This sort of transience highlights one reason that organizing fast-food workers is so tricky. “People go from a job at McDonald’s to a job at H&M to driving for Uber,” says Han.
Solidarity was also forged as lines blurred between various types of low-wage service employment.
With that campaign following an enormous teachers strike, movement engendered movement as one set of workers inspired others. Current bids owe a lot to a broader, non-union “Fight for $15” campaign that launched in Chicago in 2012 among restaurant and retail workers, Han says. To date, however, a union contract recently established at the small West Coast chain Burgerville is a rarity. 32BJ has been active in this arena for the past nine years and is part of a larger national push to organize the sector. There have certainly been other efforts since. David McNew/Getty Images The Roots of Fast-Food OrganizingĪttempts to organize fast-food workers date back to the early ’80s and a little-known union contract that was won by workers at an eatery in Detroit’s Greyhound bus station, says Alex Han, a longtime labor organizer who’s now a Bargaining for the Common Good fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.
Striking McDonald’s employees at a 2016 protest in Los Angeles. This transient and vulnerable labor pool has historically proved tricky to organize unions such as 32BJ hope they can convince them that better wages and less stressed lives are on the horizon, if only they make their voices heard. The strike at the Queens store was just one in a string of actions in the past two years in response to transgressions at New York area Chipotles - and it was part of a larger, longer, more concerted effort from union organizers to force fast-food chains to do better by their workers. The fact that protests are occurring even in New York City - which has enacted hard-won, union-boosted worker protection legislation including Just Cause and Fair Workweek laws - and even at a chain like Chipotle, which promises to serve customers “food with integrity,” underscores the uphill work of union organizers. Fast-food workers were being exposed to COVID “They also realized that they’re not just being left unprotected - that their health didn’t matter to their employers - but that they were getting shit wages for their work.” There’s no “shortage of people who can do the jobs, it’s that the jobs are terrible,” said Suzanne Adely, co-director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. The situation has only gotten worse since the COVID epidemic began, and that fact has lead to mass walkouts across the country as well as widespread labor shortages in the foodservice industry. Wage theft, unsafe work environments, last-minute shift changes, and firings for no clear reason are just some of the unethical, if not illegal, indignities fast-food workers say they endure in the U.S. The store’s 20 other crew members, most of whom earn New York City’s $15 hourly minimum wage, were similarly strapped. ” The company did not respond to requests for comment on this story, but Guzman says the closure cost her $600 in lost wages - more than half her portion of rent on an apartment that she shares with her mother. There’s no “shortage of people who can do the jobs, it’s that the jobs are terrible.”Ĭhipotle “waited a whole week to tell us” the store would remain closed, says Caren Guzman, a veteran crew member and recent community college graduate.
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