June 29, 2023 • 46 mins
Mia talks with Mira, a freelance journalist and union organizers, about McDonalds and what we can learn from an eventually failed union campaign there.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
It could happen here. It's the show where we hate McDonald's.
I'm your host, be a long professional McDonald's haater, and
with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's
a freelance journalist. And you need an organizer. Miro, Welcome
to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah, so okay, So specifically, there are lots of the
hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think
I'm actually not sure how well it is known today,
but I'm about eighty percent sure that the tradition of
breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a it was
actually originally a thing about breaking like it came from
(00:48):
like a bunch of campaigns. I think it definitely in France.
I think also in Mexico that like anytime a Starbucks, Starbucks,
Jesus Christ, anytiving McDonald's would open up, everyone would immediately
start breaking the windows.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's the only proper way to handle on McDonald's. And yeah,
professional opinion.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
But the reason we're talking about McDonald's is that, Yeah,
you tried to organize a McDonald's union, which is I
guess the other thing you could do with the McDonald's
other than lighting it on fire, which is it you could? Oh,
I guess, I guess there are those people in France
who took it over and turned it into like a
food co op or something.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
But a third thing you can do with.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It, discovered a third A third thing to do with
the McDonald's. Let's get the towers. Yeah, but uh, yeah,
I wanted to talk about I guess what you know, Okay,
I wanted to use Yeah, so you you've written a
very good piece about this in strange matters, uh called
my Mcunion that is really good, and I wanted to
(01:48):
talk about sort of the piece, the sort of nitty
gritty aspect of like what it's like to organize a union,
and also just about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good Lord, no, I.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Have so much to talk about, so more than happy too.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, So I guess, okay, I think I think we
should start with just the sort of McDonald's miss of
it all. I wanted to start with just talking a
bit about what it's actually like to work on a
McDonald's because I, well, okay, a, I feel like it's
not actually universal experience anymore for like people who have
worked at a fast food restaurant and b I think
(02:29):
people who it's it's a thing you blought out of
your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah, okay,
so what is it actually like when you show up
to your shift.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So McDonald's was my first job, and it was a
hell of an introduction. Yes, the moment you would come in,
you would be most days bombarded with constant orders on
the screen because they had these little screens both in
the front and back drill area that like showed all
the orders they had. And like a good sixty seventy
(03:05):
percent of the time I came in, people would just
be swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh,
thank god you hear. We need someone to get on
right now. And it's like you don't even get a
moment to breathe. Like, as you're standing there waiting to
clock in on their punching machine, you're just like, oh,
dear God, I'm gonna have a fucking terrible time. And
(03:26):
as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you
clock in, you're getting streamed at by your bosses right
by you because they're like, oh no, a customer complained
because there was too many pickles on their sandwich, And
then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive through window
on top of that, and then you might have people
at the front counter. This was before proven, so McDonald's
(03:49):
still had front counters when people would come in. I
don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone I've been
to since has just closed down internally. And I envied that.
But you would have people yelling from there, and if
you were one of the unfortunate souls who ended up
working directly facing the customers and not just cooking, you
(04:10):
would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved.
I later worked at a Windy's where I got a
taste of that, and I walked out three days into March.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Stuff sucks.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, And I think that, you know, I think like
one of the things I think like compounds this is,
you know, okay, I will, I will, I will, I
will do a theory, which is that I think people
have a really weird understanding of what it means to
have a job on a sort of theoretical level that
(04:49):
dates back to a genuinely, very weird period in the
twentieth century where people actually had like stable hours. Yeah,
and that's just not how any of this works, right,
Like you know, you like, there is no actual stable
amount of hours. You just get you get some number
of hours like a week that you're assigned to. But
(05:09):
then you know, but this these least to do a
thing that we've out god like, like literally every single
field we've talked about unidizing has this problem, which is
just understaffing, because why the fuck would you have enough
people to do a job? Would you could have less
than enough people to do a job and pave them less.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
That That was my experience on McDonald and fast food
in general. You would get such inconsistent numbers of hours
that you wouldn't know how much money you'd be making
in the month, because, for all you know, this month,
you could be working you know, every regular day, every
business day of the week. You could be working only weekends,
(05:46):
or you could be like I was after the union
got busted spoiler alert, uh, working three hours on Sundays
in the mornings. And that's it if they really wanted to.
And there's nothing that outside of a union you can
do to prevent them from and outside of you know
(06:08):
niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you
can't really do much if they decide just not to
staff you. And there is people working there who they
had like full blown kids, families relying on them in
that job. They weren't making much Pennsylvania, butimum wage was
seven twenty five and you know they were paying us that. Yeah,
(06:30):
and so from what little they could get, they would
maybe get like at best a one hundred bucks a
week with their hours, unless they were able to get
into like a managerial position where it's the only one
where you'd be kind of guaranteed ours in the sense
that they desperately need you so they'll throw you on whatever.
Beyond that, it's you also don't know the days you're
(06:53):
going to work too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, This thing I was gonna ask is like, what,
like how how much time do you have between finding
out you're going to be on a shift and then
like being on the shift.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You can have anywhere from several days notice to under
twelve hours notice, And there is no way to predict
what's going to happen the next week. Is it all
depends on when you're going to get staffed. There were
points I found out day out when I was going
(07:26):
to be working.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah, and like this, I mean, this
is the thing that like is becoming. This is the
way that labor used to work in like the eighteen hundreds,
and then you know, it was just sort of like
phased out because it turns out this is actually a
stunningly inefficient way to actually like like run a business.
(07:50):
But you know, we've reached the thing that happened at
the end of history. Is it's not the history ended,
it's that like capital needing to be efficient end and
now they just like do this shit and it's like, well, okay,
so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly
an efficient way to run things. It's you just like
it's it's it's it's a mechanism designed to just like
(08:11):
absolutely destroyed like the sort of psyches and lives of
the people who are doing the thing.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, that is completely accurate. They do not give a
rat's ass about anyone working there. For a second. Everyone
working there is completely expendable, even if they're a manager.
There's been points people have worked there for like three
four months and got promoted to a manager. There's everyone
(08:41):
is expendable, and they they make sure you know that too,
and how they treat you, You're not treated with any dignity,
with any respect. You're just completely thrown around at their
whims and the whims of upper management, you know, the
the regional managers and the like. And it's it's awful
(09:08):
because how they get away with that model is they
know there's always going to be some people who are
desperate to work at McDonald's, either because they're young and
need to get a first job, or they're down on
their luck and need to get something to pay the bills.
(09:29):
I've even hitting hard times trying to reapply at McDonald's
since working there because I needed to pay the bill.
I was in that exact position again and fairly recently,
and so it's it's not a fun place to be,
(09:50):
to put it mildly, Yeah, of course they didn't let
me work there again because I believe I'm banned from
ever working at a McDonald's again.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
That's a That's another thing that I think is not
that well understood, like loss of companies just have basically
not even like there are there are people that I
know who are blacklisted, like from shit they did dream
occupy like people like, yeah, like like that they're these
these things, these things suck and if you like, you know,
(10:22):
this is I guess one of the sort of issues
of doing any kind of organizing is that like if
you lose, like stuff can go like very badly for you,
which sucks. But also simultaneously, if you don't organize things
we go very badly for you. So it's you know,
so it's a double or yeah, yeah, I guess just
one everything I wanted to ask, which I don't know,
(10:43):
if you know do you do you know if you're
if you're uh, if your McDonald's was a franchise, if
it was like actually owned by the company.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
So yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't don by
like the official company in any major sense. I actually
met the franchise owner during the course of the union,
which was a fun time when we were in the
process of getting busted. Oh boy.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, So do you want to explain what a franchise is?
