It Could Happen Here - How to (Not) Unionize McDonalds

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Mia talks with Mira, a freelance journalist and union organizers, about McDonalds and what we can learn from an eventually failed union campaign there.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and

influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here.

It's the show where we hate McDonald's. I'm your host, Mia Wong, professional McDonald's hater. And with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's a freelance journalist and union organizer. Mira, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so, okay, so specifically, there are lots of... 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 80% sure that the tradition of breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a... It was actually originally a thing about breaking uh like it came from like a bunch of campaigns i think in definitely in france i think also in mexico that like anytime a starbucks starbucks jesus christ anytime mcdonald's would open up

everyone would immediately start breaking the windows that's the only proper way to handle a mcdonald's in my formerly professional opinion but the 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 a McDonald's other than lighting it on fire, which is maybe too kind to do 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. But a third thing you can do with co-op or something but a third thing

you can do with it discovered a third a third thing to do with the mcdonald's has hit the towers um 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 a very good piece about this in strange matters. I called my Mick union. That is really good. And I wanted to talk about sort of the piece, the sort of nitty gritty aspects of like what it's like to organize a union and also just about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good Lord.

Oh no. I have so much to talk about. So more than happy to. Yeah. So I guess, okay. I think, I think we should start with just the sort of McDonald's-ness of it all. I wanted to start with just talking a bit about what it's actually like to work at a McDonald's, because I, well, okay, A, I feel like it's not actually a universal experience anymore for people to have worked at a fast food restaurant. And B, I think people who...

It's a thing you blot out of your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah. So what is it actually like when you show up to your shift? So McDonald's was my first job and it was a hell of an introduction yeah the moment you would come in you would be most days bombarded with constant orders on screen because they have these little screens both in the up front and back grill areas that like showed all the orders they had and like a good 60 70 percent of the time i came in people would just be swamped the orders they had and like a good 60 70 of the time i came in people would just be swamped with orders they'd be running around being like oh thank god you're here 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 terrible time and as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you clock in, you're getting screamed 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-thru window on top of that. And then you might have people at the front counter. This was before COVID, so McDonald's 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 envy 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 would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved. I later worked at a Wendy's where I got a taste of that. And I walked out three days into work. Yeah. Stuff sucks. 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 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 dates back to a genuinely very weird period in the the 20th century where people actually had like stable

hours and that's just not how any of this works right like you you know you like there 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 then you know but this leads to a thing that we've oh god like like literally every single field we've talked about unidicing has this problem which is just understaffing because why the fuck would you have enough people to do a job when you could have less than enough people to do a job and pay them less that that was my experience at mcdonald's 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 Or you could be like I was after the union got busted spoiler alert Working three hours on Sundays and 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 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's people working there who they had like full-blown kids families relying on them in that job they weren't making much much. Pennsylvania minimum wage was $7.25, and you know they were paying us that.

And so what little they could get, they would maybe get at best $100 a week with their hours, unless they were able to get into a managerial position, where it's the only one where you'd be kind of guaranteed hours, in the sense that they desperately need you so they'll throw you on whatever. Beyond that, you also don't know the days you're going to work. Yeah, yeah.

I was going to ask, how much time do you have between finding out you're going to be on a shift and then being on the shift? finding out you're going to be on a shift and then like being on the shift. You can have anywhere from several days notice to under 12 hours notice. And there is no way to predict what's going to happen the next week. Cause it all depends on when you're going to get staffed. There are points I found out day of when I was going to be working Jesus Christ

yeah yeah and like this I mean this is a thing that like is becoming this is the way that labor used to work in like the 1800s and then you know it was sort of like phased out because it turns out this is actually a stunningly

inefficient way to actually like run a business. But, you know, we've 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 ended. And now they just like do this shit and it's like, well, OK. So it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly inefficient way to run things. It's you just like, it's, it's, it's, it's a mechanism designed to just like absolutely destroyed like the, the sort of psyches and lives of the people who are doing the thing.

