Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Behind the Counter: Unmasking the Truth of Unionizing in the Fast Food Industry with Mira Lazine
In this Strange Matters/Varn Vlog collaboration, we discuss Mira Lazine's account of organizing the McUnion in Strange Matters Issue 2. What if we told you that the friendly face behind your fast food order is grappling with challenges you'd never even imagined? We're inviting you into a raw, deep, and humanizing conversation with Mira Lazine, who has been on the front lines of unionizing in the fast food industry. They shed light on the high turnover rates, the harsh quest for better employment conditions, and the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on an already precarious unionization effort. They also debunk the misconceptions regarding who constitutes the fast food workforce, revealing a broad spectrum of individuals from all walks of life.
Our adventure begins with the inspirational and challenging journey of Luzin, who was radicalized by the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and has held on to his anarchist beliefs despite skepticism from coworkers. Luzin helps us understand the two major union models, the IWW model of solidarity unionization and the bureaucratic union model. Taking us step-by-step through the process, they shed light on the complexities of reaching out to workers on different shifts, building trust, and leveraging power mapping in unionizing.
But let's not forget the digital age we live in. We dive into the power of technology and its impact on our behavior, especially the dangers of over-reliance on social media and the dopamine feedback loop it creates. Mira and Luzin share stories of surprising allies and betrayals that surface during the process of unionizing, highlighting trust as an ongoing theme. This episode isn't just about the complexities of organizing within the fast food industry; it's about human resilience and strength, and a testament to the people behind your fast food order. Tune in for an enlightening conversation that you won't want to miss.
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Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. I'm here with Mira.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone.
Speaker 1:How do I say your name?
Speaker 2:Luzin.
Speaker 1:Luzin, mira. Luzin and Mira wrote an article for Strange Matters called my Mac Union, and you talk about learning unionization tactics and what you picked up from the IWW, what you could take away from that and what you couldn't. So let's begin with framing why it is so hard to organize in fast food spaces. What's the issue there?
Speaker 2:So I guess one of the main issues with fast food organizing is that there's a huge amount of turnover Like you'll go through possibly dozens of people in just a couple months. At the McDonald's I worked at, we went through maybe like in the span I worked there over 100-something people, and it's really hard to build solidarity when you're don't know who you're going to be working with the next day. You don't know who's going to be there with you, and not to mention the awful benefits and pay. It can make it hard for people to want to stick around too. So it further increases the turnover when people get treated badly, like there's no real desire among many people to improve the job. It's just kind of like yeah, I'm here as a temporary thing getting me by, and so it's. I guess that's the main issue with it. There's plenty of small issues, of course.
Speaker 1:So when you came into the McDonald's workplace, what do you think of the misconceptions that a lot of people have about it? One your right turnover for this field is really high. However, there's also a lot of people assume that it's like all super young workers who are probably in high school, and that's not true either. So when you went to start to unionize around 2018, what were your first? You know what were your first roadblocks, beyond the obvious structural ones.
Speaker 2:Just to clarify on the timeline real quick. It was around late 2019, early 2020, that the union campaign was going on.
Speaker 2:The reason I bring that up is because COVID played a role in it towards the end. But, like you said, it's not true that people working there primarily high schoolers or college kids. There's a fair share of them, don't get me wrong, but there are just as many, if not more, people who are like disgruntled parents trying to make a living for their kids. You had just average older folk. There was one guy who was, I think, in his 60s or 70s working there during my time as just not even a manager or anything, just a regular employee. There were people from all walks of life just trying to get by and the idea that it's like it gets talked down so much because so many people view it as like, oh, fast food is just a kid's job. You know, it's something you're in for a year or two when you're just starting out or while you're in college, to pay a few bucks, like for some people that's their livelihoods, that's what they're stuck in, because it consumes so much time and energy that it can be almost impossible to seek anything else to get out of it.
Speaker 2:A lot of people I know from my time working there, and in other fast food restaurants too, were they were completely feeling defeated, like whenever anyone would talk about getting another job. It would be treated as like this really rare event, you know, like oh wow, you got really lucky, you managed to find something that pays better than here and get out of here. Good for you. The rest of us are stuck here, though. I remember at a one fast food job I worked it wasn't McDonald's, it was a local chain in Scranton area the one manager tried to talk me out actually of switching to a different industry because he didn't believe I could do it. Because there's just everyone in fast food is stuck there and there's so few people who, when they're stuck in fast food for years, actually get out of it and make it out of it for a long time. At least that's a perception of it. I'm not too sure of like the employment statistics on it or anything, but that's definitely the idea that gets tossed around a lot.
Speaker 1:So that may be the case. It's actually hard to talk about fast food as an industry because there's a lot of seasonal employment in it. There's a lot of people working it very temporarily and know they're going to work in it temporarily, but there's also a lot of people who get caught up in it. Even when I was working in fast food, I was a pizza manager a key holder, not a general manager For about a year. I was a floor cook for about a year and I have horror stories about that job. Like you know. I literally broke my ankle and couldn't get off a 16-hour shift. It was like it was holding myself up one day. And then I had a bad knee too from another job shortly thereafter. My left leg is kind of still paying for that and I got workers comp from it. And then I got promoted as a shut up kind of situation.
