me. “There’s a lot to learn from reading about those movements, watching those old videos. It’s been kind of like a history class for me.”

So far, the effort has aimed to raise awareness of the poverty wages of fast-food workers through strikes and rallies. Hundreds of synchronized arrests across the country, even peaceful ones, generate headlines and TV news segments. That exposure attracts new workers to the cause. It can also help begin to change public opinion, which gets the attention of politicians.

But beyond the public push, there’s no clear plan for getting from a minimum wage of $7.50 an hour to $15 an hour. Who is going to get billion-dollar multinational corporations, with a rich history of hostility toward unions, to the bargaining table?

And who is going to sit at that bargaining table representing the workers? That, too, remains unknown.

Stand Up KC and its partners in other cities are bankrolled by labor organizations such as the Service Employees International Union, which has poured $10 million into the movement. That money trickles into local nonprofits with ties to low-wage workers. In KC, Jobs With Justice and Communities Creating Opportunity have been involved — part of what’s called the Workers Organizing Committee of Kansas City — in helping plan the demonstrations. But the SEIU has so far avoided discussing the specifics of how it expects to remain involved moving forward. It prefers, for now, to have workers such as Wise speak for the movement.

The other side of this battle sees a conspiracy in seemingly opaque organizations like Stand Up KC, and views the actions of SEIU and other labor groups involved in the fast-food fight as less than altruistic. The labor rolls have declined by half in the last three decades — 11 percent of American workers are represented by unions today, down from 20 percent in 1983 — and scooping up thousands and thousands of fast-food workers would be a huge boon.

Brian Peterson, a Spencer Fane Britt & Browne lawyer who represents employers in labor disputes, presented the skepticism of the ownership set this way in a recent legal article on his firm’s website:

“The Laborer’s Union, through a group called the Workers Organizing Committee, is actively attempting to organize fast-food and casual restaurant workers in the Kansas City metropolitan area as well as in other midwestern cities. The Union is acting as though it is a public interest group that is seeking to increase the minimum wage to $15. But its true goal is to become the restaurant workers’ exclusive bargaining representative. First, the Union ingratiates itself with restaurant workers by advocating for a substantial increase in the minimum wage. Second, it asks the workers to sign letters that they support and will participate in a strike with other employees in support of a minimum wage increase. Then the union seeks employee signatures on union authorization cards. Finally, once it has collected a sufficient number of signed authorization cards, it files an election petition with the National Labor Relations Board.”

Whether the movement’s demands are achievable is a separate unanswered question.

After the arrests at the September 4 sit-down, the remaining protesters marched to Grove Park, two blocks east. Emanuel Okoye watched from the doorway of Furniture USA, the business he owns on Truman Road. Okoye was not impressed.

“They should get a job that’s not fast food if they want better pay,” Okoye said. “That’s a job you work a couple years, and then you find a better one.”

I asked Okoye how much he pays his employees. He said his only employee is a part-time delivery driver who works on commission. He estimated that the driver made somewhere around $12 an hour this way.

Okoye said he sympathized with the workers and agreed that they deserved a raise. “You can’t live on $7.50 an hour,” he said. “Nobody can do that.”

What would a fair increase be? I asked him. Okoye wiped his forehead with a handkerchief from his back pocket and thought for a moment. Across the street, a gust of red shirts printed with the slogan “We Are Worth More,” picket signs and megaphone-led chants paraded past the Walker Towel & Uniform Service plant.

“I’d say $9.50, maybe $10,” he said. “I get what they’re doing if $15 is a bargaining chip. But those jobs are low-skill jobs. The services they provide don’t justify a wage like $15 an hour. More skilled workers should be getting raises before those jobs are.”

Okoye was echoing the basic counterarguments reliably pronounced in news stories about the issue. I’d heard the same from friends, acquaintances and strangers when I talked with them about the fast-food workers’ movement. I’ve heard from culinary-school graduates, who make $11 an hour working at high-end restaurants, who considered the $15 an hour figure for fast-food workers an affront to the value of their own work. I’ve talked to adjunct instructors at local universities who cobble together a living by working course loads that demand 50- and 60-hour weeks for roughly $24,000 a year (or $12 an hour) before taxes. I’ve talked to lawyers, with student-loan debts up to their eyeballs, who review documents for large firms for $15 an hour.

