Graphic by Patrick Fore
The fight for $15 began in 2012. The fight to pay workers as dismal wages as possible has been in existence since the creation of wage labor.
Every argument that can be made against the dignity of workers seeking living wages has been made. Many try to appeal to the supposed rights of business owners to maintain and expand their profit margins: “Companies just can’t afford to pay their workers more!” “If they raise wages, they’re just going to have to raise prices, and that’s just something I as a consumer won’t tolerate,” the list goes on. But one argument against paying workers a reasonable minimum wage that stuck out to me as especially inconsiderate was:
“If they want to make more money, they should learn a skill.”
As if food preparation, retail servicing, garment making, inventory management, cleaning and caregiving aren’t skills.
Where did this assumption come from? And why has it persisted with such fervor? How is it that so many Americans have condemned their favorite fast food restaurant’s worker to be deserving of making only $7.25 an hour, while in the same day, pulling into that same drive through to purchase another meal? In order to unpack the mental gymnastics that have led so many to devalue the labor which makes our world keep turning, we must understand its history.
Prior to the industrial revolution, the closest existing institutions to restaurants in the United States were taverns (which were frequented by travelers) and “eating houses,” gathering places that served from one pot to patrons sitting communally, like in a mess hall. At this time, most eating was done within the home. For working class families, wives and mothers performed the labor of preparing meals. In wealthier families, enslaved women and servants performed this labor.
However, the abolition of slavery in the United States, and the developing Industrial Revolution caused shockwaves to the American labor market. Emancipated Black women found work performing domestic labor for compensation, while emancipated Black men experienced discrimination in the job market. In addition to contributing toward poverty in Black communities across the United States, the discrimination these men faced impacted the labor market, mostly by changing the standard of who could participate in it.
Because white factory owners prioritized their racist biases over staffing their factories, labor shortages during this era were imminent. Black male workers were a source of cheap labor for American capitalists, if they were hired. However, as the industrial revolution began picking up speed, the go-to workers to hire, working-class white men, were demanding wage increases. In order to keep the cost of production low, and to avoid hiring Black men, white capitalists began sourcing cheap labor from a new demographic: working-class white women. Unlike their male counterparts, white women were not unionized, and existing gender-biases contributed toward their wage exploitation. Typically, white women were paid one third to one half of their male counterparts’ wages.
With more white women working in the public sphere, duties of the domestic sphere, like cooking, became difficult to keep up with. Working class white families couldn’t afford Black servants like their bourgeois counterparts, and so a new business was popularized: the restaurant. In urban centers, restaurants (often called “eating houses” or “restorators”), served America’s hungry working class. Due to their experience preparing food and working in the home, both Black and white women worked in these kitchens. Progressively, they began working at lunch counters and eventually as servers. As job opportunities progressed for white men and the restaurant industry grew, it naturally progressed to become a home for women’s labor.
Similar progressions happened across other industries. As white women spent less time in the home, industries like garment making, sales and caregiving also entered the public sphere. With the industrial revolution also came the invention of the department store as a way to entertain wealthy women, with its polished appearance and fixed prices. This economic reshaping also brought about the invention of the daycare, a place for working women to leave children they could not care for at home. Both of these industries attracted women workers, making good use of skills previously used in the home.
In any place where women worked, though, it was expected that they would not be paid competitive wages. Gendered expectations about who should be the breadwinner, who should be allowed to participate in labor unions, and who was intellectually “superior” left working women with the foundation that allowed for the gender wage gap to form and persist.
Black women were most heavily impacted by this exploitation, as they were required to become the primary financial providers of their families in order to compensate for the labor discirmination impacting their husbands. Historically, Black women have participated at higher rates in the labor market than their white counterparts, and for lesser pay. This trend has continued to the modern day.
By the latter part of the 20th century, the labor market looked drastically different than it did during the Industrial Revolution. Labor shifts that occurred during the World Wars made women’s participation in the public economy a standard, and white feminist movements of the 1960s and on pushed white women into education-based “career” work for the first time. The rigid gendered expectations of labor seemed to have lost their chokehold on society by the 21st century — or so we think.
In practice, these low-wage industries of retail, caregiving, housekeeping and food preparation are dominated by women. In retail, women laborers typically outnumber male laborers 2:1. The vast majority of housekeepers and domestic caregivers are women. Whether or not we consciously think of these labor divisions today, they exist, and have existed as such for hundreds of years. With this context, my discomfort surrounding the “learn a skill” argument makes a lot more sense.
These low-wage jobs aren’t performed without skill. In fact, the labor performed by these low-wage jobs has made our world go round since the foundation of civilization. The reason we don’t give credit to this labor in the same way we give credit to other manual labor jobs like manufacturing, transportation and construction is because it has historically been done by women, and more recently, specifically women of color.
Because it has been done by women, and because it has required training and skills developed within the domestic sphere, we as an American society have assumed these skills to be somehow innate. In reality though, we have become so normalized to this labor and underestimate the skill required of it because we have always taken it for granted. To a person who has always had their dinner ready for them at the table, or their house clean when they arrive home, the labor process of ensuring these domestic comforts has been concealed. And because the women performing this labor have already been infantilized through gendered stereotypes, the consumer must assume the labor process must not require much, if any, skill at all.
So long as we wait for employers alone to make the decision to pay their workers a living wage, we are giving them the power to impose their own biases about labor value onto their workers. As a result, industries traditionally occupied by women and especially women of color are subjected to undervalued and exploitative wages, while male- and white-dominated fields aren’t. In the movement for workers’ interests, improved wages, working conditions and better-ensured rights realistically not a “one size fits all” goal. The fight for a living minimum wage is a fight broader than just dignity for workers. It is an essential first step to building equity and delivering justice to the marginalized races, ethnicities and genders who have been exploited by our deeply racist and misogynistic economy.