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Refusing to swallow the burger >> Unionization at McDonald's isn't just about justice for a bunch of teenagers. It's part of a movement to turn McJobs into humane work
In a 1995 column in the Wall Street Journal, editorial board member Amity Shlaes described the homespun philosophy underpinning the teaching of prospective new burger-flipper bosses at McDonald's Hamburger University. McDonald's isn't just about hamburgers, she writes: it's about civilizing the continent's young. "Two decades after the the end of the Selective Service, a strange thing has happened: the draft army is being replaced by the army of fast-food workers. Twenty thousand volunteer troops are going to Bosnia this winter. But this year alone, McDonald's will put close to 20 times that number of 15 to 19 year olds through its equivalent of basic training. Over the decades, training programs like McDonald's have taken over much of the work teaching responsibility and courtesy the army used to do. Instead of learning 'Yes sir,' 'No sir' and push-ups on the parade grounds, young people are learning 'Please,' 'Thank you' and 'Here are your fries' at places like McDonald's." "We're father, minister, rabbi, counsellor, big brother--and boss," an executive tells Shlaes. Civilizing 18 year olds, another says selflessly, is, "whether we like it or not... a role we're thrust into." > > > The owners of six McDonald's franchises recently shut down their St-Hubert restaurant just when it appeared employees there were going to receive union accreditation. Pity the poor McDonald's executive: after all that care spent on teaching people about enthusiasm and good old-fashioned courtesy, here in Quebec a bunch of upstarts--snot-nosed kids, in the words of radio host Gilles Proulx--were actually on the verge of forming a union and slapping their mentors in the face. It turns out they were tired of the stresses of the job, of being yelled at until they cried, of vomiting from stress once their shift had finished, of being timed with a stopwatch to the second as they served a customer. It was pay, too. Some of the workers had salaries a heartbreaking 20 cents above minimum wage after six years of work. And there were the little unclassifiable things they didn't go for, like being grabbed and physically shaken for neglecting to ask a customer if he wanted a sundae as well as a hot apple pie. > > > But as interesting as the story is, there's more to it than worker grievances with the biggest fast-food firm in the world. What is being brought into question with the McDonald's unionization drives in Quebec is the very nature of McJobs. Once the kind of jobs teenagers and students took temporarily while they educated themselves for better things, this kind of low-paid, part-time job in the service industry has now become a job-job--one that is likely to be held for a much longer period of time. The crummy wages no longer count as pocket money, but as salary to pay for rent and food. "More and more people are realizing that jobs in the service sector are where they're going to be for a while," says John Bowman, national representative of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union. "In the old days they knew they'd be there a year or two while they went on to become a rocket scientist. That's no longer the case. They don't have that job lined up anymore." The CAW successfully unionized workers in 10 different Starbucks coffee shops in British Columbia last year. Workers were angered with the company's computerized scheduling system that gave newer, lower-paid employees more hours than experienced, higher-paid workers. It's a common tactic in fast-food management, says Bowman. The object is to groom a large pool of part-time labour and strongly discourage any worker wanting to linger too many years as an employee. With so many part-time workers, adds Bowman, the boss also has the opportunity to reward docile workers with more hours and punish recalcitrant ones with fewer: "They use it as a power thing." All these factors create the need for unionization in the service sector, says Bowman. Since the Starbucks unionization, the CAW has been getting calls from workers in trades the union wouldn't have heard from only a few years ago--security guards, hairstylists, warehouse workers, retail salespeople and janitors. Higher wages in these trades are an imperative, Bowman says. "There are greater numbers of people around just barely making enough money to pay the bills. You can't build an economy on that." Unionizing these workers, though, is another story. Bowman says it can be an incredibly demanding sector to unionize because of high turnover of workers, erratic scheduling and the sheer novelty of it all. Because of service workers' low wages, moreover, the union dues collected are "not exactly a financial bonanza."