Speaker 1:But I remember leaving because of the fear of what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:I was at this time I was in my sophomore year in college and I was offered, you know, oh well, you can become a general manager, you're really talented and I remember like, if I do this, am I going to be able to do anything else and, yeah, you can make an okay living as a general manager.
Speaker 1:We were talking like between $35,000 and $80,000 in 2001 money, but that's a pretty big gap in earning potential and, you're right, it eats up so much of their time. If you're some of these people, particularly if you get moved on the salary in these scenarios your weeks are like 60 hours long. It's very hard to do a whole lot of self improvement or whatever in that kind of job environment unless the business pays for it, and it's probably not going to be to give you any skills to get you out of fast food. So it's very hard to talk about because there's like a core of people who are really stuck in it and there are, you know. There's also, notoriously, kitchen jobs, both fast food and, you know, fast, casual and anything but the high end restaurants are known as a place that like well, if you're a felon, this is one of the few jobs you can get.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So there's a whole lot of that too. And yet when I was, you know, it never occurred to me to try to unionize the pizza store that we were at, even though there were clear violations of stuff going on, like, for example, we would expect all the pizza drivers to have their own insurance and they can't get business insurance right Now. This is just flat out illegal. But it was like part of the business is like don't let your insurance company know that you work for the pizza place because they're going to uninsure you because you're doing business driving and we're not providing any business insurance for liability or anything like that. And that was universal common practice in the late 90s, early on, Right, that sort of thing it.
Speaker 1:I don't think most people just accept it. But I'm like do you have you realize what you're taking on to yourself by doing that? Like? And I don't know if it's still common practice, I actually have no idea but I knew that later on when I worked for an insurance company, but they were always looking to find people who were pizza deliberately drivers and uninsure them.
Speaker 1:Like it was like a known thing that you tried to do you try to bait people to admit it. They were a driver and then we're not doing commercial insurance by like, yeah, and these were people who made minimum wage and this was this was 2001 to 2003 minimum wage, so that's 550 an hour, I think. So, yeah, and there's also a truth that until like, basically until semi-schooled labor got a backdoor pay raise by the federal government, paying $15 an hour, that most food service was stuck at whatever the minimum wage or just a dollar or two above it. That's starting salary, and unless you get into malinagement, there's not a whole lot of ways to make a whole lot more than starting salary in most of these jobs. And is that still true?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's some. You might be able to get lucky and get a raise the one I was mentioning that they were trying to talk me out of switching industries. I got like a small raise and a small title change when I became more of like a head cook there, Cause I was kind of like in between a sit down restaurant and fast food and that was about it. It wasn't anything substantial and, like you said, unless you're seeking management or rising through the ranks that way or anything like that, you're gonna be stuck in the same role, doing the same exact things over and over. There's a decent chance some managers are gonna like offload their responsibilities onto you too, and sometimes you'll get a say in it. You know you can turn it down, but most of the time you don't, because if you turn down the offloading of extra stuff to do, they're gonna be like oh well, I guess you're not a hard worker or whatever.
Speaker 1:And they'll cut your shift hours even if they don't fire you. Yeah, this was this thing that we always that was commonly done, which I'm pretty sure even in right to work states is illegal, but it was super commonly done to where, when they didn't wanna fire anyone to risk having to pay out unemployment, they would cut their hours down to like an hour. We can keep them on it like that for like a month or two until the even when we were short staffed to make them quit so that they couldn't collect unemployment insurance. In my state that was a super common practice and, like I said, pretty sure that's illegal too, but again common.
Speaker 1:Just like you know other things that are illegal that were common, like penalizing you for not showing up to work early. That's another one that's highly illegal but common. And these are not the kinds of people in general have the money to know how to search out a labor lawyer and since they don't have a union to upfront those costs on, this stuff just goes unpunished generally. I mean, it's the rare case where someone actually brings some of these things to court.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've never heard of it getting punished at all and I hate to see it. But like it's so difficult for people in that situation getting exploited by a fast food job to get resources because they're already in a state where they don't have access to much. If they have any disposable money at all, they have to use it for bills and everything, so they can't afford lawyer costs. A lot of people in that position are stuck in either small town areas or just areas without much opportunity whatsoever. Many people didn't have the luxury of being able to go to college or anything either. Right out of high school they came into those jobs and just kind of got stuck there. So there's not any way they could have known what to do, who to call and the best way to go about things to say they're too busy trying to make it day to day and it's like it's terrible.
