On Wednesday 8 January activists from across London met to discuss the launch of the Fast Food Rights campaign. The meeting was hosted by John McDonnell MP, the bakers union BFAWU and Unite the Resistance.
We debated the first steps of the campaign with agreement on a day of action on 15 February. We will target fast food stores on London’s Oxford Street, but encourage activists across Britain to do the same.
The campaign seeks to highlight the conditions of fast food workers in a multi-billion pound industry that is now increasingly dominated by zero hours contracts and low pay. But the focus of the campaign is seeking to organise the fast food sector.
Contributions from Wigan’s Hovis workers, UCU and Unite members showed how it’s possible to take on zero hours contracts and to organise new sectors into the trade union movement.
There will a further planning meeting ahead of the day of action. This will be on Wednesday 22 January at 7pm (venue tbc).
Leaflets for the day of action are on our resources page.
The historical precedent for fast-food strikes
By Daniel Levinson Wilk at Al-Jazeera America
More than a century ago, American waiters organized, struck — and won
For more than 150 years, the U.S. labor movement has been plagued by the false belief that some types of workers just can’t be organized. At various times, labor leaders have ignored or actively undermined immigrants, African-Americans, women or “unskilled” workers who wanted the protections of a union, under the assumption that they could not, or would not, contribute to the greater union cause.
Waiters are an extreme case in this history. Their ranks were drawn heavily from oppressed demographics: African-Americans in the early 19th century, then Irish, Germans and subsequent waves of immigrants. By the early 20th century, and especially during the labor shortages of World Wars I and II, waitresses also proliferated in American restaurants and canteens. But despite waiters’ large numbers, union leaders considered them unorganizable, or not worth organizing. They doubted that minorities and women possessed the discipline for labor solidarity. The complex skills that waiters used on a daily basis — speed, memory, multitasking, interacting with the public — were considered less impressive than craft skills that created a tangible product, like shaping a horseshoe or rolling a cigar. Even within the union of service workers that was supposed to represent waiters — the predecessor to today’s UNITE HERE — bartenders dominated the union’s ranks for most of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and demonstrated the same prejudices against waiters as the general public.
Today there are more than 10 million waiters in the United States, some making good wages and tips, others struggling to survive on the tipped minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, which has not been raised in 22 years. It is still an occupation dominated by immigrants, minorities and women. Among all the workers who serve food to us today, fast-food workers generally work under the worst conditions. According to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project, more than half of these workers earn so little that they must rely on public assistance; low wages at McDonald’s, for example, are estimated to cost taxpayers $1.2 billion a year to help employees survive.
UNITE HERE — a union of waiters as well as airport, hotel, gambling, garment, textile, laundry and transportation workers, with a membership of more than 250,000 — is supposed to support waiters’ rights. But it’s significant that this union hasn’t taken the lead in organizing the one-day strikes of fast-food workers in August and on Dec. 5. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has traditional strengths among building-service and health care workers, has been more supportive. What’s more, the remnants of old discriminatory beliefs about waiters are visible in the surprised tone of many commentators and pundits who have written about the strikes. In short, these workers are still seen as less than worthy, or capable, of union membership and solidarity.
Special conditions
Today’s embattled fast-food workers might be inspired by the history of national waiters’ strikes, which dates back to the 19th century. Against all assumptions, when conditions were right, restaurant workers organized, struck and won.
The first national U.S. restaurant strike took place in 1853, when, that April, African-American waiters working in the hotel restaurants of New York founded the Waiters Protective Association, struck briefly and won higher wages. Reports of the victory inspired other waiters up and down the Eastern Seaboard. These workers collaborated across racial lines, which was rare for unions in the 19th century, and organized themselves across many kinds of workplaces: restaurants, hotels, saloons, boardinghouses and, it seems, even some private homes.
