The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America by David Rolf (review)

How did the American Dream, where hard-working Americans could attain good jobs and a pathway to middle-class stability, turn into a nightmare of perverse inequality and precarious work? And what are workers and unions going to do to put workers on the road from poverty to prosperity?

These are the two questions David Rolf sets out to answer in his book on the Fight for $15. Rolf, the president of the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 775 in Seattle, makes the case that raising the minimum wage to $15 is one of the defining working-class issues of our time. The book is structured into three parts: explaining the rise of low-wage work and inequality, telling the story of how workers and unions are organizing the Fight for $15 campaign, and debunking common myths the campaign is bumping up against.

Rolf's examination of the rise of inequality and precarious jobs in the United States treads familiar territory. Hewing closely to the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich, Rolf dates "the war on the middle class" to the mid-1970s. He argues that right-wing ideas, like tax cuts and deregulation, began to take hold amongst segments of the working class spurned by rising unemployment and inflation. The right wing through the 1980s and 1990s was thus able to further their longstanding dream of eroding the power of unions and working standards.

The decline of the middle class was followed by the rise of "new work" which is fissured, flexible, and insecure. Workers are atomized in the workplace and their collective power and solidarity have been eroded. Rolf paints a damning picture of work today, with its proliferation of subcontracting, part-time, temporary, and freelance work. Rolf also notes there are now more workers in the United States who have no legal right to form a union than workers who do.

Rolf's analysis of the changing workplace is useful, though it underplays the role the attack on the welfare state has played in undermining workers' confidence and security. For instance, the rise in post-secondary education fees for students has been a major reason why part-time work has proliferated. Likewise, the gutting of welfare entitlements in the 1980s and 1990s fed a sense of insecurity amongst low-wage workers. This erosion of social programs and public infrastructure contributed to a sense of isolation and economic fear amongst the working class. The political defeats suffered by the working class are not only as important as the setbacks endured by workers in the workplace, they are interlinked.

Understanding that the ideological shift in workers' confidence and sense of collective power is the result of both the restructuring of employment relations and political defeat is important to grasp the true measure and impact of new work. Workplaces and work are changing in the 21st century, but as Kim Moody and Kevin Doogan have written it is important not to overstate this claim or assume the working class is either a moribund concept or a powerless political force. In his most recent book, On New Terrain (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), Moody argues that precarious work did grow as lean production methods were ramped up in the early 1980s, but precarious work has not expanded further over the last 30 years. Workers feel more insecure and wages have stagnated, but the nature of work has not been dramatically upended over the last several decades.

The most interesting aspect of Rolf's book is when he shifts gears from a broader analysis of the American economy to a narrative about how a $15 minimum wage was won in Sea-Tac and Seattle. Sea-Tac, a small suburb outside of Seattle that includes the city's airport, was the first jurisdiction to enact a $15 minimum wage in the United States. The airport, which once provided many middle-class jobs, is now the site of many outsourced low...