Speaker 1:It's not like there's excess labor lawyers also hanging out in a lot of these ex-urban communities, or ex-suburban communities even, and a lot of the center of the country and, like you said, there's a lot of these places. My hometown is one of them actually where, like, the employers are the government, the school system, also the government, maybe a medical clinic, if there even is one, and there may not be one. Let's see what else. Retail and fast food and that's literally the only industry in the small town right are the suburban town and maybe you can drive an hour, hour and a half to some other job. I mean one of the things I'll say around here, like in Salt Lake, like, yes, like, for example, average pay here has gone up just because they have to get people on market competition in the city, so like they are paying $15, $16 an hour in most fast food places, which is still not enough to survive here, but it's significantly better than a lot of other places and jobs. But if you were to go just out of the Salt Lake or Utah Valley to one of these small town areas that may be touristy or maybe it's just like supporting farmers or whatever, there might be a McDonald's and one other local food chain, and that's literally the only non-farming business, our non-mining business in town. That's it. And yeah, and I live in a state where there's where, yes, there's what three universities and two private universities, but they're all in a very small area and if you can't afford to live in that area and get financial aid for it, it's very hard for you to have a whole lot of options.
Speaker 1:So I think this is something that we actually don't think about a lot when we talk about the United States and these kinds of problems, because a lot of people think that, like, the opportunities are just class based, and they are in a lot of degrees. They're not just class based though, they're also like regional, like there's just whole swaths of this country where there's not that much, like you know, and so if you don't get lucky and have some kind of additional aid to move out and go to school or to join the military or whatever, there's not a whole lot of options for you, because even the government jobs usually require some kind of credential to get, except for, maybe, the post office, you know. So, yeah, I think this is often not talked about when we talk about a lot of this work, because that's the counter tendency to like oh, it's a bunch of high schoolers. Also, high schoolers don't tend to have jobs this much anymore. That's another fact that I don't think is often accounted for. So you started your unionization effort around early mid 2019?
Speaker 2:Yeah it was around, I think closer to mid 2019. I don't remember the exact month, but it was around then that I started seriously going about it. I was employed at the McDonald's since, I wanna say, september of 2018, although I could be wrong in the exact month, because it's been a while.
Speaker 1:And you were already a left winger, already a leftist of some variety. What kind of delusions did you have as a leftist who entered this kind of environment Like let's talk about that somewhat openly, because I think a lot of people do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I and to give a little bit of preface to I was younger than I already am. I was when I started working there, I was 16, but by the point I was starting the union, I was like 17, 18. So I was very green.
Speaker 1:So Neri, one may say, a child, no, no.
Speaker 2:Yeah, basically, and I came into leftism and anarchism specifically through a lot of online spaces. I got radicalized, initially from the Bernie Sanders campaign 2016, like a lot of other people, and fell down a few rabbit holes and ended up falling into leftist ideals and by the time I got my first job, I was already a pretty diehard anarchist Still am so managed to keep that over the past couple of years, but it my idea of how the world worked and how to approach things was a lot more Optimistic. Then I guess I could say his I've. I felt like it would be a lot easier, maybe not fully consciously.
Speaker 2:I knew there was Union busting campaigns and I knew that. You know, I knew the history of it at least slightly. All the All the unions in the past. I got busted and things ended violently for the unioners. I didn't expect anything like that to happen, but I knew that strong retaliation was a thing. But I had that kind of Green I Idea subconsciously that like, but I'm immune to that, I'm immune to things going wrong. This is gonna go my way, it's gonna be perfectly fine and and I thought Things could be done pretty easily. I Was wrong.
Speaker 1:So you talking? You talk in your article about meeting a Certain wobbly. For those who don't know what wobbly is, that's an IWW member. Now, when we will call them mark I do not know if that is Mark's real name, nor is that important so you encountered Mark and you went through the, the IWW's Training program, correct? Um, our mark just kind of brought in those principles with him. Mark more brought in it all with him there.
Speaker 2:Well, I didn't go through any. He tried to set me up with some official training programs, but it just didn't work with work in school at the time so I couldn't attend any.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's often a problem with those Like, yeah, I'm trying to go to school so I can get out of this job, that that If I can't organize it, and so I don't have any time to take the training class to organize it. So what did mark give you off? Would you talk about the two models of union that they are that they talked about? I guess it's a fitness union and solidarity unions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, mark, we started from scratch, basically because up until that point, admittedly, my knowledge of unions was pretty lax, beyond unions good. And so, mark, he was very patient and very kind with it all. He explained it all easily digestible from Ground zero and kind of built up my knowledge bit by bit. Yeah, he started off with Discussing the two types of union models, the two major types of union models.
Speaker 2:I know it can kind of branch off a little bit, going in specifics, but contrasting the IWW model of the of solidarity unionization with the more standard model found in your more bureaucratic style unions. And he gave me the choice of what I wanted to do. He was a bit biased with it, but he admitted he was. It wasn't like he was spoon feeding me an ideology or anything. He presented me with the information I needed. And Let me make the choice. And I Didn't get to include this in the article because it wasn't really relevant and it was more tangential.
Speaker 2:I initially knew so little that I actually wanted to do both somehow and that's not Possible really. I mean, you can try to some degree, but after a certain point, when you're organizing the union itself, the two models just gonna flick to way too heavily. You can't have a solidarity union model in its full capacity with more bureaucratic, hierarchically, hierarchically structured Model it. You can maybe have some elements of inspiration taken from both, but the idea that oh yeah, I'm just gonna do both concurrently is like no, that's not how it worked. But he explained to me and, and still, let me make the choice. And we ended up going towards the solidarity union model.