On April 21, thousands of waiters walked off the job in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, demanding a higher wage and a new measure of dignity. They were especially aggrieved by the common practice of managers calling to them by whistling, as if they were dogs, and voiced their outrage publicly during the demonstrations and in interviews with journalists. The action had mixed success; some employers raised wages after a day or two, but others blacklisted strikers and replaced them with female waiters. We do not know if the whistling continued.
In the spring of 1893, waiters across the nation struck again, this time in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and possibly other cities. There were many parallels to the strikes that took place 40 years earlier. Waiters reached out across racial lines and across different kinds of workplaces. In addition to their demands for higher wages and better conditions, they echoed previous demands by making another specific plea for dignity, this time decrying common regulations that waiters report for work without facial hair. (In the era before disposable razor blades, beards were more common, and a clean shave was often associated with effeminacy or immaturity.) As with the earlier strike, the results were mixed — some won concessions and others lost their jobs, sometimes to women.
Two other factors linked, and possibly enabled, the strikes of 1853 and 1893: Both occurred in years of economic crisis, and both coincided with World’s Fairs in one of the cities where waiters struck (New York in 1853, Chicago in 1893). These factors were significant. The fairs gave waiters in those cities special leverage — bosses needed to settle labor disputes quickly in order to take advantage of unprecedented tourist dollars. And it’s possible that the economic crises of 1853 and 1893 had the same impact as the one in 2008, driving more experienced or higher-status workers into jobs waiting tables, where they began to demand the wages and dignity they had grown accustomed to in previous careers.
One might conclude, therefore, that special conditions are necessary to rile restaurant workers into action. More clearly, these two strikes disproved the idea, common even among other service employees, that certain kinds of workers are just too difficult to organize.
In the early 20th century, waitresses followed their male counterparts into labor militancy. As Rutgers historian Dorothy Sue Cobble demonstrated in her 1991 book “Dishing It Out,” waitresses built strong union locals, first in Seattle in 1900, then spreading to Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, New York and most other major cities in America. Like men, they focused on both bread-and-butter issues — wages, benefits, working conditions — and the more intangible question of dignity, in this case fighting both managers and the sexism of their union brothers.
Since the 1970s, the strength of union waiters has declined along with the rest of the labor movement, but service employees like hotel chambermaids, janitors and home health care workers — many of them women and immigrants — continue to surprise the nation with their resolve and success. Fast-food workers are the latest in this list.
The possibilities of success for striking fast-food workers are better than at any time in the last 10 or 20 years. Service jobs are growing fast; the terms of employment and the working conditions in these jobs are largely awful; and the labor market is pushing older, more experienced and more militant workers into fast-food jobs. Even President Barack Obama wants to raise the minimum wage. Looking back to 1853 and 1893, the only precondition we’re missing now is a World’s Fair.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/fast-food-historymcdonaldswaiters.html
Our first campaign meeting
Wednesday 8 January, 7pm
@ Committee Room 9, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA
The bakers’ union BFAWU, John McDonnell MP and Unite the Resistance are putting out a call to initiate a campaign for workers’ rights in the fast food industry. The first meeting will be held in Parliament on 8 January.
We will be discussing the campaign and plans for a possible day of action in February. It is open to all activists, campaigners and trade unionists. For more information email uniteresist@gmail.com, info@bfawu.org or mcdonnellj@parliament.uk
Hungry for fast food rights
Press release from the Bakers’, Food & Allied Workers Union
BFAWU has agreed to work with Unite the Resistance and John McDonnell MP, along with other groups at a meeting on 8 January 2014 in order to discuss and hopefully address the lack of fairness and justice for workers in the UK’s fast-food industry.
Recent announcements from these hugely profitable companies regarding their use of unpaid labour and their abundant use of zero hours contracts seem to have gone largely unnoticed in the mainstream media. It would appear that forcing workers into poverty and having them rely on benefits to pay for basics such as rent and food is quite acceptable in David Cameron’s ‘big society’ Britain. Well it isn’t.
We are calling on all of these massive, global fast-food companies to stop this shameful exploitation and instead, ensure that their employees are provided with proper contracts of employment with wages that mean they don’t have to depend on state handouts in order to exist. It is frightful that we even have to make this demand in the 21st century.
