How Fast Food Workers Super-Sized Their Pay in New Zealand

[marmar]

How Fast Food Workers Super-Sized Their Pay in New Zealand
By Erik Forman


Recent strikes at Walmart and fast food restaurants in New York City have opened new horizons for unions in the United States. The two campaigns are navigating mostly uncharted waters by steering clear of the National Labor Relations Board election procedure and striking without a demand for recognition. As the headlines fade, many of us are wondering—what’s next?

Going public with a dramatic action is one thing. Building a durable organization of workers in the notoriously inhospitable low-wage service sector is another. But a small, spunky union in New Zealand offers an example of what a lasting union in fast food can look like.

The independent union Unite (no relation to UNITE HERE) launched its “Super Size My Pay” campaign in 2005. Now with more than 4,000 members at KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King, and Wendy’s, it has become one of the most successful fast food organizing efforts in the world.

From 0 to 2,000 in Six Months

Unite developed an organizing model that took advantage of two features of New Zealand labor law: As in Europe, employers are legally required to negotiate with a union that represents even just a handful of its workers. And in 2003 a Labour Party government passed a law requiring employers to allow union organizers access to non-union shops to meet with workers. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.zcommunications.org/how-fast-food-workers-super-sized-their-pay-in-new-zealand-by-erik-forman

[Brickbat]

1. Illustrating once again how backwards our labor law is.

K&R for solidarity.

[midnight]

2. With the astronomical pay of their bosses this message "Super size my pay" makes

their demand crystal clear..

[pampango]

3. In New Zealand "As in Europe, employers are legally required to negotiate with a union that

represents even just a handful of its workers."

Lessons for the U.S.

Criticisms aside, Unite’s accomplishments are impressive—a nearly 50 percent increase in wages in the chains since 2005, abolition of youth rates at the chains, shifting the national political dialogue on low-wage work, and perhaps most important, making unions relevant to a new generation of workers.

We can’t simply copy and paste Super Size My Pay into a North American context. Employers are much more aggressively anti-union in the U.S., and our legal framework for collective bargaining is much weaker. And Labor Notes readers will agree that rank-and-filers must sit in the driver’s seats of their unions.

However, we could build on elements of Unite’s model, extending organizing from the shop to the community, as Unite did by bringing students into their coalition, and by adopting society-wide demands for all workers, not just those covered by a contract.

And, like the high schoolers who stormed Queen Street, unions must be willing to take disruptive actions that put real economic pressure on employers and cause political crises for elites.

Great find. Thanks, marmar.