Speaker 1:And how did that go for you when you started embracing the solidarity union model? What does that look like in a McDonald's context?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. So I'll preface with I don't have much of a point of reference for an outside the McDonald's context. Fair enough, but in terms of what I can relay, I Was one of unfortunately one of the primary and only people pushing for it at a certain point. Now how it should have gone and how it did go. At its peak it was, there was a small group of us as like the core people, kind of being the main ones to try to get people on board, talk to folk and Just see where everyone's at and how they're feeling with the workplace, and we were able to make some decent strides with that. We.
Speaker 2:It was a little bit clique-ish, unfortunately, because I I didn't fully know to reach out in my comfort zone and talk to people who might be better organic leaders but may not be especially close to me. The people I talked to were people I was already buddy buddy with. Now some of them, in Hindsight I still think were decent picks, especially considering who I was there. But others were more. I Don't think others Were in a position where they would have wanted to take on a unionization role, where they would have wanted to take on the role Organizing everything. I think they more so went along with it because they were just like, yeah, why not, this seems like a cool idea? And it was Disorganized, but at its peak it was functional. So, in terms of the actual structure, you had a core group of us and then we all kind of had sort of tangential or explicit connections to other people who we either talked to or were going to talk to, as a kind of like web almost. And the ideal way it should have been done because I I am very critical of how we did it looking back, but the ideal way it should have been done was, as I said, we get people who Might be Outside of my comfort zone, people I'm used to, people that we all were used to, and we didn't really do that in terms of the core people involved, the kind of like main union organizers behind it all we, what it should have been and what I think the ideal version would have looked like, is you have a select group of people Representing all the different shift periods.
Speaker 2:You know your morning shift, your overnight shift, your evening, midday, and and they're all people with close connections to other folk across the different shifts.
Speaker 2:They're all people that can be considered as just part of the community there, their integral to the place. Everyone looks to them and they're not so much making decisions on behalf of everyone, but they're People that you can count on to when we're making the calls of who else to go in and what sort of Actions we might want to take. Their people you can count on to actually represent other people and Make sure everyone's voices are heard, so that way it's not just oh, you're an elected representative for us, you're someone who's actually relaying our concerns and someone who is actually listening to us and allowing us to chime in if we so please. But it was much too centralized when we were doing it and I think that's an easy pitfall, especially for new organizers to fall into, is sticking too much into their comfort zone and taking on too much for one person and letting it be just much too Tied to one or a select group of people. That makes total sense you talk a lot about.
Speaker 1:You know, mark, helping you learn how to do what I have learned as power mapping and I do when I've done Work, both union and non-union. I don't talk about this work actually on my show because I don't want to compromise it, but I do all kinds of power mapping. I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. I do all kinds of power mapping. I can power map community leaders. I power map organizational leaders. I power map money flows, like who gives what to whom and how do we know it and what might you know? What kind of bias might this give them? If you appeal to this organization and in small communities, like, let's say, no longer, stop, you're the ACLU of Wyoming, which is all of four people for a whole state yes, that's true facts, by the way, and you need to know well who's the primary donor keeping these four people employed and do they have any biases and Etc. And so I'll power map that way too.
Speaker 1:Now for union organization organizing, that's actually generally not that important unless you're dealing with, like a, a business union. Frankly, that has to deal with lobbying and the kind of politics stuff and unfortunately in that kind of union environment that tends to be all that they do like, like my union president, I think, helps negotiate with the school board and then deals with the Republican Legislature and that's kind of it. I Mean they send us emails about when to show up on redshirt or something, but like that's, you know, and that's something the IWW model wants to avoid, and I think kind of rightly so actually. But how did you find trying to figure out who the community leaders were and who they, who you could use, both within the particular McDonald's you're trying to organize and in the larger community to you know, help you protect you influence? How did that go?
Speaker 2:so the thing about stratton area is, even though it's labeled as a city, it's just a glorified small town. It's a big small town, but it's a glorified small town, and that's true for a lot of Pennsylvania. Yeah, pennsylvania, especially northern Pennsylvania, is just Nor the Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1:You know pencil tucky, as we like to call it. Yeah, I am familiar with the area you're talking about. So, yeah, scratchin, I think people do kind of use scratchin as a city. It may have been at one time, but I Would definitely agree to you if you want to call it. It's a mid.
Speaker 2:It's a mid-sized to smaller city with small town characteristics for sure so, yeah, it's a day, and like the 40s and 50s, when coal mining was at its peak there, but ever since that the industry there fell under Scritten has just become pretty much irrelevant. Unless you're a die-hard fan of the office or Joe Biden, yeah, there's nothing else to it.
Speaker 1:A large part of the rust belt is this way, so people should listen up with that. This is not just that's not just Pennsylvania. It's like most any mid-sized city and the upper Midwest in the, in the north Atlantic. That's not on the coast. If you're not close enough to New York to benefit from that, which is you know, we talk about Pennsylvania. That's why the north and the west kind of get falling out of this discussion. It's there's, no, they don't benefit from knock-on effects for being, you know, I don't know, close to To Philadelphia, are close to New York.
