Fran works six days a week in fast food, and yet she’s homeless: ‘It’s economic slavery’

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But Marion and Hughes are fighters, figureheads in what some see as the next wave of the civil rights movement. The pair are leading voices in Stand Up Kansas City, the local chapter of the union-backed Fight for $15 movement, which is campaigning for a nationwide increase in the minimum wage. And they’re determined to make a difference.

The Fight for motion that is $ 15 is probably the most high profile, and successful, labor movement in the US, and has successfully pushed for local raises in the minimum wage throughout the nation, mostly in Democratic strongholds. Trump comfortably won Missouri in 2016, even though the important cities — Kansas City, St Louis and Columbia — voted Democrat. But the pair are convinced that by coming together, the millions of Americans working low wage jobs can effect change even.

“It’s not just us, it’s all across America,” says Hughes. She says she felt “invisible” prior to the Fight for $15 movement.

On 14 April 2015, campaigners held what was then the largest ever protest by low-wage workers in US history. About 60,000 workers took to the streets in cities throughout the nation.

When protesters came to Marion’s restaurant, she says the majority of the staff moved to the rear of the restaurant to distance themselves from the activists while her company boss “smirked and laughed” as they read their requirements and stated what they needed. “I looked at him and I thought, ‘You don’t have these concerns’,” she says. “How can you laugh at someone else’s pain? And I am going through the same thing. That’s when I joined the Fight for $15.

“There is wave. There’s momentum. I think that with all of working together, we will win $15 in the end,” she says.

It’s been almost a decade since the Great Recession, and America has witnessed a record 82 months of month-on-month jobs growth. The national unemployment rate now stands at a 4.3%, a 16-year low. But month after month, it is the low-wage sectors — fast food, retail, healthcare — that have added new jobs. Wage growth has barely kept pace with inflation. The national minimum wage ($7.25) was last raised in 2009.

Across the US, 58 million people earn less than $15 an hour; 41 million earn less than $12. In Missouri, Kansas City and St Louis councils recently passed local ordinances that would have increased the minimum wage — to $13 an hour by 2023 in Kansas City’s case.

But backed by local and national business interests, Missouri’s governor, Eric Greitens — a bestselling author, former Navy Seal and a rising Republican star — has moved to roll back the increases, arguing businesses can’t afford raises and will leave. “Liberals say these laws help people,” Greitens said in a statement. “They don’t. They hurt them.”

Not so, says David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economics Policy Institute. “We have decades of study on this and it all concludes that increases in the minimum wage have had negligible effect on jobs growth,” he says. The academic debate is currently about whether that impact is a small gain in growth or a small drop. Either way, he says, a small rise in the minimum wage has an outsized impact on low wage workers. A $1 an hour rise from the current minimum of $7.25 would give the average low wage worker $2,000 more a year, says Cooper. “That is a massive shot of income,” he says.

The intense lobbying against an increase is “only a device to keep wages as low as possible so that companies can catch as much profit as they can”, he says. Polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of an increase. At least 40 cities and states around the country will raise their minimum wages in 2017, thanks largely to ballot measures. Those measures will deliver raises of around $4,000 a year for more than one-third of the workforce in states like New York and California, according to the National Employment Law Project.

But Greitens is not alone in fighting back, helped by a study of the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage hike by the University of Washington, which seemed to suggest higher wages had translated to fewer jobs. That the methodology of that study has been heavily criticized (“utter BS“, according to Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies ) and stands in contrast to piles of studies that found the opposite hasn’t negated its popularity with anti-wage hikers.

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Marion isn’t in it for the politics. She is in it for the money, money that means one thing for her: getting her family back together and giving them a secure life. We pick her up at Popeyes and drive to a pleasant Kansas City suburb. Cicadas thrum as she beams strolling from the car to hug her daughter Rayven and goddaughter Shi’ Ann.

Shi’ Ann, in her rainbow hued “LOVE” T-shirt (the “O” is a butterfly), plays with princess flip-flops and squirms, giggling in Marion’s arms. “Princesses don’t put their fingers in their mouths,” laughs Marion. I ask Rayven how it is living without her mum. The idyll is over. Tears fill her eyes. Marion goes inside so we can’t see her cry.

Later, Marion says Rayven wants to leave school at 16 and get a job in fast food to help out. Ideally, her mum wants her to go to college but nothing is ideal for the Marion family at present.

After the visit, we drive back into the city to All Souls Unitarian church where Marion and Hughes are set to address a panel of academics, union leaders and others. The neighborhood is a world away from their own. A giant Louise Bourgeois spider menaces a manicured lawn at the Kemper art museum close by. The two women are unintimidated. They hold the room with ease as they talk about their fight with humor and a confidence that things will change.

Guests ask why they don’t go back to school, get higher paid jobs. Hughes has a college degree but as the daughter of a low wage worker said she could only afford community college. Employers saw her degree as “worthless”, and she ended up $13,000 in debt. She did have a job in a tax office but lost it only to find that thanks to Missouri’s business-friendly rules, she was barred from working for another tax office by a non-compete agreement. (Fast food franchisor Jimmy John’s imposed a similar agreement on its workers but dropped it last year after a public backlash.)

Barred from tax office work, Hughes said fast food was all she could find.

Marion says the argument that fast food workers should leave for other, better paid, jobs misses the point. People like fast food. The companies that make it make fortunes. “We are the foot soldiers for these billion-dollar businesses. We’re the ones doing the job and bringing the money,” she says.

“At the top of America, when it comes to Trump and them, their goal is to keep us down,” she says. “Between these billion-dollar companies and Trump, it is a power trip.”

They can afford to pay more and, she believes, eventually they will. “We are still coming. No war has been won during the night and we are not giving up.”

More than that, she likes working in fast food. “I love it. I’m good at it. Exactly like Martin Luther King said, ‘If you are going to be a road sweeper, be the best damn sweeper there is’,” she says. “I don’t understand. It’s just this society is all messed up.”