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. Everyone is expendable and 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 regional managers and the like and And it's awful. 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 a 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. I've even had 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. again and fairly recently and so it's

it's not a fun place to be in to put it mildly of course they didn't let me work there again because I believe I'm banned from ever working at a McDonald's again yeah that's a that's another thing that I think

is not that well understood like lots 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 yeah like like they're these these things these things suck and if you like you know 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 would go very badly for you so it's you know it's a double-edged sword yeah yeah i guess there's one other thing i wanted to ask which i don't know if you know do you do you

know if you're if you're uh if your mc your McDonald's was a franchise, if it was actually owned by the company? So, yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't owned by 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. Yeah. So do you want to explain what, what a franchise is and I guess like how that sort of model works? Yeah. So most McDonald's out there are franchises,

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 uh in the scranton area 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. these folk they would be the kind of be treated as like the head honchos 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 green restaurant and area McDonald's went they were the main ones in charge now of course McDonald's corporate always had the final say over everything but they 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 yeah which i think is really interesting it's like they've

they've managed to somehow combine like the worst aspects of working for a major corporation with the worst aspects of working for like a small business tyrant, which is interesting, too, because it's like, I don't know. This is like one of the weird things about McDonald's, right? It's like McDonald's. McDonald's corporate doesn't make money from hamburgers. They're basically a real estate company that like sells franchises to people. Yeah. they're basically a real estate company that like sells franchises to people but but simultaneously 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 they're like licensing like franchising fees or whatever like no matter what sort of like shit is happening

there yeah and that's i don't know i it's it strikes me as like a really interesting it strikes me as like the exact arrangement that's like the most likely to create a fascist which is like because like like you know you you have a group of people like and i i think i think it's a good argument this this is what like quote unquote economic anxiety is is you have like a a bit you have you have a sort of middle level of like this you know 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 bottom-up 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 working for them. Yeah.

Scratch a liberal and a fascist leads. Yeah. It's more true than McDonald's and fast food, really, than anywhere. Yeah. The McFascists reign supreme. Ah. So, speaking of McFascists, supreme. Ah, so speaking of McFascists, the products and services,

these are two distinct sentences. They are not related. FCC, please, actually no, fuck you. The FCC doesn't, well, no, no, the FCC does not regulate us. I think we're actually regulated by the FTC, so fuck the FCC.

That's why I can swear on this podcast because they don't regulate us i think we're actually regulated by the ftc so fuck the fcc uh that's why i could swear on this podcast because they don't regulate us welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every

week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Feast, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, And we're back. Okay, so having returned to more McFascism. Yeah, okay, so I 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 off the ground. to get this off the ground?

Yeah. So it started with me. I was the first one there to bring up the concept of a union because then I was like only 17. I was new to anarchism still. And so I was young, green, and eager to get shit done. I still am, all the above.

So much older. Yeah. 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 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. 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 uh they're also not really anarchists the most of them were just like your social stems but they were they were eager to get something done and 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

uh northeast pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there but we were not part of that history initially. And so it ended up going south. Unfortunately. It went well at first, but I think some of the main issues we had in hindsight doing things especially now having more experience union organizing under my belt

in hindsight we rushed things way too much we were trying to get everyone 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 going about it that would have been better for what we were doing yeah and i guess this comes to one of the 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 right politically

the the the things that are important to get a union to work are kind of similar which is that yeah like it's usually 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 workplace people sort of trust and respect and like make friends with and figuring out how to sort of how to get them involved and how to get i don't know how how unions are not just sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're built of actual like social relationships that you have with another person and another and other groups and the relationships that they have with another person and the relationships that they have with other people, etc.

