The Power to Win:

Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for $15, and Multidimensional Power

Co-Authored with Dorian T. Warren

Chapter in the forthcoming anthology, Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st-Century Social Movements, edited by Shanelle Matthews and Marzena Zukowska

Introduction

When we began writing this chapter in the summer of 2021, the country was experiencing a once-in-a-generation strike wave. The COVID-19 pandemic had upended all our ideas of normalcy, and workers from Amazon to Starbucks were demanding better pay and a union. Progressive politicians and mainstream economists had come to agree on the need to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour – at least.

Ten years earlier, Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), began organizing the conversations that would birth the “Fight for $15 and a Union” campaign. She asked Dorian Warren, then an associate professor at Columbia University, to organize some progressive economists to support the idea of a $15 minimum wage. He couldn’t find a single one.

Their arguments against a living wage mirrored the economic common sense of the prior half-century: neoliberal capitalism. The markets, economists argued, once unencumbered by government interference, would deliver the socially optimal minimum wage; doubling wages from $7.25 to $15 would “hurt the very people you want to help.”

Neoliberalism’s fundamental faith in markets to organize the economy was undergirded by three ideological pillars: the transfer of public wealth to private control through privatization, corporate freedom from accountability through deregulation, and the starvation of government services through low tax rates. The dominant narrative reinforced the economic theory’s common sense. It was a story of individual responsibility, the low value of physical versus intellectual labor, and the erasure of social difference to uphold long-standing forms of social stratification based on race, gender, ability, and other identities. It also connected market fundamentalism with social conservatism, refocusing government intervention on protecting traditional, Christian family structures for their stabilizing effects.

What caused the consensus to unravel? The real pillars of the economy: people.

Ordinary people built power through organizing and called forth a future beyond neoliberalism. Through the emergence of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the Fight for $15 a year later, ordinary people – organized into labor unions, community-based organizations, and social justice movements – advanced an alternative story in which economic productivity does not determine human worth and dignity. Scholars refer to this alternative as a “solidarity economy”, which prioritizes people and the social good of economic activity. Its elements include the dignity of work, a positive role for government regulation and rule-setting, the rejection of zero-sum thinking, a “bottom-up” or “middle-out” economic framework, and equity in our institutions, policies, and politics.

This new narrative developed over the past decade because of the narrative power that emerged from Occupy Wall Street and matured in the Fight for $15. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defined it. Narrative power is the idea that the stories we tell and the values they transmit can change mindsets and behaviors by setting the public debate and, ultimately, reshaping notions of common sense. Occupy Wall Street flexed narrative power that changed the American conversation on economic inequality, while the Fight for $15 built on that narrative power with the multidimensional, movement power of grassroots organizing, ideas, and politics.

Narrative and movement power unraveled the neoliberal consensus and transformed people’s lives. The Fight for $15 delivered material change in numerous places around the country and proved that our economy can function with a different way of valuing workers. 27 million workers won roughly $150 billion dollars in raises over a ten-year period. The campaign’s victories, however, would not have been possible without the narrative groundwork sparked by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Over the last decade, these movements have demonstrated the importance of narrative power – and its catalytic impact when connected with movement power. In many ways, Occupy Wall Street busted open the narrative door toward an alternative to neoliberalism that the Fight for $15 expanded and kept open for over a decade.

Full chapter available upon request.