Since November, the New Zealand trade union Unite has been leading strikes in major fast-food chains, including KFC, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Burger King and McDonald’s. Green Left Weekly’s Azlan McLennan caught up with Unite organiser Joe Carolan when he visited Australia for the June 17 Young Workers’ Conference in Geelong.
Unite’s “Supersize My Pay” campaign has won 8% pay rises for most of these workers, a minimum wage of $12, adult rates for young supervisors and the introduction of overtime rates. One of the campaign’s main demands, to end youth wage rates, was “hugely popular and mobilised lots of people on the streets”, Carolan said.
McDonald’s started paying non-union employees 75 cents more per hour than those who’d joined the union, “but rather than this busting the union, which was their strategy, they’ve actually mobilised lots of people to join it”, Carolan said. “We’re preparing now to go after McDonald’s [in Auckland] in a big way, and we’re looking for solidarity from around the world because, if we can crack one city, this could spread.”
Carolan outlined the three phases in the Supersize My Pay campaign. “The first was highly symbolic strikes. The Starbucks strike was world news.
“One of the Starbucks CEOs scoffed at us on morning radio, saying there’s only three workers going on strike so what’s all the attention about? Workers in Starbucks heard this and immediately wildcatted. I went round in the Workers’ Charter Freedom Bus and picked up about 30 wildcat strikers.”
The KFC strike about two weeks later was even bigger. “We had probably the world’s youngest strike committee — three 15 year-olds and two 16 year-olds. They had a great process in the KFC store, electing a strike committee, preparing the strike themselves and advertising it.” The third strike was at Pizza Hut.
Unite then organised a lightning (no-warning) strike on the day the NZ Labour Party announced its new minimum wage. “That got huge media exposure and made Unite’s recruitment process a lot easier”, Carolan said.
Unite uses lightning strikes because “low-paid workers can’t afford to go on strike for a whole day. When we told young workers they could strike for an hour during the busy period they were like 'Fuck yeah!’”
Then Unite organised rolling strikes. “We’d start in one store, get all the KFC workers on the bus, drive to the next KFC store, where they’d see the other workers on strike, and pull them out” and so on. Carolan said the companies were “terrified” when these rolling strikes started because they were losing control over the workers.
In the latest phase, “we knew that politically we could take this onto the street”. To illustrate, Carolan described a “distinctive placard” at one of the street protests, which said: “Student revolt from Paris to Auckland, defend young workers’ rights”. It was making the link between the students’ and young workers’ victory in France and the need for resistance in NZ, where National Party MP Wayne Mapp has instigated legislation “that will allow employers to fire anybody within their first 90 days of employment for any reason”.
Carolan believes that Unite’s successes can be duplicated anywhere if “the campaign is led by the workers themselves”. He will be addressing the Resistance national conference in Sydney, July 8-10 (see advertisement on page 5). For more information, visit <http://www.unite.org.nz>.
From Green Left Weekly, June 28, 2006.
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