And I guess, like how that sort of model works.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah, So most McDonald's out there are franchises, which basically
means McDonald's will kind of let independent people buy out
their stores and own and manage them in a certain region.
For a portion of the profits in the Scranton area,
(11:44):
which was where I did the union, they were all
owned by one single family who was ultra rich, in
part because of the McDonald's and in part because of
family inheritances, and these folks they would be the kind
(12:08):
of be treated as like the head Honchow's, the same
way that CEOs get talked about at most companies. They
weren't the CEOs, of course, but like as far as
in terms of managing greets, rant and area McDonald's went,
they were the main ones in charge. Of course McDonald's
corporate always have the final say over everything, but they
(12:29):
manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world, so
they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty,
which is why they kind of let people own these franchises.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, which I think is really interesting. It's like they've
managed to somehow combine it like the worst aspects of
working for a major corporation with the worst aspects of
working for like a small business tyrant. Which it's interesting
too because it's like, I don't know, this is like
one of the weird things about McDonald because like McDonald's,
McDonald's Corporate doesn't make money from hamburgers. They're basically a
(13:01):
real estate company that like sells franchises to people, but simultaneous.
But that means that like they can do things, like
they can force their franchises to do things that are
like unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them, Like there's
they're still getting paid, Like they're still getting paid there
like licensing, like franchising fees or whatever, like no matter
(13:24):
what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah, And
that's I don't know, it's it strikes me. It's like
a really interesting It strikes me as like the exact
arrangement that's like the most likely to create a fascist,
just like because like you know, you have a group
of people like and I think I think it's a
good agm with this. This is what like quote unquote
economic anxiety is. Is you have like a you have
(13:46):
like you have a sort of middle level of like this,
you know, the middle level of person who is a
capitalist but is also getting squeezed from the top down
like by a by larger corporations and then also is
facing bought about pressure from workers, and so their solution
to this is just like ruthlessly, like you know, just
just like ruthlessly do a fascism against like everyone who's
(14:08):
working for them.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, scratch a liberal and the fascist reads.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, it's a more.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
True than McDonald's and fast food really than anywhere. Yeah,
the mcfascists reign supreme. Ah.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So speaking of mcfascists, Uh, the products and services these
are too. These are two distinct sentences. They are not related.
Uh FCC please, actually, no, fuck you. The SCC doesn't
well no, no, the SCC. The SCC does not regulate us.
I think we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck
(14:44):
the SEC. That's why I could swear on this podcast
because they don't recomplain us. And we're back. Okay. So,
having having returned to more mcfascism, Yeah, okay, so I
(15:07):
guess we should start talking about how the union organizing
started and how I guess the sort of immediate mistake
that y'all made attempting to get this, to get this
off the ground.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah, So it started with me. I was the first
one there to bring up the concept of reunion because
then I was like only seventeen, I was new to
anarchism still, and so I was young, green, and eager
to get shit done. I still am all the above, Yeah,
(15:51):
but I had a few contacts to local IWW people
through just the very very faint activist networks that were
up there, and by faint, I mean a total of
like five people. So I got in contact with the
(16:14):
IWW guy I believe. I used the name Mark. Yes,
I used the name Mark in the article to protect
his anonymity, so I'll just keep consistency. And Mark was
the one who convinced me to take more major steps.
(16:37):
He was the one who I talked to and got
consultation about it, and he was the one who gave
all that initial guidance. And there was a few friends
of mine I had there there also, not really anarchists.
Most of them were just like your soci dems, but
they were They were eager to get something done and
(16:58):
help out, so you know, can't complain there. And it
was like a small core group of us who all
wanted to get involved and get this out and done.
And we had never done anything like this before. Northeast
Pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there, but
(17:20):
we were not part of that history initially, and so
it ended up going south unfortunately. Pretty it went well
at first, but I think some of the main issues
(17:44):
we had in hindsight doing things, especially now having more
experience in organizing under my belt, in hindsight, we rushed
things way too much. We were trying to get everyone
(18:05):
on board. We didn't do sufficient one on one conversations
with people, We didn't do sufficient intel gathering, and we
didn't we relied too much on our technical tools and
left too much incriminating evidence that we trusted too many
people with. We didn't really have a strong way of
(18:29):
going about it that would have been better for what
we were doing.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, and I guess this comes to one and I
think of the main things that you're talking about here,
and I think is one of the main things about
you know, union organizing that like, like pretty much no
matter who you talk to wright politically, the the things
that are important to get a union to work are
kind of similar, which is that, Yeah, Like it's usually
(18:57):
a very slow process. It's a process of building relationships,
and it's a process of figuring out who in your work, well,
who in your workplays people sort of trust and respect
and like make friends with and figuring out how to
sort of how to get them involved in how to
get I don't know how how unions are not just
(19:17):
sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're they're
built of actuals, like social relationships that you have with
another person and another and other gifts and in the
relationships that they have with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, Yeah,
I wanted to ask about how, how okay, when when
when you were sort of starting to do this right,
how how were you sort of identifying the people you
(19:39):
needed to talk to and what kinds of things were
you doing to try to get them involved and try
to like map out how the workplace functioned.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
So the first people identify for people that I thought
I could trust, and the core group of people I
had were folk that in regards to the union, I
in hindsight was able to trust. We all agreed on
the same issues, and we all had the kind of
a similar more gung ho attitude. I think me definitely
the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall
(20:11):
where I was kind of pushing the union by myself
for a bit, which is definitely easy to fall into. Yeah,
but we in terms of identifying the workplace leaders, the
natural leaders found there, we mostly relied on conversations with
Mark to do that. We talked with him about who
(20:33):
worked there. We gave a brief list of everyone who
worked there, and we kind of just pinpointed them the
specific people we saw as leaders and left spent that
And I mean, as far as basic charting goes, it
wasn't terrible, but there is definitely a lot to be
desired and it could have been far more fleshed out.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
What do you think that would have looked like? Or
you know, what does it look like in sort of
like other campaigns that you've run that were like the
first one you ever tried to do at seventeen.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
So charting as I would do it now, it should
be done from the start before even approaching the first
person unless you extremely trust the person, like you are
just bonded for life. You know, you can't go without
them unless you have like really deep trust with the person. Initially,
(21:25):
you shouldn't approach anyone but you going into it. You
should start off with if you can reaching out to
an IWW rep. But if you can't make a detailed
chart of who's in your workplace, what positions they're at,
what team they're on, Like in terms of if they're
on one person's managed area or another person's managed area,
(21:54):
you should should figure out who they're close to, who
they listen to, live in demographic information because you want
your unions to be intersextional, and you want to be
able to figure out above all else, whether or not
you've had away from work one on one with them,
(22:17):
and whether or not you've had any talks with them
prior about unions and where they might stand on unions.