For these people — a middle class that increasingly finds itself overeducated and undervalued — $15 an hour for fast-food workers seems like an irrational transfer of money. So now a fry cook earns more than a college instructor? That would have been nice to know before spending all that money on tuition.

Peter Eaton, the director of the Center for Economic Information at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a professor of economics, supports raising the minimum wage to $15. “But it doesn’t make sense to raise the wage in just one sector of the economy,” he told me. “The lowest-skilled group getting a raise and a higher-skilled group not getting a raise makes zero economic sense.”

The core issue, of course, is that everybody needs a raise. Why that is not generally occurring right now in America, given the booming stock market and the jobs recovery, is attributable to — well, take your pick: health-care costs, the folly of trickledown economics, congressional polarization, tax-dodging corporations, the consolidation of industries, globalization, the decline of unions.

Crawl far enough down this rabbit hole, and it’s difficult not to conclude that our country is irreparably broken. As Peterson, the anti-union lawyer, put it to me, “It [raising fast-food workers’ wages] is an expansive issue that involves questions about social policy, how taxes work, how unemployment is administered. You need a more holistic solution than just raising wages to $15 an hour.”

A lack of consensus on what would benefit America’s workforce turns out to be a pretty great situation for the fast-food industry, particularly at a time when jobs are scarce and the wage floor is as low as $7.50 an hour. While economists and politicians debate policy solutions, McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King are free to continue offering poverty wages and banking obscene profits until they’re forced to make adjustments. Given this trajectory, the decision by fast-food workers to stage demonstrations seems logical. How much do they have to lose by demanding better wages and attempting to unionize? How much worse can it get?

The social-equality think tank Demos reported this year that fast-food CEOs are the highest-paid workers in the United States, with an average salary that has quadrupled over the past 13 years to $23.8 million in 2013. Meanwhile, fast-food workers are the lowest-paid in the economy, and their wages have increased just 0.3 percent over the same period.

A 2013 joint study between researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California–Berkeley found that 52 percent of the fast-food workers in the United States make so little that they must enroll in some form of public assistance, at an annual cost to taxpayers of $7 billion. In Missouri, 49 percent of fast-food workers rely on public assistance, at an annual cost to taxpayers of $149 million. Perhaps the most damning illustration of this remains the tale of the McDonald’s worker — a Chicago employee who has worked for the company for 10 years without a raise from $8.25 an hour — who called the company’s “McResource Line” for financial advice and was counseled to sign up for food stamps.

“It’s very clearly the case that McDonald’s relies on the federal government to subsidize its employees, by paying them so little that they require welfare benefits in order to survive,” Eaton said. “So Joe Schmo, or you or me — we’re helping McDonald’s pay their workers through our tax dollars.”

We’re also helping McDonald’s — and Burger King and Taco Bell and the rest — whenever we pick up a nutritionally bankrupt but irresistibly low-cost meal there. When so many Americans make so little and everything else costs so much, the idea of the Whopper as the occasional indulgence, rather than a cheap source of calories for, say, a parent working two jobs, is a sad myth.

Another easily debunked myth is the fast-food companies’ long-clung-to stance that their workers are largely high school kids working part-time jobs. The average age of a U.S. fast-food worker today is 28. Many have children. Many are like Marie Sanders.

Sanders was among those arrested at the September 4 demonstration. She works at the McDonald’s at 63rd Street and Troost, where she punches in 30-35 hours a week, at $7.75 an hour. She has worked at McDonald’s for three years and has been given one raise, for 40 cents.

She also works six days a week at a credit union, where she makes $9 an hour. Between the two jobs, the single mother toils roughly 70 hours a week and takes home around $600. The highlight of her week is Saturday night: She doesn’t work at McDonald’s, and the credit union is closed on Sundays. It’s the only time of the week when she has more than 12 straight hours off.