Speaker 2:So yep, although ironically, a lot of people from Scranton were actually from New York originally. I myself grew up in New York City For a bit and ended up moving to Scranton because it was cheaper it a lot of people from there Relocate to Scranton area because it's just dirt cheap problem as they get stuck there that that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Now, this is not in your article, but I think it's something we should consider. And we talk about these problems with, like unionizing, these franchises Stuff. So we talked about people being trapped. Um, there's sort of a core periphery within the United States, often even within a region of the United States, right? So, like New York is the core, but you can get pressed out of New York really easily and then you go to some of these periphery areas and you can initially, you know, get by a little easier, it's cheaper or whatever.
Speaker 1:But then you're stuck in that ecosystem and it is hard to get out because the cost of leaving is higher than what you can make. So there's this purchasing power gap that that that emits, and sometimes it helps you, like when you first move to Scranton and I Used to live In a city in Georgia that was like this to Atlanta. So I've seen these dynamics a lot and then you're like why can't afford to move back to Atlanta? Because, like, it's so cheap to live here, but I'm also not making that much money living here. So, unless I have some kind of remote job when I can take basically take money out of the of the New York economy but still get the benefits of the New York economy, of the are, the LA economy or whatever. I'm kind of bound. I can't just leave easily. Maybe if I'm young I can go to college and use that to pivot my way out, but if I'm middle-aged it's real hard yeah and especially to when your whole family moves with you.
Speaker 2:Then it becomes not an issue just separating yourself. But then, oh, now I got my mom a worry about, I got my pa, I got my uncle, my great, great great aunt Gertrude. You know I have so many people that have since came with me and built their lives here. That just Difficult. You become ten times harder and the next thing you know, oh, there's a new family name in the area that everybody knows.
Speaker 1:So so, so and one, since, when you're trying to figure out community leaders, and you talked about this, you ended up you, because of natural limitations, because who you're comfortable with, because of natural clique, is dish, because also, other than the job and a lot of these places now, solidarity organizing and I don't want to like romanticize the old small community, but solidarity organizing would have been easier because, even though you might have to deal with the minister or whatever, you have churches, you have this out in the other, even if they're reactionary. You you have these community centers in which to pull from. But a lot of these areas, those things are a lot weaker now, like they're not places where you can go and necessarily find natural leadership to organize a job.
Speaker 1:Like it's not clear that there's as many of those kind of quasi public spaces To pull from, and I do think that makes this, this, a lot harder to do. Do you agree with me? With that, I mean particularly in today's, you know, cultural environment, which is not to say that there are reasons why people don't trust each other in today's cultural environment, let's be honest. But you know, they're not even always wrong, but the it's still. It's hard to do a solidarity union when, like, how do you get to all these members of the community and you need to do it outside of work, to organize successfully or to organize without them being able to crush you. So, yeah, that's a big challenge in a lot of these places, yeah, and especially to when you don't have a ton of contacts to everyone.
Speaker 2:If you're in a position, like I was, where, while you're part of the community and you might know everyone, you're not especially close to everyone, like when you're not.
Speaker 2:When you're not Because the thing about Straton area is as small, townie as it is, there's also that kind of city element to it too.
Speaker 2:We have a lot of people who you might not know and might not have that primary connection to, and so it can be basically Building a relationship with a stranger, and if you don't have any sort of common ground, you work completely different shifts, you work With completely different people, different hours of the day. It Comes a question how do you get to know them enough to meet with them outside of work, having an in-depth one-on-one conversation with them where you talk about unions and their comfort and their familiarity with it and their issues with their job, when, especially when they're completely dependent on this job and even might be Buddy buddy was people like the management there who could be family members of them? This one manager I know a couple of her kids actually worked at that same McDonald's, so we were able to talk to them and get them on board, at least tentatively, but it was a huge risk factor that we were constantly considering.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is one thing I think about fast food, and there's a lot of jobs like this, but fast food is particularly the case, where, on one hand, there's a fair amount on McDonald's is gonna have a where. How. How many people worked at your McDonald's at a time? Generally Between 70 and 100. Yeah, so that, more than say, like a Starbucks, which has like a work, a work staff of usually about 50 and shifts of like 20, right, but for less than say, a factory where you probably had five to seven thousand, and so the when I point this out, this is why Some of these air, some of these kinds of fast food jobs, particularly ones that aren't in cities, are so hard in big cities, like like we talk about Starbucks, starbucks and this is not me slagging on a Starbucks campaign and, yes, baristas are proletariat, before anyone else talks about anything stupid but they do have some advantages and that it's not franchised. A lot of them are urban and while it is a high tone of her job and in that way it's like McDonald's, it's you also tend to know People you work with, because there's usually only two shifts, whereas like a McDonald's you have three or more, sometimes I mean like if it's a 24 hour McDonald's, they can have a bunch yes, actually, and so I think that really does change a lot of the dynamics here.