You want to document all that and it doesn't have
to be the most detail. You can just do a
spreadsheet with it, but it can definitely be a lot
to document. And it's it's no joke. It's not something
(22:38):
that should be rushed. It's not fun. I you know,
there's there's nothing really that's a blast about trying to
sit there and be like, ah, yes, let me fill
out paperwork about my workplace employees. But it will come
back and save you so many times and give help
you formulate strategies for going word and we we rush
(23:04):
things and talk did things like talking to people on
the workplace floor and just said, hey, do you want
to do a union yeah, and call that a day
and said that was one on one and it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, should we explain what one on one like is
supposed to be?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, So one on one is. It doesn't necessarily have
to be on one on one, but it should be
between at least a union organizer and another person. It
could potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping be a
more noviced one along with during the one on one.
(23:44):
That could be a thing, but ideally they are just
one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about
initially anyway noncommittal discussion on where what their issues are
in the workplace, what griefances they might have, and what
(24:10):
their current stances on workplace organizing.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah, okay. Another thing I wanted to sort of get
into is the role of like having having a way
to talk to people outside of work and having just
sort of a collaborative space where people talk about and
I think this is something that like I don't know,
I think this is you know, this is one of
the big things. I think that that this is one
of the big things that's changed in the past, you know,
(24:36):
maybe like decade and a half or so is that
how like the the the actual space in which people
talk about a union like tends on to be a
physical space anymore. It tends to be sort of either
like a signal chat or like a Facebook chat, like
a I guess what'sapp technically is owned by Facebook. But yeah,
(24:58):
and so yeah, I want to talk a bit about that,
and also I guess get into the sort of security
problems that you can have with this, because yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's what we did. We had a group chat on
Facebook Messenger to talk to everyone about the union and
everything like that. And there's a lot of pros to
having a centralized group chat, don't get me grown. It
makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to
take actions to other people. It can be helpful to
(25:31):
do any last minute coordination needed. It can be useful
to make sure everyone's on the same page. But there's
also major drawbacks to it. One. As you mentioned, there's
big privacy concerns, and we ran into that during the campaign.
If with anything organizing, you're only as secure as your
(25:53):
weakest link, and if you have people you do not
completely one hundred percent trust in your group chat, someone
could meek everything either wittingly or unwittingly. In our case
it was wittingly, but you very well could have someone
who isn't being careful and might show the group chat
to someone else who they shouldn't on accident. And unless
(26:18):
everyone's on the same page about best security practices, you're
not going to get very far with having that. And
for another, doing any form of organizing over texts and
a major capacity is really hard. Yeah, there's so many
(26:39):
issues with like making sure people are understanding their tone
and undercommunicating properly and just meeting each other on the
same level that you really can't do over text like
you can do in person. If a text medium should
in my view, only be there to facilitate interactions that
(27:02):
are later done at best in person, but if not,
they can be done through like video calls.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah, And like, as much as zoom can be really annoying,
like it is way more productive than trying to do
things too text Like Yeah, just like having just like
just like having a weekly zoom meeting. You know, like
like there there's there's a lot of like cases where
you like, you know, you literally physically can't be in
the same place and you know, and if that's that's
(27:30):
the thing you're dealing with. Like, yeah, doing video calls
and stuff like that makes it way way easier, for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
It It is a way better medium to do anything
union related with. And it's also much easier to bond
with people over video chat too, And that's a huge
part of the union is connecting with your other film
(28:00):
workers and meeting each other on that same level and
bonded over your shared interests, over your share what you
desire from union, what you desire from your workplace. You
can't really do that easily anyway over text. I'm sure
someone somewhere has done it, but it's not recommended for
(28:23):
me anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Okay, Unfortunately, we need to do another thing that's not text,
which is ads. You can tell do great on the
ad pivots here, it's fine. I was I was watching
what's his name, the guy the right Way, ship head
guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for
a little bit. Glenn Beck, That's the one I was watching,
(28:44):
Glenn Beck, and I was like, oh no, this guy,
this guy's this guy's ad pivot was just racism. So
you know, we could do it could happen. Here are
our second slogan better ad pivots than Glenn back, and
(29:11):
we are back, hopefully.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will be broken
and this will immediately cut to a third AD. But
assuming that it doesn't, I wanted to talk a bit
also about sort of the kinds of things that are
necessary to get people to believe that a union can work,
(29:36):
because that's you know, like or organization isn't just sort
of a purely like it isn't just sort of a
purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale, you know, like
as much as it's about social Relationshi's about sort of morale,
about people believing in the thing. So I wanted to ask, Yeah,
I guess talk a little bit about what that process
(29:58):
is sort of like and what can happen to it.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, So that's something an issue we ran into and
make a union fairly early on was keeping people motivated
for the union and getting people wanting to be involved,
because one of the most common things you'll hear when
trying to organize the union is people like, oh, I
can't afford to lose this job. I have a family
(30:24):
to feed, I have bills to pay. You'll see people
saying they don't want to risk their careers. If you're
in a more professional environment, you'll see people just not
wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And
it's important when you're kind of trying to address those
(30:45):
concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not gonna
you can't make those concerns go away, because they're real.
When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you
could get fired and get punished for it. It happened
to me. It comes with the territory. But if you
(31:09):
do things safely and you do things right, it's a
much safer option than not doing any And that's the
main thing you kind of want to talk to people about,
is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's going
to change without you. And you can't butter up to
your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you.
(31:31):
The most they'll do is play pretend for a little
bit until things go right back to normal. And you
kind of want to talk to people about also why
it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the
(31:52):
union because their strength is in numbers, and that's something
that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose
is that they're not going to be an envelope. When
someone's viewing getting involved, a lot of the time they're thinking, oh,
if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're
not thinking about the strength envemnors. Sure you just you
(32:13):
yourself as the only one pushing for change in a workplace, Yeah,
there's a decent chance you'll get fired. But if you
have a whole crew of ten people, all who are
essential running the operations, pushing for change, suddenly you're going
to see things shifting a much different way. And so
building that solidarity among people is important, and I think
(32:36):
is the I don't want to say the absolute best way,
because there isn't an absolute best way to handle those concerns,
but it's definitely a way that can be effective if
done right.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, and I guess, okay, I guess I guess we
should go into how it sort of came apart. Yeah,
because unfortunately, you know, and this I think is the
thing that is depressing but true, which is that a
lot of union like statistic well, actually I don't have
the numbers. I'm not going to I'm not going to
(33:11):
actually say that, but a lot of union campaigns don't work,
and you know, sometimes it's because like something bad happens,
sometimes because it's just you know, stuff happens out of
your control. Sometimes it's I don't know, like a pandemic starts.
But yeah, I was talked about what happened here and
how to sort of avoid that because it sucks.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
So there's a lot of things that can be a
downfall in the union. In the case of McDonald's, our
main downfall. There was a lot of you know, little
things we did wrong that didn't help at all that
definitely just made matters worse in the end. But the
(33:58):
straw that broke the camel's back was not being careful
with who we trusted. And Dan, as I referred to
in the article, he was the one that caused the
penultimate destructure of it. The COVID contributed heavily, but I
feel like if it weren't for Dan, the union could
(34:19):
have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now,
if it weren't for COVID, I think the union also
could have stuck around. But the mixture of external factors
and internal did the downfall. But in terms of things
we could have actively prevented. Dan was the main thing
(34:40):
that we could have done approached way differently. We could
have approached handling new people in a much better light.