Sanders hopes that her credit-union job eventually turns into a full-time position. “I’d quit McDonald’s in a second,” she told me. “Are you kidding?”

Since the fast-food workers’ movement began in late 2012, there have been several victories for low-wage workers in America. How much credit Stand Up KC and the rest can claim for those victories is debatable. But they keep coming.

In July, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that McDonald’s, which has long skirted responsibility for the activities of the franchised restaurants that make up 90 percent of its U.S. locations, can be held accountable for the labor actions of its franchisees. For years, the franchise model has insulated McDonald’s from unionization efforts because unions had to engage with each individual franchise. The decision, which McDonald’s is appealing, helps clear the way for a collective union push among all McDonald’s workers.

Then there is the recent wave of minimum-wage hikes across the country. Some have come at the corporate level. Starting next year, the Gap will pay all workers at least $10 an hour. Costco workers now start at $11.50 (with average employee pay at $21 an hour). In and Out workers make $11 from day one.

President Barack Obama has said he favors a national minimum-wage raise to $10.10 an hour. He has also signed an executive order requiring that all federal contractors be paid $10.10 an hour.

Seattle passed an ordinance to incrementally raise the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour by 2018. San Francisco will soon vote on a similar bill. The mayors of Los Angeles and Chicago publicly support a citywide raise to $13 an hour. Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont have upped their minimum hourly wages to $10.10. Earlier this month, Las Cruces, New Mexico, approved a hike to $10.10.

Whither the Kansas City metro area? Cities in Missouri and Kansas lack the ability to act on their own, à la Seattle, because their state legislatures have passed pre-emptive laws to prevent them from doing so. Missouri House Rep. Jamilah Nasheed, a St. Louis Democrat, sponsored a bill in the most recent session to raise the minimum wage in Missouri to $10.10. It went nowhere. Lawyer E.E. Keenan, whose firm represents employees in labor disputes, says it’s not clear whether Kansas City, Missouri, can raise the minimum wage given Missouri laws, but there are other options.

“What can be done by cities and counties is impose requirements for people who get government benefits like tax credits and subsidies, TIF [tax-increment financing],” Keenan told me. “Local governments can tell these companies that if they want taxpayer money, they need to pay workers certain wage requirements. If someone is getting millions in government benefits, the least they can do is pay their workers a living wage.”

A June New York Times article about a mayoral convention quoted Mayor Sly James on this very topic. He told the Times that conversations he’d had with mayors at the convention had prompted him to “email his legal counsel and city manager after the jobs committee meeting to see if vendors and concessionaires [in Kansas City] could be required to pay workers more.”

Asked recently how that was coming along, the mayor’s office responded that its counsel had advised that the city could indeed require contractors to pay a certain wage when working on city projects, and it’s still “exploring the consequences, both positive and negative, of doing so.”

Regarding TIF recipients and other city-subsidized entities being required to pay a higher minimum wage, the mayor’s office passed the buck to the City Council, saying it was outside the mayor’s power. How about the fast-food workers’ movement? Does the mayor support $15 an hour?

“The mayor believes deeply that the minimum wage should ensure that people who work full-time jobs should not have to live in poverty … however, a more scaled-in approach would allow businesses to adjust,” spokeswoman Joni Wickham said. The office did not respond specifically to a question about how much the minimum wage in KC would need to increase in order to lift full-time low-wage workers out of poverty.

A few weeks ago, I went to visit Wise after his shift at Burger King. He was supposed to get off at 5 p.m., but when I arrived, he was still on the clock, changing out the marquee with a 20-foot pole. Operating the tool made him look like some kind of circus performer. On a day’s notice from his manager, he had come in four hours earlier than he was scheduled. He couldn’t say no; ever since he quit Pizza Hut, he needs all the hours he can get. He ended up punching out 45 minutes late because the crew was understaffed.

We chatted while Wise waited for the bus. Under his arm, he carried a copy of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son — a recommendation he’d picked up while in Chicago for the workers’ convention. He said he has been looking for a new job now that his daughters are back in school. His friend knows a guy at Costco.

“I’m trying to get him to put in a good word for me,” Wise said.

♦