How can labor overcome?

• Author: Jaffe, Sarah

When Hillary Clinton addressed a group of fast food workers in Detroit this summer, it was a clear sign that something has changed. For decades, unions have been losing ground, both in membership and in political clout. The insurgent Fight for $15 movement is transforming the landscape, and showing how labor might regain traction on an unequal playing field.

"Thank you for marching in the streets to get that living wage," Clinton told the crowd of 1,300 fast-food workers as she campaigned for President. "We need you out there leading the fight against those who would rip away Americans' right to organize, to collective bargaining, to fair pay."

Though Clinton did not endorse a $15-an-hour national minimum wage, her appearance made headlines. A representative of Fight for $15, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said that while Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley were not asked to speak, both have called for a $15 wage.

"All the major Democratic candidates for President have spoken out in support of workers fighting for $15 and the right to a union," says Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fight for $15. "Fifteen is a winning political issue. Raising pay for hardworking Americans has always been a winning political issue. The Fight for $15 encourages political candidates from all parties to stand up for higher pay and the right to a union."

The movement began in November 2012 with a one-day strike by a couple hundred New York workers demanding $15-an-hour pay and the right to organize a union. It has since spread across the country, as two dozen cities and a handful of states, deep red ones like Nebraska as well as liberal cities like San Francisco, have passed local measures to boost the minimum wage.

Through workplace action and coordinated protest, the movement has turned an ambitious demand into political reality, drawing politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, neither of whom are generally considered progressive stalwarts, to endorse its major aim.

As the 2016 elections loom, the labor movement faces a critical question: How can it turn such expressions of support into political power?

Organized labor may be due for a rebound, after the drubbing it's taken in the recent past. Union density is down to just 11.1 percent of the workforce, from 20 percent in 1983; nearly half the remaining union jobs are in the public sector. Conservatives like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin as well as corporate-friendly Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago have made bashing unions and forcing concessions on workers into a calling card, and all too often they've won.

While labor spent hundreds of millions on Barack Obama and Democrats in 2008 and 2012, its key political issue, the Employee Free Choice Act, went nowhere, shoved aside for...