We should have had a centralized group being the ones
with all the communications everything, and let people prove their
trust to the union over time, doing taxes for it
(35:01):
and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff
that's already there. Because Dan was two faced, we all
thought he was our friend, which is why we thought
we could trust him. But he was in it just
to try and get some benefits for him, which is
(35:21):
why he snitched. He thought maybe he would get, you know,
some type of promotion or something he didn't which side note,
it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If
anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just
going to screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody
likes to snitch. Yeah, but we should have been a
(35:43):
lot more cautious with how we approached people and shouldn't
have just been doing things for the sake of doing them,
Like we shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace.
We shouldn't have been inviting and the one and everyone
to all our confidential group chats. We should have been
(36:07):
cautious of who we were around and what we were
saying around people and how we were going about it.
That's the core of it. I mean, yeah, it's recklessness.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, And I mean I think, like, you know, obviously
it is not good if the exist, like if the
existence of your union and a bunch of your stuff
gets leaked like this is not necessarily fatal, Like I've
been involved in campaigns where like that's happened and we
want anyways, but it could definitely be like you know,
especially like especially early on in the process and especially
(36:44):
like the more precarious stuff is uh, yeah, it's not great.
I get yeah, pretty bad pretty quickly, you know. I
guess the thing that I wanted to sort of ask
about was like, Okay, so historically up until the last
I mean I think was was was Burgerville the first
(37:05):
like modern fast food union. I think it might have been.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
It was either Burgerville or Jimmy John.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah, it was one of the two. Up up until
like really the last like like I think, like post
like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, fast food has been really
really difficult to organize and a lot of a lot
of unions either just didn't try or did these kind
of like weird PR stunt campaigns that were you know,
(37:35):
like Fight fifteen attached things where it's like, well, we're
not actually really trying to get a union, we're trying
to like get PR stuff for Fight fifteen. But this
is I don't know, this is the thing I think
it's interesting about the idea, about about the idea. This
is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of
the world specifically, is that they've actually like gone in
(37:58):
and seriously attempted to do it, and they sort of
finally broke through it a couple of places, and you
know this this McDonald's campaign didn't work. But what was
kind of interesting to me about it is like, I
don't know, like how kind of I don't know if
normal is the right word of a campaign it was,
but it's it looks a lot like I don't know,
it looked like it looks a lot like campaigns that
(38:20):
I've been involved in that were like not in the
fast food industry. And now I guess I was wondering
a bit about like to what extent were the sort
of tactics shaped by like the very specific weird conditions
of fast food, and to what extent it was just
sort of like the stuff you'd use in any workplace.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
So a lot of our base model was just stuff
you'd use in any workplace. Because at the time we're
doing this, I think the only fast food unions that
were around were like Jimmy John's and Burbertville. I think
those are the only two that had any publicity. This
was before all the major Starbucks campaigns.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, that's all pretty recent.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, and so we didn't have much of a playbook
for how to approach things in a fast food environment. Specifically,
a lot of what we're actually emulated the model on
was factory environments and things like that, because there is
somewhat of a similarity of having worked in both between
(39:28):
fast food and factories. With factories and both fast food,
you have a kind of assembly line model, you know,
crank out or crank out work. Crank out work, get
things out at a rapid pace, and stick to your job.
Maybe do it a little bit of clean up now
and then, but you stick to what you're doing, and
(39:51):
you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You
have some overlap, but only in so far as your
job will allow, but you might be able to talk
to each other and you shared break areas. That kind
of structure informed how we approached it. By us, what
we tried to do was talk to people we didn't
(40:13):
have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras,
in areas that were away from other people who might
be able to hear. But there is better ways of
doing it, and I think other campaigns benefited out there,
(40:39):
likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core
of it, because that's also, at least for me and
my experience with it. Something that didn't help us was
having someone who with no real experience doing something at
the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone
of no experience can't do amazing things. Countless examples of
(41:01):
unions that were ran by people with no experience at
all who's just jumped right into it and did amazing jobs.
But it's important to get a diversity of people with
different walks of life at the core of it, people
with different perspectives. Just so many different people involved at
(41:24):
the core as a kind of central organizing committee can
do you wonders with a union because We had just
a few young left leaning people, a few young left
leaning white people, most of which were male presenting. I
wasn't out as trans there, so I was presenting as masculine.
(41:48):
The other people I was with, they were all CIS men,
with one exception, two exceptions. Sorry, my memory is a
little on the fritz. But we needed more people with
different perspectives in there. We needed more, and there was
plenty to be found in the workplace, but we just
(42:11):
we neglected to include them in the core organizing the committee.
And I think that's something that could really benefit unions
and probably is a major strength of a lot of
the successful ones is having a diverse, main primary group
of central organizers. I don't want to say central organizers,
(42:32):
more like core organizers, because the solidarity union model isn't
like hierarchical, but this is a central group of people
involved that seek to do the main light work.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, and you know, I mean this has been I
think like one of the things that made the like
the Starbucks campaign's work was like they well with was
STARBARCKSNA specifically, it was a lot of like find the
queerest person in the world place to start talking to them,
but having the core group of people working on things.
Being as diverse as possible is good both in like
(43:07):
an immediate practical sense and it is sort of like
long term to chief sense, and the faster that happens
the better. Yeah, okay, do you have anything else that
you from this that you think people should know about?
Speaker 2 (43:19):
I would say, if you can get external help from
a union if you've never done it before, and even
if you have, having someone to balance ideas off of
can wonders. There's a lot of fun with the IWW
that are more than willing to offer helping hand to
people trying to get started on a union campaign. All
you got to do is reach out and ask, and
(43:41):
I'm sure there will be someone in your local who's
willing to help. But even if there's not, you can
probably get someone to help you more remotely too, And
even just a little bit of guidance can go a
long way.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Yeah, union, good McDonald's bad eye. Be careful while you're organizing,
and yeah, be strategic inspired about it. Well, okay, do
you want people to find you first? And if so where?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah? I can be found over unfortunately for now on
Twitter at my regazine. Also on Mastdon much more preferably,
And those are the main places I'm at. If you
want to reach me to, my email is found on
(44:30):
my Twitter and masked it on my relating at gmail
dot com. It's the best way to get hold of me.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Well, we'll put a link to the strange meta article
in the in the description so you can read that
to you because it's great. Yeah, Mirat, thank you so
much for joining But I was gonna say us, but
I guess, thank you so much for joining me. Uh, yeah,
it was. It was great talking to you is fuck
McDonald's play sucks ass.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
Thank you so much for having Yeah, it was really
been a huge fan of this podcast for a while,
so I was like, when I first heard about potentially
being on here, I was stoked. And also, yeah, fuck McDonald's.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, I guess, yeah, this has been the podcast that
you're listening to. You can find us that Happened here
pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us the
rest of the stuff that people do at cools on media.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
I guess, I guess.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
I actually I have not plugged the do show that's
been happening. There'll be a couple of episodes out by
the time we do this. But cools On has done
a show with Jake Canahan called Sad Oligarchs. That's about
the Russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dying over the past,
like as the start of the Ukraine. Yeah, probably only
(45:49):
getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is happening there
right now plays out. I don't know, but by the
time this goes up, you'll probably have a better idea
of what happened or didn't happen. But yeah, go listen
to that. Yeah, and go start a union in your
workplace or alternately, light light light something on fire legally
not the place something campfires explorers, if we can make those,
(46:14):
we have the technology.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Union sores.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Best kind.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It could happen here. It's the show where we hate McDonald's.
