Reflecting on the Fight for 15, a decade later

When I immigrated to New York more than 30 years ago, I had no idea I’d be at the center of one of the most transformative labor movements in U.S. history. I grew up in Guyana, the youngest of 15 children. My dad worked for a Canadian bauxite company and we owned a home and had comfortable lives. But my parents wanted more for us, and they immigrated to America. Many of us kids followed. I arrived in 1990.

The dream of a better life, however, did not materialize, at least not for a long time.

Shortly after I arrived in New York City, I found a job at KFC to help our parents pay the bills. I got minimum wage, which at the time was $4.25. I was a teenager, so it was ok. I was just happy to be contributing to the household. Things started to go downhill when KFC sold the restaurant to a franchisee. My employer offered me shifts at multiple locations, and before long I was logging 90 hours a week.

I breaded the chicken and mixed the mashed potatoes. I scrubbed pots and pans, mopped floors and filtered boiling hot oil. Then I went and did it all over again at another store. And then another.

One of my brothers, Alvin, also landed at KFC and wound up working seven days a week for minimum wage. We never called in sick for fear that our jobs wouldn’t be there when we returned. We suffered burns on our bodies from the scalding oil.

On top of the low pay and dangerous working conditions, neither of us ever saw a penny of overtime pay. Rather than paying us time-and-a-half, as required by law, our boss instead cut us three separate checks at regular pay, one for each of the restaurants where we worked.

For years, it felt like we’d never achieve what we had hoped for back in Guyana: a comfortable life for our families and a better future for Alvin’s four children. We were working in a $200 billion fast-food industry that treated us like we were disposable. I had worked at KFC for 22 years and never got a raise of more than a quarter at a time.

That changed in the summer of 2012 when we were approached by organizers. At the time, no one on the news or in government was talking about workers’ wages. We assumed we were powerless. Boy were we wrong.

We met other fast-food workers going through the same struggle. Their stories of working grueling shifts and long hours sounded painfully similar to ours.

When fast-food workers walked off the job, we weren’t alone. We did it first in New York City. Then it spread to Chicago and St. Louis and Detroit and Milwaukee and Kansas City and Seattle. By the summer, workers in 60 cities were striking demanding the same thing: $15 an hour and a union.

I walked off the job more than a dozen times myself. It was scary the first time, but we saw how workers can stand up to some of the largest corporations in America.

Twice, I got arrested for participating in civil disobedience. The first time I knew we could really win is when the police officer who arrested me said, “I hope you all get your $15.”

I joined with other workers at KFC to file complaints with the New York attorney general about our stolen wages. Together, we won a $375,000 settlement. I took part of my $15,000 and paid for the visas of my three brothers who were the last ones remaining in Guyana. The rest, I put in the bank.

Perhaps our biggest win of all came when the wage board convened by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo passed a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers in New York City. Soon after that, Cuomo signed a law making $15 the minimum for all workers across the state.

Since we first went on strike 10 years ago, the movement we helped launch has transformed the politics of wages across our nation. Nobody gave us a shot at first, but our movement has won $150 billion in raises for 27 million people across the country, including us. Today, Alvin is paid over $17 an hour as a baggage handler at JFK Airport and I’m paid $16 an hour at Wendy’s.

More importantly, we inspired workers everywhere to take on some of the most powerful companies in the world. From Starbucks to Amazon to Apple, workers are rising up and saying in one loud voice: we are worth more. These big companies can keep fighting us. But I know that when workers stand together and never give up, we will prevail.