Today, fast-food workers in more than 100 cities will stage another in a series of one-day strikes, in some places engaging in civil disobedience. The workers’ “Fight for 15” campaign, an effort to win $15 hourly wages and contracts from some of the nation’s largest employers, most particularly McDonald’s, has been building steadily since a small band of employees first walked off the job two years ago in New York.

By the conventional metrics of organizing projects, the workers’ effort, backed and coordinated by the Service Employees International Union, is a work in progress at best, a quixotic venture at worst. The great unionization campaigns of the 1930s and ’40s focused on factories that employed thousands. McDonald’s offers unions no such economies of scale: The hundreds of thousands of people who work for the company and its franchises are scattered among thousands of small outlets. It’s hard to see how even a rising number of sporadic strikes by discrete groups of employees will bring McDonald’s to the bargaining table anytime soon.

Still, even though the campaign has yet to win a union contract for a single worker, it already has to be judged a signal success. By highlighting the abysmal incomes of millions of hardworking Americans, it has prodded governments to phase in minimum-wage increases in a growing number of cities and states. California has raised its minimum to $10; Massachusetts, to $11; the District and its Maryland suburbs to $11.50. Seattle has hiked its minimum to $15, and San Francisco voters are expected to do the same at the polls in November. San Diego recently raised its standard to $11.50, and on Monday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed raising his city’s minimum to $13.25 — roughly the same level that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) are pushing for. Other legislation targeted at low-wage workers is being enacted, as well: Last week, the California legislature, with the backing of Gov. Jerry Brown (D), passed a bill mandating paid sick days for the state’s workers.

The fast-food workers’ campaign, then, may be viewed not simply as a unionization drive but also as the second act of a broader workers’ movement kicked off by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011. Occupy never developed a strategic focus that went beyond occupying, but it nonetheless focused the nation’s attention on the widening chasm separating the 1 percent from everybody else. The fast-food campaign, similarly, has not produced — not yet, at least — anything resembling a union contract, but it has staged enough high-profile actions, with a compelling economic and moral message, to win real gains for workers, whether those workers stand to ever become union members or not.

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