I'm your host, be a long professional McDonald's haater, and
with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's
a freelance journalist. And you need an organizer. Miro, Welcome
to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah, so okay, So specifically, there are lots of the
hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think
I'm actually not sure how well it is known today,
but I'm about eighty percent sure that the tradition of
breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a it was
actually originally a thing about breaking like it came from
(00:48):
like a bunch of campaigns. I think it definitely in France.
I think also in Mexico that like anytime a Starbucks, Starbucks,
Jesus Christ, anytiving McDonald's would open up, everyone would immediately
start breaking the windows.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's the only proper way to handle on McDonald's. And yeah,
professional opinion.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
But the reason we're talking about McDonald's is that, Yeah,
you tried to organize a McDonald's union, which is I
guess the other thing you could do with the McDonald's
other than lighting it on fire, which is it you could? Oh,
I guess, I guess there are those people in France
who took it over and turned it into like a
food co op or something.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
But a third thing you can do with.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
It, discovered a third A third thing to do with
the McDonald's. Let's get the towers. Yeah, but uh, yeah,
I wanted to talk about I guess what you know, Okay,
I wanted to use Yeah, so you you've written a
very good piece about this in strange matters, uh called
my Mcunion that is really good, and I wanted to
(01:48):
talk about sort of the piece, the sort of nitty
gritty aspect of like what it's like to organize a union,
and also just about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good Lord, no, I.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Have so much to talk about, so more than happy too.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, So I guess, okay, I think I think we
should start with just the sort of McDonald's miss of
it all. I wanted to start with just talking a
bit about what it's actually like to work on a
McDonald's because I, well, okay, a, I feel like it's
not actually universal experience anymore for like people who have
worked at a fast food restaurant and b I think
(02:29):
people who it's it's a thing you blought out of
your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah, okay,
so what is it actually like when you show up
to your shift.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So McDonald's was my first job, and it was a
hell of an introduction. Yes, the moment you would come in,
you would be most days bombarded with constant orders on
the screen because they had these little screens both in
the front and back drill area that like showed all
the orders they had. And like a good sixty seventy
(03:05):
percent of the time I came in, people would just
be swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh,
thank god you hear. We need someone to get on
right now. And it's like you don't even get a
moment to breathe. Like, as you're standing there waiting to
clock in on their punching machine, you're just like, oh,
dear God, I'm gonna have a fucking terrible time. And
(03:26):
as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you
clock in, you're getting streamed at by your bosses right
by you because they're like, oh no, a customer complained
because there was too many pickles on their sandwich, And
then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive through window
on top of that, and then you might have people
at the front counter. This was before proven, so McDonald's
(03:49):
still had front counters when people would come in. I
don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone I've been
to since has just closed down internally. And I envied that.
But you would have people yelling from there, and if
you were one of the unfortunate souls who ended up
working directly facing the customers and not just cooking, you
(04:10):
would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved.
I later worked at a Windy's where I got a
taste of that, and I walked out three days into March.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Stuff sucks.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, And I think that, you know, I think like
one of the things I think like compounds this is,
you know, okay, I will, I will, I will, I
will do a theory, which is that I think people
have a really weird understanding of what it means to
have a job on a sort of theoretical level that
(04:49):
dates back to a genuinely, very weird period in the
twentieth century where people actually had like stable hours. Yeah,
and that's just not how any of this works, right,
Like you know, you like, there is no actual stable
amount of hours. You just get you get some number
of hours like a week that you're assigned to. But
(05:09):
then you know, but this these least to do a
thing that we've out god like, like literally every single
field we've talked about unidizing has this problem, which is
just understaffing, because why the fuck would you have enough
people to do a job? Would you could have less
than enough people to do a job and pave them less.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
That That was my experience on McDonald and fast food
in general. You would get such inconsistent numbers of hours
that you wouldn't know how much money you'd be making
in the month, because, for all you know, this month,
you could be working you know, every regular day, every
business day of the week. You could be working only weekends,
(05:46):
or you could be like I was after the union
got busted spoiler alert, uh, working three hours on Sundays
in the mornings. And that's it if they really wanted to.
And there's nothing that outside of a union you can
do to prevent them from and outside of you know
(06:08):
niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you
can't really do much if they decide just not to
staff you. And there is people working there who they
had like full blown kids, families relying on them in
that job. They weren't making much Pennsylvania, butimum wage was
seven twenty five and you know they were paying us that. Yeah,
(06:30):
and so from what little they could get, they would
maybe get like at best a one hundred bucks a
week with their hours, unless they were able to get
into like a managerial position where it's the only one
where you'd be kind of guaranteed ours in the sense
that they desperately need you so they'll throw you on whatever.
Beyond that, it's you also don't know the days you're
(06:53):
going to work too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, This thing I was gonna ask is like, what,
like how how much time do you have between finding
out you're going to be on a shift and then
like being on the shift.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You can have anywhere from several days notice to under
twelve hours notice, And there is no way to predict
what's going to happen the next week. Is it all
depends on when you're going to get staffed. There were
points I found out day out when I was going
(07:26):
to be working.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah, and like this, I mean, this
is the thing that like is becoming. This is the
way that labor used to work in like the eighteen hundreds,
and then you know, it was just sort of like
phased out because it turns out this is actually a
stunningly inefficient way to actually like like run a business.
(07:50):
But you know, we've reached the thing that happened at
the end of history. Is it's not the history ended,
it's that like capital needing to be efficient end and
now they just like do this shit and it's like, well, okay,
so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly
an efficient way to run things. It's you just like
it's it's it's it's a mechanism designed to just like
(08:11):
absolutely destroyed like the sort of psyches and lives of
the people who are doing the thing.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, that is completely accurate. They do not give a
rat's ass about anyone working there. For a second. Everyone
working there is completely expendable, even if they're a manager.
There's been points people have worked there for like three
four months and got promoted to a manager. There's everyone
(08:41):
is expendable, and they they make sure you know that too,
and how they treat you, You're not treated with any dignity,
with any respect. You're just completely thrown around at their
whims and the whims of upper management, you know, the
the regional managers and the like. And it's it's awful
(09:08):
because how they get away with that model is they
know there's always going to be some people who are
desperate to work at McDonald's, either because they're young and
need to get a first job, or they're down on
their luck and need to get something to pay the bills.
(09:29):
I've even hitting hard times trying to reapply at McDonald's
since working there because I needed to pay the bill.
I was in that exact position again and fairly recently,
and so it's it's not a fun place to be,
(09:50):
to put it mildly, Yeah, of course they didn't let
me work there again because I believe I'm banned from
ever working at a McDonald's again.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
That's a That's another thing that I think is not
that well understood, like loss of companies just have basically
not even like there are there are people that I
know who are blacklisted, like from shit they did dream
occupy like people like, yeah, like like that they're these
these things, these things suck and if you like, you know,
(10:22):
this is I guess one of the sort of issues
of doing any kind of organizing is that like if
you lose, like stuff can go like very badly for you,
which sucks. But also simultaneously, if you don't organize things
we go very badly for you. So it's you know,
so it's a double or yeah, yeah, I guess just
one everything I wanted to ask, which I don't know,
(10:43):
if you know do you do you know if you're
if you're uh, if your McDonald's was a franchise, if
it was like actually owned by the company.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
So yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't don by
like the official company in any major sense. I actually
met the franchise owner during the course of the union,
which was a fun time when we were in the
process of getting busted. Oh boy.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, So do you want to explain what a franchise is?