Yeah. I wanted to ask about how... Okay, when you were sort of starting to do this, how were you sort of identifying the people you 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 so the first people i identified were 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 kind of similar, more gung-ho attitude. I think me definitely the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall where I was kind of pushing the union by myself for a bit, which is definitely easy to fall into. Yeah. But 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 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 about 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. What do you think that would have looked like? Or what does that look like in other campaigns that you've run that were the first one you ever tried to do at 17? were like the first one you ever tried to do at 17 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 you shouldn't approach anyone but you get going into it you should start off with um 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, like in terms of if they're on one person's managed area or another person's managed area, you should figure out who they're close to, who they listen to, relevant demographic information because you want your unions to be intersectional and you want to be able to figure out above all else whether or not you've had a away from work one-on-one with them 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 that should be rushed it's not fun i've 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 forward and we we rush 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 a one

on one and it it wasn't yeah should we explain what a one-on-one like is supposed to be 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 a more novice one along with during the one-on-one, that can be a thing. But ideally, they are just one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about, initially anyway, just a non-committal discussion on what their issues are in the workplace, non-committal discussion on where what their issues are in the workplace what grievances they might have and what their current stances on workplace organizing 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 this

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 maybe like decade and a half or so uh is that how like the the the actual space in which people talk about a union like tends not 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 whatsapp technically is owned by facebook but yeah 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 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 wrong. It makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to take actions to other people it can be helpful to 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. With anything organizing, you're only as secure as your weakest link.

And if you have people you do not completely 100% trust in your group chat, someone could leak 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 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 text in a major capacity is really hard. There's so many issues with making sure people are understanding their tone, communicating properly, and just meeting each other on the same level that you really can't do over text like you can do in person.

A text medium should, in my view, only be there to facilitate interactions that are later done at best in person. But if not, they can be done through like video calls yeah like as much as zoom can be really annoying like it is way more productive than trying to do things through text like yeah just like having just like just like having a weekly zoom meeting you know like like there's there's a lot of like cases where you like you know you literally physically can't like be in the same place and you know and if that's the thing you're dealing with like yeah doing video calls and stuff like that makes it way way easier for sure 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

your fellow workers and meeting each other on that same level and bonded over your shared interests over your share what you desire from a union what you desire from your workplace it you can't really do that easily anyway over text i'm sure someone somewhere has done it but it's not recommended for me anyway okay unfortunately we need to do another thing that's not text which is ads you can tell we're doing great on the ad pivots here it's fine I was watching

what's his name the guy the right wing shithead guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for a little bit Glenn Beck that's the one I was watching Glenn Beck. And I was like, oh, no, this guy, this guy is this guy's ad pivot was just racism. So, you know, we could do it.

It could happen here. Our second slogan, better ad pivots than Glenn Beck. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back, hopefully.

I don't know. 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. Because that's, you know, like, or organization isn't just sort of a purely like, isn't just sort of a purely like – it isn't just sort of a purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale. As much as it's about social relations, it's about sort of morale and about people believing in the thing.

So I wanted to ask – yeah, I guess talk a little bit about what that process is sort of like and what can happen to it. Yeah. happened to it? Yeah. So that's something an issue we ran into in the MEC 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 a union is people like, I can't afford to lose this job i have a family 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 uh like 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 concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not going to, 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 do things safely and you do things right, it's a much safer option than not doing anything. 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 a you and you can't butter up to your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you 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 And you kind of want to talk to people about also why it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the 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 in it well 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 and numbers sure you just you yourself is 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 10 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 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. Yeah. And I guess, okay.

Um, I guess, I guess we should go into how it sort of came apart. Yeah. Because unfortunately, you know, and this is, I think is a thing that is depressing but true

which is that a lot of union like just statistic well actually i i don't have the numbers i'm not gonna i'm not gonna 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 it's just, you know, stuff happens. It's out of your control. Sometimes it's, I don't know, like a pandemic starts. But yeah, we should talk about what happened here and how to sort of avoid that because it sucks. So there's a lot of things that can be a downfall in a union. In the case of McDonald's, our main downfall,fall 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 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 destruction of it. COVID contributed heavily. But I feel like if it weren't for Dan, the union could 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 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 to everything and let people prove their trust to the union over time by doing tasks for it 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 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 gonna screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody likes snitch yeah but we should have been a lot more cautious with how we approach people and shouldn't have just been doing things for the sake of doing them. We shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace. We shouldn't have been inviting everyone and everyone to all our confidential group chats. everyone and everyone to all our confidential group chats we should have been 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 it's recklessness I think like you know obviously it is not good if the, like if,

if the existence of your union, a bunch of your stuff gets leaked, like this is not necessarily fatal. Like I've, 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 like the more precarious stuff is uh it yeah it's not great um i can get pretty bad pretty quickly um 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 like modern fast food union i think it might have been it was either burgerville or jimmy john yeah i was one of the two up up until like really the last like like i think like post like 2015 2016 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 like fight