Speaker 1:Whereas you have a place like McDonald's or I don't know, they can like a waffle house for people who know what that is. Those places are really hard to organize because of the shift work, because what they're mainly, they might only be Three or four people in a shift. They're always on that shift. They don't know the other people they work with. There's not a lot of overlap, you don't. But you also don't really know who like who mental management's gonna side with at any given time either, and a lot of these jobs it's not. They don't always side with corporate. I mean, their incentives aren't clearly there, but you don't know and it's a huge risk and, as you said, like, these are not kinds of jobs with, like nepotism, protections or anything. So like, yeah, people tend to be related to each other and Are know each other they day.
Speaker 1:There's all kinds of things that make this so Both more and more isolated than you would think it would be, but also more open to you know places where you don't know where someone really is gonna stand. Their, their incentives or interests are not obvious, right, and I think that's particularly true in like fast food management, because, except for the general manager, they also don't make much money, so you don't know where their loyalty is, but they don't want to lose that job because if you know you're in a place like Scranton or, god forbid, a suburb outside of Scranton even, what are you gonna do? Like it's a very yeah, it's a tough situation and we've already talked about how it's hard to get like labor law support for this and it's, I think it's kind of an open secret. Because of one thing I will say about restaurants Um, restaurants have really low profit margins. They just do like, how does McDonald's make money? They're not lying when they say it's real estate, like so, which is not to say that that justifies, you know, mistreating employees. I'm just, I just like that's why a lot of management is the way that it is and labor laws are really hard to enforce because a lot of people are afraid and they're way easier to enforce on corporations and on franchises and so much that they're enforceable at all. So does this all still comport with your experience?
Speaker 1:You tell a lot of. You tell a lot of stories about you know people who you wouldn't expect helping you, like people who and that you were not sure of, who ended up even being like like lower management, who would tell you stuff that was going on so the union could try to develop with inside information and how that was actually crucial, and stuff like that. So I don't want people to think this all is, this all just goes in the direction of bad, but it is a huge complication, right. So you did that. You kind of you figured out who was friend, who was neutral, maybe who was hostile, and then you talked about other things, like how to organize this, where you don't want to use Facebook, even though that seems obvious because a lot of people are on Facebook, but it's easily recordable, right. So you end up using things like Snapchat or Signal or something like that, but that means you got to get people to use it and understand it. Snapchat's a little bit easier than, say, signal because it's so ubiquitous, but how did you find that working?
Speaker 2:Like the digital structure of everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and trying to move around that, because one of the things when we talked about these common spaces, for example, when we were talking about, like I don't know, churches or civic clubs or whatever you're trying to organize around this stuff, it's kind of hard to prove what you said right, and whereas if someone screenshots you on Facebook, well, they do have proof, right, and even something like Signal, which is pretty encrypted and it's hard to find out that, you can still screenshot it where maybe Snapchat you can't right, Because you can't really save the video as they ought to delete. And yeah, they can screenshot you but you're not going to get sound from that. But a lot of people had that. I used to think a lot of people were more optimistic about the way the digital infrastructure would help people organize and I think people have ran into some hard limitations around that. What's your experience there?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we ran into a lot of issues with trying to structure things in a way that was accessible for everyone, while at the same time trying not to compromise everything. We used Facebook Messenger because, like you said, it's the most convenient for people. Everyone there had it. All you have to do is log on. We make a group chat right there. But also, like you said, it's so easy to document and log and, as I wrote in the article, that gets used against us.
Speaker 2:We didn't account for what if someone were to snitch. We just assumed good faith on everyone we were involving and, as nice as it is to think, oh yeah, everyone we're going to be working with is completely on the same page as us and is completely on board with it with the same enthusiasm that we are, the actuality is is that people are going to be too faced and then to give it a union campaign. You know there is no union campaign that runs perfectly, has no issues with it, has no one trying to stop it. That just doesn't happen. There's always going to be at least one person trying to put a stop to it and in the case of the McUnion we.
Speaker 2:Facebook wasn't initially going to be our first pick. We did deliberate over Snapchat. I was partial to Signal, but I didn't want to push it on people. I think Mark actually advised against using Signal because he didn't want to add additional learning curve for people trying to, who might not already be familiar with the spaces you know we had, especially when we started involving folk who was outside of our comfort zones.
Speaker 2:then it's like, oh well, we have this grandmother of three trying to use an app that she's not familiar with, and make sure that she also uses the voice function and not the text function, so no one can screenshot it, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And as the union grew, it became harder and harder to manage. And in the time since working at McDonald's, I've also worked in tech, and if there's one thing I've learned from working in tech, it's that temporary solutions often become permanent solutions. Absolutely, that is exactly what happened with us with Facebook Messenger. It was not supposed to be our one stop. This is where we communicate with everyone. It became the one stop. This is where we communicate with everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, path dependency is a motherfucker. You're absolutely correct about that. You like, oh, we're just going to do this. For a little while, about 10 years ago, I was doing stuff on Facebook and that's what I thought too. And then I was like, oh my God, I've been all this infrastructure on this corporate platform. That's not useful for me and but now I don't know what to do with all this infrastructure Locally. The COVID freakout fixed a lot of that for me, but it is. It is an interesting how much, how much that happens right, particularly with something like and Facebook is particularly easy to reach security with. So, yeah, so I guess this you know, you deal with a different digital infrastructure. You learn about path dependency. That sucks. You deal. You're trying to figure out Whose friends and enemies, both in incentives and also culturally. There's all kinds of stuff playing into that. What surprised you the most during this process? That's a good question.
