KU professor leads project to document history, preserve KC-based movement to fight for better restaurant pay

A photograph of a man holding a sign outside of the Missouri Capital. He is wearing a red T-shirt and holding signs made by Stand Up KC, an organization advocating for better pay for restaurant workers.

A member of Stand Up KC holds a sign outside of the Missouri Capitol advocating for better pay for restaurant workers. Image credit: Steve Hebert

Fri, 01/16/2026

Mike Krings

LAWRENCE — While the national Fight-For-$15 movement to gain better pay and working conditions for fast food and casual restaurant workers was influential and made a lasting mark, the story of the movement could be forgotten if it were not preserved. A University of Kansas professor is part of an ongoing, collaborative effort to document the work of Stand Up KC, a Kansas City, Missouri-based organization.

A sustainable community archive commemorating the local, labor, Black and women’s history of the movement has been built to preserve the physical materials and stories that might otherwise be lost. Tadeo Weiner Davis, assistant professor of social welfare at KU, was part of the collaborative to form the Stand Up KC Community Archive, which will be housed in the LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries.

“Stand Up, Fight Back: Designing an Anti-Racist Movement for Worker Power,” an exhibition of materials used in the movement, will also open Jan. 17 at the Charlotte Street Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri.

Weiner Davis, whose research documents community organizing, labor movements, urban politics, race and class, was a recipient of a 2023 KU Racial Equity Research, Scholarship & Creative Activity Award to help establish the community archive.

“Most chapters in the Fight-For-$15 movement across the country kind of disappeared, but Stand Up KC stuck around. They are now a statewide chapter known as the Missouri Workers Center,” Weiner-Davis said. “I started checking out the spaces they worked in over the last several years and saw things like signs, fliers and materials from their work stored in a basement office and realized it was just a flood or mold event away from being wiped out.”

Weiner Davis collaborated with Stand Up KC members and staff, including a worker advisory board to guide the creation of the archive. The group led decisions on what materials to preserve, where to house them and to record oral histories with members who were involved with the movement that will be included in the archive to ensure their stories are not lost.

Weiner Davis and team collected materials and conducted interviews with journalists who covered the movement, professors and students who have studied it, as well as organizers and community members who took part in protests, demonstrations and activities to improve pay and working conditions for restaurant employees, who are disproportionately represented by women and people of color in the United States.

The opening reception at the Charlotte Street Gallery will be an initial display of material related to the movement, including ephemera such as Stand Up KC’s iconic red T-shirts, screen prints, cell phone photography and art from workers, banners, and documentary video and photos as well as oral histories from workers.

Related programming will feature a discussion about the graphic design of materials Jan. 31. A panel and conversation about archiving people’s history will take place Feb. 12.

While more events will be held in the future, the Community Archive will be available permanently in UMKC Libraries’ LaBudde Gallery for historians, scholars, journalists, students and anyone interested in the local history of the movement, Kansas City labor organizations and the work of women and minority communities to improve working conditions.