It is equally appalling that companies are making vast profits and awarding their senior management with massive pay increases and bonuses, while those on the front line and in the engine room are paid a pittance, are unable to plan ahead and are given absolutely no long-term job security whatsoever.
The bottom line is that these companies have the ability and the finances to pay trainees and provide secure employment. They should be doing so without question.
The much debated and oft-quoted ‘cost of living crisis’ isn’t the fault of ordinary working people. It isn’t the fault of teachers and nurses, nor is it the fault of firemen. It certainly isn’t the fault of disabled and unemployed people and it definitely isn’t the fault of people working in the food industry.
The blame lies exclusively with irresponsible and greedy bankers, gambling away people’s futures in an unregulated financial sector. The irony is that whereas many of those responsible should be stood in the dock facing charges of misappropriation, they have gone unpunished and have in fact, continued to prosper following bailouts from the UK taxpayer.
To add insult to injury, our political classes have ensured that those ‘with the broadest shoulders’ have been able to protect and in many cases, add to their wealth whilst those who had no hand whatsoever in the crisis are having to deal with the impact of the recession head-on by way of pay cuts, pay freezes, redundancy and the systematic erosion of employment rights, all in the name of ‘economic necessity’.
Companies of course, many of which operate in the food industry have jumped on the bandwagon with lip-licking relish.
Trade Unions were formed to ensure that groups of workers were able to challenge unfairness and exploitation collectively; providing individuals with the strength and support of others in their time of need.
So if you work in the fast food industry; if you have a member of your family working in the fast food industry; if you are having to work on a zero hour contract; if you are unemployed and are being forced to provide free labour as part of the government’s ‘workfare’ scheme, contact the BFAWU and tell us of your experience. Let us help you change your life and the lives of those you work with.
Together, we have strength in unity.
Ian Hodson
National President of the Bakers’, Food & Allied Workers Union
US fast-food workers stage nationwide strike
Yesterday fast-food restaurant workers across the US staged a 24-hour strike in protest against low wages. Walkouts were reported in New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and also Detroit, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Organisers hoped workers in as many as 100 cities would participate in what is the latest in a series of such actions. Unions want a $15-an-hour (£9.19) federal minimum wage. The current one, set in 2009, is $7.25 per hour.
President Barack Obama, who has backed a Senate measure to increase the minimum to $10.10, specifically mentioned fast-food workers “who work their tails off and are still living at or barely above poverty”, in an economic policy speech on Wednesday.
His Democratic allies, who control the upper chamber of Congress, have said a vote on the matter could be held this month. But even if it passes the Senate, it is not clear if it would be approved by the Republican-led House of Representatives.
Nearly 100 protestors gathered around a Wendy’s restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, at midday, carrying signs saying “stick together for $15/hr”. Shaquena Davis told the BBC she worked at the fast-food restaurant, making $7.25. “I got kicked out of school because I couldn’t pay the bill,” she said. “I’m living in a one-bedroom apartment with five people.”
Kachelle Krump, 23, works at a Burger King in the area. She told the BBC she works 16 to 20 hours a week and would like more hours, but that management had been unhelpful. “I have a child who is seven years old – she’s in school, she needs things,” said Ms Krump. Of her employer, Burger King, she said: “It’s a billion dollar company. Share a little.”
In Detroit, about 50 demonstrators turned out for an early morning rally in front of a McDonald’s, including a handful of employees who walked off the job. However, the restaurant stayed open. Another 40 demonstrators rallied at a Burger King in Atlanta.
The American fast-food industry has come under increasing scrutiny because part-time jobs, including retail and food positions, have made up most of the job growth since the recession. It is not yet clear how many fast-food restaurants will be affected by Thursday’s industrial action.
The workers’ last nationwide strike, in August, was patchy, with some restaurants appearing to function normally while others were unable to do business.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25239433