15 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 for 15. But this is, I don't know, this is the thing I think is interesting about the IDW, about the, this is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of the world specifically is that

they've actually, like, gone in and seriously attempted to do it and they sort of finally broke through at a couple of places. And, you know, 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 it like it looks a lot like campaigns that i've been involved in that were like not in the fast food industry. I guess I was wondering a bit about to what extent were the tactics shaped by the very specific weird conditions of fast food? And to what extent it was just the stuff you'd use in any workplace? So a lot of our base model was just stuff you'd use in any workplace. So a lot of our base model was just stuff you'd use in any workplace because at the time we were doing this, I think the only fast food unions that were around were like Jimmy John's and Burger Grill. I think those are the only two that had any publicity. This was before all the major Starbucks campaigns.

Yeah, that's all pretty recent 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 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 fast food and factories. With factories and both fast food, you have a kind of assembly line model. Crank out work, crank out work, crank out work, get things out at a rapid pace and stick to your job maybe do a

little bit of cleanup now and then but you stick to what you're doing and you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit you have some overlap but only insofar as your job will allow but you might be able to talk to each other you 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 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. 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 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 with no real experience doing something at the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone with no experience can't do amazing things. There's countless examples of unions that were ran by people with no experience at all who 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. perspectives, just so many different people involved at 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.

people, most of which were male presenting. I wasn't out as trans there. So I was presenting as masculine. The other people I was with, they were all cis men with one exception. Two exceptions, sorry. My memory's 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 neglected to include them in the core organizing committee. And I think that's something that could really benefit unions. fit in 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 more like

core organizers because the solidarity union model isn't like hierarchical but just a central group of people involved that seek to do the main light work yeah and you know i mean and this this has been i think like one of the things that made the like the starbucks campaigns work was like they well with the starbucks campaign specifically it was a lot of like find the queerest person in the workplace and start talking to them but having the core group of people working on things being as diverse as possible is good both in like an immediate practical sense and in a sort of like long-term strategic sense and the like faster that happens the better yeah okay do you have anything else that you from this that you think people should know about i would say if you

can get external help from a union if if you've never done it before, and even if you have having someone to bounce ideas off of can only be wonders. There's a lot of folk with the IWW that are more than willing to offer a helping hand to people trying to get started on a union campaign. All you got to do is reach out and ask. And I'm sure there will be someone in your local who's willing to help but if 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 yeah union good mcdonald's bad i be careful while you're organizing and yeah be strategic and smart about it do you want people to find you first and if so where yeah I can be found over unfortunately for now on twitter at my magazine also

on mastodon much more preferably and those are the main places I'm at. If you want to reach me too, my email is found on my Twitter at mastodonmyralocene at gmail.com. It's the best way to get a hold of me. Yeah, we'll put a link to the Strange Matter article

in the description. So you can read that too because it's great um yeah murad uh 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 it was you'd fuck mcdonald's it really sucks ass thank you so much for having me yeah it was really great being out there but a huge fan of this podcast for a while so I was like when I first heard about potentially

being out here I was stoked and also yeah fuck McDonald's yeah I guess yeah this has been the podcast that you're listening to you can find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram you can find the rest of the stuff that people do at Koolzone Media.

I guess I actually, I have not plugged the Dew show that's been happening. There'll be a couple of episodes out by the time we do this, but Koolzone has done a show with Jake Hanahan called Sad Oligarchs that's about the Russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dying over the past, like since the start of the war in Ukraine. Yeah, probably only 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 s'mores we can make those we have the technology union s'mores best kind it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com sources thanks Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.