Breaking: Workers in some 50 restaurants
expected to walk off job, potentially shutting down several eateries
today
By Josh Eidelson
New
York City fast food workers this morning planned to walk off the job in
what organizers promised would be the largest-ever strike against the
fast-growing, virtually union-free industry. The workers are demanding
that chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s raise their wages to $15 an hour
and allow them to organize a union without retaliation. The campaign
expected over 400 workers from 50-some stores to participate in the
surprise strike, doubling the size of their previous walkout and
potentially shutting down several fast food restaurants for the day.
“Obviously,
it will piss off our bosses even more than before,” KFC worker Joe
Barrera told Salon in a pre-strike interview. Barrera, 22, said that
over his seven years in the industry, “we’ve had our complaints, but no
one actually spoke out about it … I guess people were finally tired of
the disrespect, under-compensation, being overworked, not having steady
schedules and times, not having enough hours – basically, being played
around with.” Workers from Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s,
Papa John’s, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are also expected to join the
strike.
Barrera, who’s paid the $7.25 minimum wage, said that a
decent raise would allow him to stop skipping meals and start pursuing
college. “Maybe I could afford to have a girlfriend, take her out on a
date …” he added. “All of that money goes right now to just surviving.”
Fast
food is becoming an ever-larger and more representative sector of the
U.S. economy. “We should think of these jobs as the norm,” said Columbia
University political scientist Dorian Warren, “because even when you
look at the high-skilled, high-paying jobs, they’re even adopting the
low-wage model” of management. That means erratic schedules, paltry
benefits, and – so far – almost no unions. “These are the quintessential
example of the kinds of jobs that we have now,” said Warren, “and of
the kind of job that we can expect in the future for the next few
decades.”
Asked yesterday about recent labor protests, a
McDonald’s spokesperson emailed a statement saying, “We value and
respect all the employees who work at McDonald’s restaurants” and that
the majority of its stores are franchisee-run restaurants “where
employees are paid competitive wages, and have access to flexible
schedules and quality, affordable benefits.”
Today’s
planned work stoppage represents a major escalation by Fast Food
Forward, a campaign spearheaded by the community organizing group New
York Communities for Change (a successor to the now deceased ACORN). The
fast food campaign’s funders include the Service Employees
International Union. As Salon first reported,
the campaign went public with a previous strike on Nov. 29. A parallel
effort is underway in Chicago, where workers are also demanding $15 an
hour and unionization without intimidation, but so far haven’t gone on
strike. While New York’s and Chicago’s are the only ones to go public so
far, similar organizing efforts are underway elsewhere as well.
Reached
over email regarding the Fast Food Forward campaign, National
Restaurant Association executive vice president Scott DeFife warned that
“Any additional labor cost can negatively impact a restaurant’s ability
to hire or maintain jobs.”
If the nature of the fast food
industry reflects what’s happening to U.S. jobs, the shape of the fast
food campaign reflects the challenges unions face in fighting back.
Since
1935, federal law has promised workers who want a union the chance to
hold an election and force their boss to negotiate. But that promise
has
proven pretty
empty. Among the obstacles: The government-sponsored election process
is rife with opportunities for intimidation and delay. Companies that
fire workers for organizing risk only meager penalties, after what can
be a years-long process. Even when workers win a unionization election,
they’re as likely as not to be left without a union contract a year
later, because companies can stall or stonewall negotiations.
So
even though the law says that it’s up to workers whether to bargain
collectively with their boss, it’s really up to bosses whether to
bargain in good faith with their employees. To succeed, union campaigns
have to mount enough pressure against companies to make the costs of
holding out greater than the benefits. But courts and politicians have
made
that harder to pull off, by making one of labor’s key
weapons – the strike – harder to effectively use. Many of the most
effective strike tactics – from sit-down strikes that physically occupy a
workplace, to solidarity strikes that spread through a supply chain –
are now generally
illegal. And “permanently replacing” striking workers – de facto
terminating them by refusing to let them have their jobs back after a
strike – is
generally kosher under the law.
“It’s
important to recognize that labor law is set up to prevent exactly this
type of organizing,” Joe Burns, the author of “Reviving the Strike,”
said of the fast food campaign.
The Fast Food Forward campaign
reflects some of the ways unions are taking on this challenge: finding
alternative leverage points against corporations, and reimagining the
strike. NYCC executive director Jonathan Westin told Salon that the
campaign “is taking on all of the different avenues that we can, to
engage workers, community, clergy, elected officials, and allies, to do
everything we can to change the conditions within the industry. And if
that’s through labor law, great. If it’s through other avenues, where
community folks are stepping up and doing things differently, that’s
great.” As Salon
reported,
when a Wendy’s worker was told she’d been terminated the day after the
November strike, clergy, politicians and other supporters won her job
back within an hour by rallying inside and outside her store.
