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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe New Yorker: Dignity (fast food strike)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/dignity-4?%20utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklyemail&mbid=nl_Weekly_091514&CUST_ID=8805439&spMailingID=7066782&spUserID=MjY0MzU4MjQ1NTUS1&spJobID=520843220&spReportId=NTIwODQzMjIwS0
Fast-food workers and a new form of labor activism.
BY WILLIAM FINNEGAN
For the customers, nothing has changed in the big, busy McDonalds on Broadway at West 181st Street, in Washington Heights. Promotions come and goduring the World Cup, the French-fry package was suddenly not red but decorated with soccer-related street art, and, if you held your phone up to the box, it would download an Augmented Reality app that let you kick goals with the flick of a finger. New menu items appearrecently, the Jalapeño Double and the Bacon Clubhouse, or, a while back, the Fruit and Maple Oatmeal. But a McDonalds is a McDonalds. This one is open twenty-four hours. It has its regulars, including a panel of older gentlemen who convene at a row of tables near the main door, generally wear guayaberas, and deliberate matters large and small in Spanish. The restaurant doesnt suffer as much staff turnover as you might think. Mostly the same employees, mostly women, in black uniforms and gold-trimmed black visors, toil and serve and banter with the customers year after year. The longtime manager, Dominga de Jesus, bustles about, wearing a bright-pink shirt and a worried look, barking at her workers, La linea! La linea!
Behind the counter, though, a great deal has changed in the past two years. Among the thirty-five or so non-salaried employees, fourteen, at last count, have thrown in their lot with Fast Food Forward, the New York branch of a growing campaign to unionize fast-food workers. Underneath the lighted images of Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets, back between the deep fryer and the meat freezer, the clamshell grill and the egg station, the order screens and the endless, hospital-like beeping of timers, there have been sharp and difficult debates about the wisdom of demanding better pay and forming a union.
A demonstration by fast-food workers last week in Manhattan. One recent study found that fifty-two per cent of fast-food workers require some form of public assistance.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON / REDUX
Most of the workers here make minimum wage, which is eight dollars an hour in New York City, and receive no benefits. Rosa Rivera, a grandmother of four who has worked at McDonalds for fourteen years, makes eight dollars and fifty cents. Exacerbating the problem of low pay in an expensive city, nearly everyone is effectively part time, getting fewer than forty hours of work a week. And none of the employees seem to know, from week to week, when, exactly, they will work. The crew-scheduling software used by McDonalds is reputed to be sophisticated, but to the workers it seems mindless and opaque. The coming weeks schedule is posted on Saturday evenings. Most of those who, like Rivera, have sided with the union movementgoing out on one-day wildcat strikes, marching in midtown protestssuspect that they have been penalized by managers with reductions in their hours. But just-in-time scheduling is not easy to analyze.
Arisleyda Tapia, who has been working here for eight years, and makes eight dollars and thirty-five cents an hour, says she was fired last year by a supervisor for participating, on her own time, in a protest. She was reinstated three days later by cooler management heads, but Tapia, a single mother with a five-year-old daughter, says that she now gets only thirty hours a week. She used to average forty. And they dont really post the schedule anymore, she told me. They just give you these.
FULL story at link.
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The New Yorker: Dignity (fast food strike) (Original Post)
Omaha Steve
Sep 2014
OP
daleanime
(17,796 posts)1. K&R....