And I guess, like how that sort of model works.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah, So most McDonald's out there are franchises, which basically
means McDonald's will kind of let independent people buy out
their stores and own and manage them in a certain region.
For a portion of the profits in the Scranton area,
(11:44):
which was where I did the union, they were all
owned by one single family who was ultra rich, in
part because of the McDonald's and in part because of
family inheritances, and these folks they would be the kind
(12:08):
of be treated as like the head Honchow's, the same
way that CEOs get talked about at most companies. They
weren't the CEOs, of course, but like as far as
in terms of managing greets, rant and area McDonald's went,
they were the main ones in charge. Of course McDonald's
corporate always have the final say over everything, but they
(12:29):
manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world, so
they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty,
which is why they kind of let people own these franchises.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, which I think is really interesting. It's like they've
managed to somehow combine it like the worst aspects of
working for a major corporation with the worst aspects of
working for like a small business tyrant. Which it's interesting
too because it's like, I don't know, this is like
one of the weird things about McDonald because like McDonald's,
McDonald's Corporate doesn't make money from hamburgers. They're basically a
(13:01):
real estate company that like sells franchises to people, but simultaneous.
But that means that like they can do things, like
they can force their franchises to do things that are
like unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them, Like there's
they're still getting paid, Like they're still getting paid there
like licensing, like franchising fees or whatever, like no matter
(13:24):
what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah, And
that's I don't know, it's it strikes me. It's like
a really interesting It strikes me as like the exact
arrangement that's like the most likely to create a fascist,
just like because like you know, you have a group
of people like and I think I think it's a
good agm with this. This is what like quote unquote
economic anxiety is. Is you have like a you have
(13:46):
like you have a sort of middle level of like this,
you know, the middle level of person who is a
capitalist but is also getting squeezed from the top down
like by a by larger corporations and then also is
facing bought about pressure from workers, and so their solution
to this is just like ruthlessly, like you know, just
just like ruthlessly do a fascism against like everyone who's
(14:08):
working for them.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, scratch a liberal and the fascist reads.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, it's a more.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
True than McDonald's and fast food really than anywhere. Yeah,
the mcfascists reign supreme. Ah.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So speaking of mcfascists, Uh, the products and services these
are too. These are two distinct sentences. They are not related.
Uh FCC please, actually, no, fuck you. The SCC doesn't
well no, no, the SCC. The SCC does not regulate us.
I think we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck
(14:44):
the SEC. That's why I could swear on this podcast
because they don't recomplain us. And we're back. Okay. So,
having having returned to more mcfascism, Yeah, okay, so I
(15:07):
guess we should start talking about how the union organizing
started and how I guess the sort of immediate mistake
that y'all made attempting to get this, to get this
off the ground.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah, So it started with me. I was the first
one there to bring up the concept of reunion because
then I was like only seventeen, I was new to
anarchism still, and so I was young, green, and eager
to get shit done. I still am all the above, Yeah,
(15:51):
but I had a few contacts to local IWW people
through just the very very faint activist networks that were
up there, and by faint, I mean a total of
like five people. So I got in contact with the
(16:14):
IWW guy I believe. I used the name Mark. Yes,
I used the name Mark in the article to protect
his anonymity, so I'll just keep consistency. And Mark was
the one who convinced me to take more major steps.
(16:37):
He was the one who I talked to and got
consultation about it, and he was the one who gave
all that initial guidance. And there was a few friends
of mine I had there there also, not really anarchists.
Most of them were just like your soci dems, but
they were They were eager to get something done and
(16:58):
help out, so you know, can't complain there. And it
was like a small core group of us who all
wanted to get involved and get this out and done.
And we had never done anything like this before. Northeast
Pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there, but
(17:20):
we were not part of that history initially, and so
it ended up going south unfortunately. Pretty it went well
at first, but I think some of the main issues
(17:44):
we had in hindsight doing things, especially now having more
experience in organizing under my belt, in hindsight, we rushed
things way too much. We were trying to get everyone
(18:05):
on board. We didn't do sufficient one on one conversations
with people, We didn't do sufficient intel gathering, and we
didn't we relied too much on our technical tools and
left too much incriminating evidence that we trusted too many
people with. We didn't really have a strong way of
(18:29):
going about it that would have been better for what
we were doing.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Yeah, and I guess this comes to one and I
think of the main things that you're talking about here,
and I think is one of the main things about
you know, union organizing that like, like pretty much no
matter who you talk to wright politically, the the things
that are important to get a union to work are
kind of similar, which is that, Yeah, Like it's usually
(18:57):
a very slow process. It's a process of building relationships,
and it's a process of figuring out who in your work, well,
who in your workplays people sort of trust and respect
and like make friends with and figuring out how to
sort of how to get them involved in how to
get I don't know how how unions are not just
(19:17):
sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're they're
built of actuals, like social relationships that you have with
another person and another and other gifts and in the
relationships that they have with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, Yeah,
I wanted to ask about how, how okay, when when
when you were sort of starting to do this right,
how how were you sort of identifying the people you
(19:39):
needed to talk to and what kinds of things were
you doing to try to get them involved and try
to like map out how the workplace functioned.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
So the first people identify for people that I thought
I could trust, and the core group of people I
had were folk that in regards to the union, I
in hindsight was able to trust. We all agreed on
the same issues, and we all had the kind of
a similar more gung ho attitude. I think me definitely
the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall
(20:11):
where I was kind of pushing the union by myself
for a bit, which is definitely easy to fall into. Yeah,
but we in terms of identifying the workplace leaders, the
natural leaders found there, we mostly relied on conversations with
Mark to do that. We talked with him about who
(20:33):
worked there. We gave a brief list of everyone who
worked there, and we kind of just pinpointed them the
specific people we saw as leaders and left spent that
And I mean, as far as basic charting goes, it
wasn't terrible, but there is definitely a lot to be
desired and it could have been far more fleshed out.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
What do you think that would have looked like? Or
you know, what does it look like in sort of
like other campaigns that you've run that were like the
first one you ever tried to do at seventeen.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
So charting as I would do it now, it should
be done from the start before even approaching the first
person unless you extremely trust the person, like you are
just bonded for life. You know, you can't go without
them unless you have like really deep trust with the person. Initially,
(21:25):
you shouldn't approach anyone but you going into it. You
should start off with if you can reaching out to
an IWW rep. But if you can't make a detailed
chart of who's in your workplace, what positions they're at,
what team they're on, Like in terms of if they're
on one person's managed area or another person's managed area,
(21:54):
you should should figure out who they're close to, who
they listen to, live in demographic information because you want
your unions to be intersextional, and you want to be
able to figure out above all else, whether or not
you've had away from work one on one with them,
(22:17):
and whether or not you've had any talks with them
prior about unions and where they might stand on unions.