Speaker 2:I would say it's the revelation of who you can actually trust, not even just in a union campaign, but in general. As we talked about, towards the beginning of the show, I was very green and naive to things and had a lot of delusions. Another delusion that I had was that anyone who was friendly towards me I could trust and anyone who wasn't a tipsy topsy-turvy to me, all the time was immediately bad and I couldn't trust. It was a very black and white way of viewing things and I mean, yeah, it's normal when you're a teenager to kind of view things that way, but experiences with this squashed that quickly.
Speaker 2:Josie, who I mentioned in the article. She was the employee turned manager who ended up bailing us out and without her I don't think we would have gotten the few concessions that we did. She played an instrumental role in us towards the end of it all and I did not expect her to. I fully thought Josie was actually going to be an obstacle in our union and union process. I thought, oh, she's so close to everyone. People are going to side with her over those working with the union and it's going to be disastrous for us. She's going to side with management now that she's a manager, and it's going to go against us.
Speaker 2:That was false. She sided with us in the end. She did what she could to help us without throwing herself under the bus, and proved very valuable in not just protecting us, but also as a person. She showed her true colors to me because we weren't like antagonistic towards each other before that, but we weren't exactly buddy buddy and she showed that she was. Even though she might be cold to me and might not be the friendliest, she was fundamentally a very great person, as far as you can use great and valuable to describe people in non-objective more subjective senses of, oh, I'd like this person and they do good by me.
Speaker 2:But she was a really great person and that surprised me. I was thinking, oh, because she became a manager, she's going to throw us under the bus and all that and no. And then, on the flip side, Dan, who I thought was on board with the union, who I thought was a good friend of mine, who I thought was someone I can trust, turned around, screwed us over and almost caused everything to fall apart. It was jarring with Dan because he was someone who I would have expected the least to betray us. I honestly we would have involved him sooner than we did.
Speaker 2:Even I didn't get to mention this in the article either because it's a bit more off topic, but we didn't get to bring him in earlier just because, circumstance he wasn't working the same shifts as a few of us, so we couldn't approach him and be like hey, come meet with us outside of work or come meet with us in the group chat and he, when we were on with him, it just it didn't work out for whatever reason, and we kind of got lucky for that that it didn't happen earlier, because chances are good if it happened earlier than it did, we all would have just gotten fired right away, Instead of the comparatively slap on the wrist that we got, which you know, reduced hours to three hours a week on Sunday mornings and getting small equipment fixed and a whole production leader campaign going on Small things like that.
Speaker 2:We wouldn't have even gotten anything like that if it happened earlier. So I guess all this to say my initial judgments of people were wrong, and in regards to Josie, I'm glad for it. In regards to Dan, I regret it, but I guess that surprised me the most.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what I thought when I read your article. I mean particularly regards to Josie and Dan and how this all kind of played out, particularly when COVID hit that I was like, well, that sounds about right. But I also thought people need to read this because they need to understand why it is so hard to unionize. Particularly the services in general are hard, but fast food and food service is really hard. And while people are using solidarity union models, union models in general, to push back and they're having some success and you mentioned Jimmy John's, which has a fairly privileged effort, everyone knows about Starbucks but when people come, there's been some things on the left for people like, oh well, that's not important, or blah, blah, blah. And on one hand I am often like, look, we do have to not pretend that Starbucks unionizing in one or two Amazon warehouses unionizing is a rebirth of unionized labor, because it's not. On the other hand, we can't throw these sectors under the bus Because there's a whole lot of people in them and there's whole lots of retiree regions of the country when this is one of like three or four viable and troddenment and, as we mentioned, a lot of the other viable Employments is for the government and requires credentials or whatever to be able to access. You know. So if you're not one of the lucky people gets a job at the post office and you don't want to be a cop and you're not, you don't have the credential to be a teacher or a nurse. Well, there's a couple options for you, and it's probably either the pigley wiggly actually, let's be real, there's no pigley regular left, it's probably or whatever the Kroger is calling that area or it's a couple of fast food jobs in a town like that or the gas station, and that's like it, like there's a whole lot of the country that is really like that. And then the places like Scranton, like Jackson Mississippi, like a lot of the small cities around the Twin Cities, where they're not quite that bad but they're not far from it, particularly in the mid, in the former rust about the parts of the country that were really dependent on Industrialization in the middle, you know, in the early middle 20th century. I mean, we talked about the history of Scranton, but there's just a whole swath of the country. That's true for, and if you abandon them and I think it's ironic that a lot of the people who are abandoning them, like were there blue hairs in big cities. I'm like, yeah, but we're fighting for people who aren't.
