Fight for $15 Workers Help Launch Modern-Day Poor People’s Campaign

On Monday, December 4th, 2017, 50 years to the day that Dr. Martin Luther King and others called for the original Poor People’s Campaign, workers in the Fight for $15 joined more than 100 clergy and moral leaders in Washington to launch the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, a new moral movement to challenge the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological destruction and the war economy.

Workers and organizers announced that tens of thousands of people will engage in direct action at statehouses and the U.S. Capitol next spring, waging a six-week protest highlighted by one of the largest waves of civil disobedience in U.S. history.

At the launch, Fight for $15 leader and Kansas City McDonald’s worker Terrence Wise noted the tremendous gains made by workers in the Fight for $15, adding, “We still have a long way to go. We need racial equality. We need economic equality. We need environmental equality.”

Wise and his colleagues on the Fight for $15 National Organizing Committee joined campaign co-chair Rev. William Barber in a march on Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office, attempting to deliver a letter in protest of the GOP tax plan.