McDonald’s and the Road to the Fast Food
Strike Wave
As this is being written on August 29th,
there are reports that fast-food workers are
staging walkouts and protests in some 60 cities. Many of the actions are
directed at McDonald’s, which makes sense, given that it is the largest and
best-known player in the industry.
Yet what makes a focus on McDonald’s
even more appropriate is the company’s history. More than any other restaurant
operator, it has worked to suppress pay rates, enforce harsh work procedures
and prevent unionization. In other words, it epitomizes everything that the
current strikes are trying to change. The following is an overview of that
disgraceful history.
From its earliest days in the late
1950s, McDonald’s went to great lengths to maintain total control of its
underpaid work force, using techniques such as lie detector tests and rap sessions that
supposedly were meant to give workers a chance to air grievances but were
mainly designed to give managers a sense of who the troublemakers were.
This non-union philosophy did not
go unchallenged. When McDonald’s sought to open its first stores in San
Francisco in the early 1970s, the company was confronted by unions and local
politicians who opposed city approval because of the labor policies of the
company. It took a long court battle before McDonald’s prevailed. In the late
1970s the fast-food chains faced an intensive campaign in Detroit by
an independent group called the Fastfood Workers’ Union.
In 1990 a group called the Campaign for
Fair Wages staged protests at McDonald’s outlets in the
Philadelphia area to protest the fact that workers at inner-city locations were
being paid less than those in the suburbs. In 1998 a group of workers at
a McDonald’s outlet in Macedonia, Ohio went on strike and sought representation
by the Teamsters union, but the effort fizzled out.
Apart from resisting unions, McDonald’s
long lobbied in the United States for a lower minimum wage for teenagers, who
made up the large majority of the company’s labor force. When the Nixon
Administration came out in support of the idea, Sen. Harrison Williams of New
Jersey charged that it was a quid pro quo for a
$255,000 campaign contribution that McDonald’s chairman Ray Kroc had made to
Nixon’s re-election campaign. After years of debate, the “teenwage”
concept was finally adopted by Congress when the minimum wage was revised in
1989 (the two-tier system expired in 1993).
Unions have been a bit more evident
among McDonald’s operations in other countries. In Ireland, Sweden and a few
other countries, unions were successful in negotiating working conditions, but
the company and its franchisees still sought to keep unions out wherever
possible. This policy became a target of a militant labor campaign when the
company opened its first outlet in Mexico in 1985. The restaurant workers union
laid siege to the facility and forced it to shut down until a successful
representation election was held.
Unions in Denmark launched a boycott of
the company in 1988 after franchisees refused to sign a collective bargaining
contract. After about eight months the company relented and agreed to join the
employers’ group that negotiated with the Danish hotel and restaurant union. In
the 1990s McDonald’s resisted union drive in countries such as
Canada, Russia and Indonesia. Like Wal-Mart, it later agreed to cooperate with state-controlled
unions in China.
McDonald’s has also faced pressures
about working conditions in its supply chain. In 2000 the company was rocked by reports that a Chinese sweatshop
employing under-aged workers forced to toil up to 16 hours a day was producing
toys for its Happy Meals. McDonald’s and its U.S. supplier announced that they
were cutting ties with the Chinese subcontractor involved. In 2005 thousands of
Vietnamese workers who produced Happy Meal toys staged a two-day strike to protest
abusive conditions on the job, and the following year a violent protest occurred at a Happy Meal toy supplier in
China.
Actions such as these prompted
McDonald’s to join with Walt Disney and a group of NGOs in what was called
Project Kaleidoscope to promote better working conditions in the Chinese plants
producing goods linked to the two companies. A 2008 report by the initiative spelled out some broad
principles and claimed that a group of 10 target facilities had succeeded in
improving working conditions.
Back in the United States, the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers, which had just successfully pressured the Taco Bell chain
to take responsibility for ensuring that farmworkers who picked the tomatoes
used in its outlets were treated decently by suppliers, issued a call in 2005
for McDonald’s to do the same. After two years of campaign pressure, McDonald’s
gave in and signed a three-way agreement with the
Coalition and the growers under which the restaurant chain agreed to pay one
cent more per pound for tomatoes to boost farmworker pay.
McDonald’s response to the farmworker
campaign shows that, when put under enough pressure, it will make concessions.
Let’s hope that the strikers can raise the heat to that level.
Note: This post is drawn from my new
Corporate Rap Sheet on McDonald’s, which can be found here.
