Many are aware of North Carolina’s backwards bathroom laws, but that is just a small part of the efforts made by state legislatures across the South to strip away the legislative tools that progressive enclaves possess to enact change on their own. Nearly every state in the South has a “pre-emption law,” which bans cities from passing laws increasing the minimum wage. The law is clearly an attempt by anti-union forces to stop Fight for $15 and related progressive movements in the Southern cities where Democratic voters control government, as 12 out of the 23 states with minimum wage preemption statutes adopted the laws after 2013. Thus, even as Fight for $15 has been successful in achieving minimum wage increases in typically-liberal cities like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco, state legislatures in the South have erected a bulwark in anticipation of increased unionization and organizing.
The majority-white North Carolina general assembly-- in which Republicans have a supermajority-- passed their pre-emption law in 2013 forbidding municipalities from raising their minimum wages above the statewide minimum wage of $7.25. In North Carolina especially, the motives are clear: to stop the state’s cities, many of them majority-Black like Durham, from passing legislation to increase the minimum wage at the municipal level. Even with the pre-emption law installed, more than 100 employers have raised minimum wages on their volition as part of the Durham Living Wage Campaign. In 2016, Durham’s city council passed a law that raised the minimum wage for all city employees to $15 an hour. All signs indicate that the political will to raise the minimum wage is present, but, first, the pre-emption laws must be dismantled. Though North Carolina’s pre-emption law is set to sunset in 2020, organizers have taken action into their own hands. As of 2017, an estimated 70,200 workers in Durham made below $15 an hour, while an estimated 21,000 made below $10 an hour.
The burden of low wages is felt disproportionately, as, according to the National Employment Law Project, more than half of Black workers and sixty percent of Latino workers in the U.S. earn less than $15 per hour. Roughly fifty-five percent of workers who earn less than $15 are women. Furthermore, according to the People’s Alliance, Durham’s largest low-wage sector is the food industry. Duke University historian and lecturing fellow Peter Pihos spoke to this point at the event, reminding the crowd, "As Dr. King described, our struggle is the struggle for genuine equality, which means economic equality— jobs and freedom. Jobs and freedom went together in the movement... Forty-nine years after Dr. King's assassination, economic equality remains his unfulfilled dream. The stock market might be at an all-time high, but the one percent takes much more than it makes while ordinary workers like these folks survive on starvation wages." Thus, almost 50 years later, the event drew on King’s theorizing to contextualize their own.Furthermore, as others noted, pre-emption laws are clearly an attempt to weaken organized labor, echoing the tactics used throughout American history to marginalize low-wage laborers, many of whom were and continue to be Black. As Elon University labor law professor Eric Fink puts it, “[Martin Luther King] would remind us that [pre-emption laws] are part of the long legacy of using the power of state government to shore up injustice and inequality. And they’re one way, along with gerrymandering, voter restrictions, etc., of effectively disenfranchising African Americans.” As Guardian journalist Mike Elk puts it, “Nationwide, pre-emption laws are quickly becoming a battlefield on which the civil rights and labor community are finding themselves fighting in court and the streets.” Thus, the event deftly situated the struggles of Black workers within a historical context, as the jointly anti-labor and anti-Black policies being passed in state legislatures across the South are not new. Rather, they represent a frequently-used strategy for obstructing justice and propping up white supremacy.
Part of the effort to fight pre-emption laws by the Fight for $15 is to bring rural Southern whites into the fold, with organization efforts made in small towns like Gastonia, North Carolina. North Carolina AFL-CIO secretary MaryBe McMillian attended the first Fight for $15 rally in Gastonia, saying “We’ve got to take that message to working people – black, white and brown – in both cities and small towns across this state. If we want economic justice, we can’t focus just on urban areas or one demographic of workers.” Thus, there has been a concerted effort to diversify the movement’s coalition and foster solidarity about all working-class North Carolinians. The event was part of a larger campaign on the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, as Fight $15 and the Movement for Black Lives organized marches in thirty cities across the country. This action is an apt representation of the Fight for $15’s strengths, as the event drew connections between historical struggles and the plight of workers today to highlight that the struggle for justice is far from over. While MLK’s image has been continually sanitized by those in power, these Workers Rights Hearings highlight that his militancy must be carried on in an intersectional-minded struggle.
These facts are key to the Fight for $15’s theorizing, as fighting for higher wages is an integral part of fighting all of the interconnected injustices in the United States and across the globe.