Speaker 1:That, no matter what, even though that's irrelevant to shut up that like there's a whole swath of people who they're kind of people that you that come into your stereotype, had about what working class is when we talk about, say, mcdonald's workers, and there's all kinds of people who aren't. That too, it's a very, very job field that you can, as you said, get stuck in, particularly if you stay there for any length of time beyond your teams and and we do have to think about how to organize it. But it's hard, it's real hard for the shift reasons, for the fact that they're particularly given the right to work, for the fact that you don't know is know your co-workers and the fact they're often in places where these other social, you know, areas that we're talking about don't really exist either. Like you said, it's grann, you know there's not a singular unifying area, there's not a single unifying church or anything like that to which you can go in and use that space as though an organizing space, yeah, so, so what are your big takeaways at the end of this process? Where would you tell people to go, since we, we both consider this important?
Speaker 2:Immediately, I would say, reach out to a local IWW chapter or even just IWW national. They there's always people there who are willing to help out a unionization campaign and, if nothing else, that there's plenty of educational resources they can offer you. There's so much history theory, um, sociology, just there's so much they can offer that they have just waiting for people to ask for it that It'd be awful not not to ask for it. I mean, and even if you can't Find folk local to you that are with the IWW which I can probably guarantee for 95% of the people listening to this, there is some IWW people local to them. Maybe not a whole chapter of the IWW, but With Scranton it was one washed out IWW guy. That's the truth. For so many other places, especially Rust Belt Towns, especially your downtrodden mid-small-sized cities, there's gonna be at least one person and and you are always going to find me not always 99.9% of the time going to find folk with the IWW who are willing to help out. It's, they do amazing work. Um, I'm, I've I've become a card-carrying member. I'm not much of an ensign, but I Do stand by the work they do and think, yeah, it's worthwhile. And also there's if say, you're new to organizing as a whole, you know you were in a similar boat to me of oh, I got radicalized remotely. You know I saw this campaign or I saw this youtuber.
Speaker 2:I W W has a lot of entry-level organizing opportunities. I say entry-level like it's a job. It's not a job, but there's plenty of organizing opportunities open for people who have not stepped foot Into any space like that before, even remotely. There's a lot. All you got to do is reach out and ask. It's a great starting point and even if you're more experienced but could use some guidance, there's folk there will help out. So I would say, yeah, that's in terms of what you can do in the immediate. Do that and also self-plug. But learn from my mistake mistakes in the McUnion article. See what you can do better, see what you can improve upon and Check out resources. To like labor notes been very helpful to me. The book labor law for the Rink and Viola highly recommend that one. Lots of good info there and Think that would cover you for starting point what I'd recommend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say, on one hand, organizing is definitely something that takes a lot of time, is kind of a job. On the other hand, I also want to point out that professional or or professional organizers for unions, particularly unions that we were considered business unions, often have a shit ton of perverse incentives, and you can see this in places like the DSA. If you really want to, I have to do my obligation and tell people that they need to subscribe to strange matters magazine for providing Articles like your own. I'm really bad at selling stuff, so, and also this is a communist podcast, but I Would suggest people support strange matters magazine because they do a lot of stuff on organizing, on monetary theory, on stuff like this From their particular perspective. I Refuse to say the the word libertarian, socialist, I I just refuse to. I mean, I know I just did, but it's Whatever, but that's from their particular perspective, which I often like, and would suggest that they also pay their authors above market rate and and they're collectively organizing. Their books are open. So, and I do have two of their issues back there. I don't want to get up and grab them, but so if you want to support that, please do. If you don't want to support it, they would still like the read. So go read yours article. That'd be great and I learned a lot from it, and I think we need more of this kind of accounting of what happens in these situations.
Speaker 1:Situations and If you know people like you are willing to. You know, protecting people's identities, obviously, but Right about it as like a form of like workers inquiry, it will really help people learn how to adjust and maybe make fewer mistakes every round that they do this, and so I want to thank you for that and Encourage other people who have also been in situations like you to write about their experiences and hide names. Don't try anyone's names. Don't be a snitch. So that's my big takeaway. I'd like to thank you so much, and I also like to give you credit for trying to organize anything. At the age you tried to organize something because I wouldn't have done it, thank you. Thank you so much, and the link is in the show notes, I believe. I'm pretty sure it's there. Also, if you want to follow Mira on the on the evil bird site, you can follow Mira on the evil bird site, the handle way back on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah is there. I'm not sure the clot will help you, but you know it it'll definitely. I don't know it won't hurt you either. Probably. Don't make it go to your head. It's bad. All right, I Checked it out. Make sure you weren't like a horrible shit poster. I'm glad that. I'm no you're not, so I am but you know that I'm getting too hooked to Twitter again.
Speaker 2:I only recently went back to it and I've already started, like today for instance, tweeting just random day-to-day stuff, and I hate it because I thought I escaped that. Dopamine, the mother.
Speaker 1:Like path dependency. Dopamine will get you. Yes. Thank you so much, mira nice to meet you, and people should definitely like. Thank you so much, mira, nice to meet you, and people should definitely read your article. I think it's really great.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's nice to meet you too and to be on this on the show. I