You want to document all that and it doesn't have
to be the most detail. You can just do a
spreadsheet with it, but it can definitely be a lot
to document. And it's it's no joke. It's not something
(22:38):
that should be rushed. It's not fun. I you know,
there's there's nothing really that's a blast about trying to
sit there and be like, ah, yes, let me fill
out paperwork about my workplace employees. But it will come
back and save you so many times and give help
you formulate strategies for going word and we we rush
(23:04):
things and talk did things like talking to people on
the workplace floor and just said, hey, do you want
to do a union yeah, and call that a day
and said that was one on one and it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, should we explain what one on one like is
supposed to be?
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeah, So one on one is. It doesn't necessarily have
to be on one on one, but it should be
between at least a union organizer and another person. It
could potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping be a
more noviced one along with during the one on one.
(23:44):
That could be a thing, but ideally they are just
one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about
initially anyway noncommittal discussion on where what their issues are
in the workplace, what griefances they might have, and what
(24:10):
their current stances on workplace organizing.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah, okay. Another thing I wanted to sort of get
into is the role of like having having a way
to talk to people outside of work and having just
sort of a collaborative space where people talk about and
I think this is something that like I don't know,
I think this is you know, this is one of
the big things. I think that that this is one
of the big things that's changed in the past, you know,
(24:36):
maybe like decade and a half or so is that
how like the the the actual space in which people
talk about a union like tends on to be a
physical space anymore. It tends to be sort of either
like a signal chat or like a Facebook chat, like
a I guess what'sapp technically is owned by Facebook. But yeah,
(24:58):
and so yeah, I want to talk a bit about that,
and also I guess get into the sort of security
problems that you can have with this, because yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's what we did. We had a group chat on
Facebook Messenger to talk to everyone about the union and
everything like that. And there's a lot of pros to
having a centralized group chat, don't get me grown. It
makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to
take actions to other people. It can be helpful to
(25:31):
do any last minute coordination needed. It can be useful
to make sure everyone's on the same page. But there's
also major drawbacks to it. One. As you mentioned, there's
big privacy concerns, and we ran into that during the campaign.
If with anything organizing, you're only as secure as your
(25:53):
weakest link, and if you have people you do not
completely one hundred percent trust in your group chat, someone
could meek everything either wittingly or unwittingly. In our case
it was wittingly, but you very well could have someone
who isn't being careful and might show the group chat
to someone else who they shouldn't on accident. And unless
(26:18):
everyone's on the same page about best security practices, you're
not going to get very far with having that. And
for another, doing any form of organizing over texts and
a major capacity is really hard. Yeah, there's so many
(26:39):
issues with like making sure people are understanding their tone
and undercommunicating properly and just meeting each other on the
same level that you really can't do over text like
you can do in person. If a text medium should
in my view, only be there to facilitate interactions that
(27:02):
are later done at best in person, but if not,
they can be done through like video calls.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah, And like, as much as zoom can be really annoying,
like it is way more productive than trying to do
things too text Like Yeah, just like having just like
just like having a weekly zoom meeting. You know, like
like there there's there's a lot of like cases where
you like, you know, you literally physically can't be in
the same place and you know, and if that's that's
(27:30):
the thing you're dealing with. Like, yeah, doing video calls
and stuff like that makes it way way easier, for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
It It is a way better medium to do anything
union related with. And it's also much easier to bond
with people over video chat too, And that's a huge
part of the union is connecting with your other film
(28:00):
workers and meeting each other on that same level and
bonded over your shared interests, over your share what you
desire from union, what you desire from your workplace. You
can't really do that easily anyway over text. I'm sure
someone somewhere has done it, but it's not recommended for
(28:23):
me anyway.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Okay, Unfortunately, we need to do another thing that's not text,
which is ads. You can tell do great on the
ad pivots here, it's fine. I was I was watching
what's his name, the guy the right Way, ship head
guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for
a little bit. Glenn Beck, That's the one I was watching,
(28:44):
Glenn Beck, and I was like, oh no, this guy,
this guy's this guy's ad pivot was just racism. So
you know, we could do it could happen. Here are
our second slogan better ad pivots than Glenn back, and
(29:11):
we are back, hopefully.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will be broken
and this will immediately cut to a third AD. But
assuming that it doesn't, I wanted to talk a bit
also about sort of the kinds of things that are
necessary to get people to believe that a union can work,
(29:36):
because that's you know, like or organization isn't just sort
of a purely like it isn't just sort of a
purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale, you know, like
as much as it's about social Relationshi's about sort of morale,
about people believing in the thing. So I wanted to ask, Yeah,
I guess talk a little bit about what that process
(29:58):
is sort of like and what can happen to it.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yeah, So that's something an issue we ran into and
make a union fairly early on was keeping people motivated
for the union and getting people wanting to be involved,
because one of the most common things you'll hear when
trying to organize the union is people like, oh, I
can't afford to lose this job. I have a family
(30:24):
to feed, I have bills to pay. You'll see people
saying they don't want to risk their careers. If you're
in a more professional environment, you'll see people just not
wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And
it's important when you're kind of trying to address those
(30:45):
concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not gonna
you can't make those concerns go away, because they're real.
When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you
could get fired and get punished for it. It happened
to me. It comes with the territory. But if you
(31:09):
do things safely and you do things right, it's a
much safer option than not doing any And that's the
main thing you kind of want to talk to people about,
is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's going
to change without you. And you can't butter up to
your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you.
(31:31):
The most they'll do is play pretend for a little
bit until things go right back to normal. And you
kind of want to talk to people about also why
it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the
(31:52):
union because their strength is in numbers, and that's something
that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose
is that they're not going to be an envelope. When
someone's viewing getting involved, a lot of the time they're thinking, oh,
if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're
not thinking about the strength envemnors. Sure you just you
(32:13):
yourself as the only one pushing for change in a workplace, Yeah,
there's a decent chance you'll get fired. But if you
have a whole crew of ten people, all who are
essential running the operations, pushing for change, suddenly you're going
to see things shifting a much different way. And so
building that solidarity among people is important, and I think
(32:36):
is the I don't want to say the absolute best way,
because there isn't an absolute best way to handle those concerns,
but it's definitely a way that can be effective if
done right.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, and I guess, okay, I guess I guess we
should go into how it sort of came apart. Yeah,
because unfortunately, you know, and this I think is the
thing that is depressing but true, which is that a
lot of union like statistic well, actually I don't have
the numbers. I'm not going to I'm not going to
(33:11):
actually say that, but a lot of union campaigns don't work,
and you know, sometimes it's because like something bad happens,
sometimes because it's just you know, stuff happens out of
your control. Sometimes it's I don't know, like a pandemic starts.
But yeah, I was talked about what happened here and
how to sort of avoid that because it sucks.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
So there's a lot of things that can be a
downfall in the union. In the case of McDonald's, our
main downfall. There was a lot of you know, little
things we did wrong that didn't help at all that
definitely just made matters worse in the end. But the
(33:58):
straw that broke the camel's back was not being careful
with who we trusted. And Dan, as I referred to
in the article, he was the one that caused the
penultimate destructure of it. The COVID contributed heavily, but I
feel like if it weren't for Dan, the union could
(34:19):
have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now,
if it weren't for COVID, I think the union also
could have stuck around. But the mixture of external factors
and internal did the downfall. But in terms of things
we could have actively prevented. Dan was the main thing
(34:40):
that we could have done approached way differently. We could
have approached handling new people in a much better light.
