Why $13 isn't enough

On August 12, I boarded a bus in Durham and head up I-85 towards Richmond, Virginia, the erstwhile capital of the old Confederacy. The bus was filled to the brim with fast-food, retail and home health-care workers; airport baggage handlers; state employees; early childhood educators; part-time and contingent faculty and other graduate student-workers like myself.

We were travelling to Richmond to join 8,000 other workers from around the country for the first ever Fight for $15 national convention. We were travelling to Richmond because we understood the deep historical links between the forces of unbridled capitalism and those of white supremacy. We were travelling to Richmond because we knew that our demand of "$15 and a union" was a demand, not just for economic justice, but for racial, gender and immigrant justice.

In Richmond, we met workers and organizers from around the country, shared stories and deepened our historical and political education. We learned about the efforts of Black folks and poor whites to come together in the era of Black Reconstruction, and how those efforts were destroyed by the emergence of the KKK and the resurgence of white supremacy. We learned about how the National Labor Relations Act of the 1930s came to exclude domestic and agricultural workers, a racist decision which denied Black workers decent wages and benefits and the right to collectively bargain. Not coincidentally, these are many of the same kinds of workers still fighting for $15 and a union today.

The next day we marched across Richmond, in sweltering heat, to end beneath a statue of Robert E. Lee that—inexplicably in 2016—remains standing. There, the Rev. Dr. William Barber II of the North Carolina NAACP, fresh off his performance at the Democratic National Convention, delivered a powerful sermon. It contained many of the same themes as the speech he had delivered outside the Allen Building just a few months earlier at the end of a week-long sit-in demanding accountability and transparency from Duke University administration as to providing justice and living wages for the majority Black and Brown service workers.

I thought about both of those speeches a few days later when I returned to Durham and read that University administration had increased the minimum wage to $13 an hour. I thought about how much time and energy and struggle it had taken—on the part not just of Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity but of countless faculty and community allies—just to get Duke to increase its minimum wage by one paltry dollar. I thought about how vitally necessary it is to celebrate even that partial victory and, simultaneously, I thought about all the reasons why $13 an hour isn't enough.

$13 isn't enough when the city of Durham has already adopted a path to $15 for all city employees.

$13 isn't enough because costs of living are rising rapidly across the city, in large part due to university-driven gentrification.

$13 isn't enough because workers and students on campus and around the country have been fighting for $15 for years now.

Bennett Carpenter is a graduate student in the literature department.