In recent decades, as strikes have declined, unions have increasingly turned to “
comprehensive campaign”
tactics designed to compel companies to budge through a combination of
political, consumer, community and media pressure. Tactics in such
campaigns can range from digging up dirt on management, to calling on
customers to boycott, to lobbying against a company’s zoning
application. Each of these can pack a punch. But unless the campaign is
really engaging workers, companies can often just wait out the bad press
while forcing employees to attend that many more anti-union meetings.
Just look at Wal-Mart, which withstood a well-funded union-backed air
war in the 2000s without really breaking a sweat.
Simply put, few
things engage customers, threaten management and transform workers like a
good strike. And so, with organized labor nationally very much playing
defense, labor organizers have been grappling with how to make strikes
work for non-union workers. Today’s fast food strike, the
fall strikes by Wal-Mart retail and warehouse workers, and a February
strike by janitors who clean Twin Cities Target stores all share a few apparent tactics in common.
Because
it’s legal to “permanently replace” workers who just strike in order to
win union recognition or higher wages, workers announce that they are
striking in protest of violations of labor law by management (if the
government finds this to be true, then permanently replacing them
becomes illegal – though that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen anyway).
Because modern U.S. strikes are often more about humiliating management
than shutting down business, workers go out on strike for a single day
rather than walking off the job indefinitely. And rather than waiting
until a majority of workers are willing to take the risk of going on
strike, organizers mount strikes with a minority of the workforce, in
hopes that their courage – and their safe return to work afterward –
will inspire more of their co-workers to join in the next time.
If organizers’ estimates (400 to 500 strikers today) hold true, that’ll suggest that such “
minority unionism”
is paying off for NYC fast food workers, at least so far. McDonald’s
employee Stephen Warner told Salon that when he heard about other
workers going on strike in November, “it gave me hope for a better
future … I was very surprised.” He’ll be out on the picket lines himself
this time, he said, “hopefully to set an example for the rest of the
people in fast food, so that they know that change is possible.”
But
can these efforts ever develop the clout to compel a company like
Wendy’s to foreswear union-busting? Labor campaigns have won some
victories against fast food giants before. As I
reported for
the Nation last month, a strike by 15 immigrant guest workers led
McDonald’s to cut ties to a franchisee that had allegedly subjected them
to shifts of up to 25 hours straight. Consumer pressure campaigns by
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (a non-union labor group) have gotten
chains like Taco Bell to sign agreements requiring improved conditions
for Florida tomato workers. And members of the Industrial Workers of the
World, a union that generally eschews legal union recognition, say
their workplace has forced improvements in discipline, scheduling and
pay in some Minneapolis Jimmy John’s stores. But getting industry giants
to drop their opposition to collective bargaining would be a tall
order, one that would likely require much larger strikes, in many more
cities, to even be conceivable.
“The franchise structure makes it
easier for McDonald’s or the other food chains to just cut a franchise
loose and say they’re not responsible,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, who
directs labor education and research at Cornell. That’s because it’s the
thousands of individual store franchisee-owners who legally employ
workers, but it’s the corporate headquarters that actually calls the
shots. On the other hand, Bronfenbrenner told Salon, “unlike Wal-Mart,
McDonald’s is much more vulnerable to consumer pressure, in that they
have competitors.” While some labor campaigns focus all of their
firepower on making an example of a single company, Bronfenbrenner said
that this campaign’s strategy of mobilizing against
all of the
major fast food industry players could pay off if one chain decides to
make a deal with the union in hopes of getting a competitive advantage
by escaping labor strife.
Burns, a negotiator for an airline
union, called the fast food workers’ willingness to walk off the job “a
very positive sign” of “a major shift in organizing strategy” after
years in which unions largely neglected strikes. But he predicted that
the constraints of labor law — including the laws limiting
“representational strikes” designed to win collective bargaining, and
repeated “intermittent strikes” against the same boss — will come to
pose a major obstacle. “In the long run,” Burns told Salon, “it’s hard
to see a successful strategy organizing fast food that doesn’t involve
violating labor law.”
While that hasn’t happened so far, the fast
food strikers are drawing inspiration from a group of workers who
famously mounted an illegal strike. Today’s strike date was chosen
because it marks 45 years since Rev. Martin Luther King was gunned down
in Memphis, where he was supporting striking sanitation workers who were
demanding union recognition. At a New York City meeting last Thursday,
two veterans of that strike met with fast food employees just before a
secret meeting where workers voted to authorize today’s strike. “In
order for you all to win anything, you’re going to have to stand up,”
Memphis striker Alvin Turner, now 78, told the crowd. “You’re going to
have to stand up and be counted … If you don’t stand up, you can kiss it
goodbye.”
No comments:
Post a Comment