We should have had a centralized group being the ones
with all the communications everything, and let people prove their
trust to the union over time, doing taxes for it
(35:01):
and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff
that's already there. Because Dan was two faced, we all
thought he was our friend, which is why we thought
we could trust him. But he was in it just
to try and get some benefits for him, which is
(35:21):
why he snitched. He thought maybe he would get, you know,
some type of promotion or something he didn't which side note,
it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If
anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just
going to screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody
likes to snitch. Yeah, but we should have been a
(35:43):
lot more cautious with how we approached people and shouldn't
have just been doing things for the sake of doing them,
Like we shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace.
We shouldn't have been inviting and the one and everyone
to all our confidential group chats. We should have been
(36:07):
cautious of who we were around and what we were
saying around people and how we were going about it.
That's the core of it. I mean, yeah, it's recklessness.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, And I mean I think, like, you know, obviously
it is not good if the exist, like if the
existence of your union and a bunch of your stuff
gets leaked like this is not necessarily fatal, Like I've
been involved in campaigns where like that's happened and we
want anyways, but it could definitely be like you know,
especially like especially early on in the process and especially
(36:44):
like the more precarious stuff is uh, yeah, it's not great.
I get yeah, pretty bad pretty quickly, you know. I
guess the thing that I wanted to sort of ask
about was like, Okay, so historically up until the last
I mean I think was was was Burgerville the first
(37:05):
like modern fast food union. I think it might have been.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
It was either Burgerville or Jimmy John.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah, it was one of the two. Up up until
like really the last like like I think, like post
like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, fast food has been really
really difficult to organize and a lot of a lot
of unions either just didn't try or did these kind
of like weird PR stunt campaigns that were you know,
(37:35):
like Fight fifteen attached things where it's like, well, we're
not actually really trying to get a union, we're trying
to like get PR stuff for Fight fifteen. But this
is I don't know, this is the thing I think
it's interesting about the idea, about about the idea. This
is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of
the world specifically, is that they've actually like gone in
(37:58):
and seriously attempted to do it, and they sort of
finally broke through it a couple of places, and you
know this this McDonald's campaign didn't work. But what was
kind of interesting to me about it is like, I
don't know, like how kind of I don't know if
normal is the right word of a campaign it was,
but it's it looks a lot like I don't know,
it looked like it looks a lot like campaigns that
(38:20):
I've been involved in that were like not in the
fast food industry. And now I guess I was wondering
a bit about like to what extent were the sort
of tactics shaped by like the very specific weird conditions
of fast food, and to what extent it was just
sort of like the stuff you'd use in any workplace.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
So a lot of our base model was just stuff
you'd use in any workplace. Because at the time we're
doing this, I think the only fast food unions that
were around were like Jimmy John's and Burbertville. I think
those are the only two that had any publicity. This
was before all the major Starbucks campaigns.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, that's all pretty recent.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, and so we didn't have much of a playbook
for how to approach things in a fast food environment. Specifically,
a lot of what we're actually emulated the model on
was factory environments and things like that, because there is
somewhat of a similarity of having worked in both between
(39:28):
fast food and factories. With factories and both fast food,
you have a kind of assembly line model, you know,
crank out or crank out work. Crank out work, get
things out at a rapid pace, and stick to your job.
Maybe do it a little bit of clean up now
and then, but you stick to what you're doing, and
(39:51):
you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You
have some overlap, but only in so far as your
job will allow, but you might be able to talk
to each other and you shared break areas. That kind
of structure informed how we approached it. By us, what
we tried to do was talk to people we didn't
(40:13):
have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras,
in areas that were away from other people who might
be able to hear. But there is better ways of
doing it, and I think other campaigns benefited out there,
(40:39):
likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core
of it, because that's also, at least for me and
my experience with it. Something that didn't help us was
having someone who with no real experience doing something at
the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone
of no experience can't do amazing things. Countless examples of
(41:01):
unions that were ran by people with no experience at
all who's just jumped right into it and did amazing jobs.
But it's important to get a diversity of people with
different walks of life at the core of it, people
with different perspectives. Just so many different people involved at
(41:24):
the core as a kind of central organizing committee can
do you wonders with a union because We had just
a few young left leaning people, a few young left
leaning white people, most of which were male presenting. I
wasn't out as trans there, so I was presenting as masculine.
(41:48):
The other people I was with, they were all CIS men,
with one exception, two exceptions. Sorry, my memory is a
little on the fritz. But we needed more people with
different perspectives in there. We needed more, and there was
plenty to be found in the workplace, but we just
(42:11):
we neglected to include them in the core organizing the committee.
And I think that's something that could really benefit unions
and probably is a major strength of a lot of
the successful ones is having a diverse, main primary group
of central organizers. I don't want to say central organizers,
(42:32):
more like core organizers, because the solidarity union model isn't
like hierarchical, but this is a central group of people
involved that seek to do the main light work.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, and you know, I mean this has been I
think like one of the things that made the like
the Starbucks campaign's work was like they well with was
STARBARCKSNA specifically, it was a lot of like find the
queerest person in the world place to start talking to them,
but having the core group of people working on things.
Being as diverse as possible is good both in like
(43:07):
an immediate practical sense and it is sort of like
long term to chief sense, and the faster that happens
the better. Yeah, okay, do you have anything else that
you from this that you think people should know about?
Speaker 2 (43:19):
I would say, if you can get external help from
a union if you've never done it before, and even
if you have, having someone to balance ideas off of
can wonders. There's a lot of fun with the IWW
that are more than willing to offer helping hand to
people trying to get started on a union campaign. All
you got to do is reach out and ask, and
(43:41):
I'm sure there will be someone in your local who's
willing to help. But even if there's not, you can
probably get someone to help you more remotely too, And
even just a little bit of guidance can go a
long way.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Yeah, union, good McDonald's bad eye. Be careful while you're organizing,
and yeah, be strategic inspired about it. Well, okay, do
you want people to find you first? And if so where?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah? I can be found over unfortunately for now on
Twitter at my regazine. Also on Mastdon much more preferably,
And those are the main places I'm at. If you
want to reach me to, my email is found on
(44:30):
my Twitter and masked it on my relating at gmail
dot com. It's the best way to get hold of me.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Well, we'll put a link to the strange meta article
in the in the description so you can read that
to you because it's great. Yeah, Mirat, thank you so
much for joining But I was gonna say us, but
I guess, thank you so much for joining me. Uh, yeah,
it was. It was great talking to you is fuck
McDonald's play sucks ass.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
Thank you so much for having Yeah, it was really
been a huge fan of this podcast for a while,
so I was like, when I first heard about potentially
being on here, I was stoked. And also, yeah, fuck McDonald's.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yeah, I guess, yeah, this has been the podcast that
you're listening to. You can find us that Happened here
pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us the
rest of the stuff that people do at cools on media.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
I guess, I guess.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
I actually I have not plugged the do show that's
been happening. There'll be a couple of episodes out by
the time we do this. But cools On has done
a show with Jake Canahan called Sad Oligarchs. That's about
the Russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dying over the past,
like as the start of the Ukraine. Yeah, probably only
(45:49):
getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is happening there
right now plays out. I don't know, but by the
time this goes up, you'll probably have a better idea
of what happened or didn't happen. But yeah, go listen
to that. Yeah, and go start a union in your
workplace or alternately, light light light something on fire legally
not the place something campfires explorers, if we can make those,
(46:14):
we have the technology.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Union sores.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Best kind.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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