And of course, there are the union-busting tactics of fast-food giants, McDonald's being the most notorious of them all. Workers at the McDonald's at Mont-Royal and Papineau who began a unionization drive a few months after the St-Hubert one, for example, received home visits, were taken on short
The St-Hubert case has dragged on before the provincial labour commissioner since the group applied for accreditation with the Teamsters in February, 1997, largely because of the time-consuming legal manoeuvrings presented by the lawyers of both the franchise managers, Mike and Tom Cappelli, and the McContestataires. But the final blow to the union came two weeks ago, when the owners of the St-Hubert franchise shut down the restaurant and booted all workers, in favour of the union or not, out of their jobs. The Capellis claimed at the time that they closed the restaurant because it was a money-loser, but union leaders say the timing is way too suspect. The Teamsters-affiliated Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ) announced last week that it wants to see the restaurant's books for proof and, if the Capellis refuse to comply, will launch a boycott of the chain. With all this strife, it's small wonder that union attempts at other MacDonald's in North America have died ignominious deaths. Magnus Isacsson, a Montreal filmmaker now researching the McDonald's unionization drive for a documentary, says the St-Hubert situation is exceptional because of an "extraordinary combination of personalities and consequences." He calls the union organizers "a group of very strong people." > > > Teamsters recruiter Henri Van Meerbeeck is the man propelling the unionization drive. Forty years ago Van Meerbeeck's father joined a union and immediately saw his salary jump from $6 to $27 a day. Van Meerbeeck's been a staunch supporter of unionization ever since. He says he's not in the least deterred by all the obstacles McDonald's has put in the union's way: "The McDonald's workers have come out very clearly in favour of a union. It's my job to see they get it." > > > For fast-food giants like McDonald's, there's a lot at stake over the unionization drive. In their 1976 book Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald's, Max Boas and Steve Chain described it this way: "To Hamburger Central, the question of unions went to the heart of its existence. The profits, the stock, the hamburger millionaires, Hamburger Central, Hamburger U--everything stood like a giant inverted pyramid on the pinpoint of minimum wages." How nervous is McDonald's about creeping unionization? According to Sid Ingerman, a professor of economics at the Labour College of Canada, very nervous indeed. "They're willing to put enormous amounts of resources into preventing unionization and they have done so," Ingerman says. He calls the closing of the St-Hubert restaurant "an act of desperation," and adds, "they're not going to walk away from this as they have in the past. The public is not happy about it." But would a boycott work? La Presse's Nathalie Petrowski wrote after the St-Hubert closing that she would boycott McDonald's immediately but for the fact that excursions there, or the promise of them, were a convenient means of making children behave. These tender sentiments were echoed by franchise owner Tom Cappelli when he was asked in an interview what he would do in case of a boycott: how, he asked earnestly, could one explain that to a child? But the lasting and amazing thing about this whole unionization drive is that the players themselves, or a good number of them, are pretty much children themselves. You have only to listen to a 16 year old named Benjamin, a now-unemployed St-Hubert McDonald's worker, who attended the press conference at which the FTQ made its boycott threat. He said something about how hypocritical it was to show heart-warming McDonald's ads with children and babies on TV when you knew what abusive things were happening to young workers within your own walls. Here was a 16-year-old kid refusing to swallow the paternalistic, kindly, friend-to-children image of McDonald's, and realizing that the organization's true sentiment toward young people was contempt. And you couldn't help but think, if this is the future of the labour movement, then this isn't too bad at all.
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by JACQUIE CHARLTON
drives and corralled behind closed doors into backrooms by one or more specially imported managers who used bribes and threats to try to dissuade them from joining the union. They had hours cut if they refused, and were even promised their very own McDonald's franchises if they helped vanquish the union. In St-Hubert, the most bizarre tactic used was the shuttling-in of a 20-strong band of anti-union workers nicknamed the McContestataires who supposedly got together on their own to hire a lawyer to help foil their fellow workers' unionization attempts. None of the McContestataires would tell reporters where the money to hire their lawyer came from.