Fastfood Lessons Learned
How lessons learned over 40 years of organizing inform how to build a union of fastfood workers today.
Keith Kelleher, in the field, as a community organizer, learning with Mrs. Susie Turner, Eastside of Detroit, 1979-1980, right before fastfood organizing; Community & labor organizing lessons learned with Detroit ACORN & ULU helped future community/labor victories & models.
1979-1983
Fastfood Organizing: Lessons Learned and Future Organizing
In December 2010, thirty years after I began organizing fastfood workers with ULU in Detroit in 1980, I was invited to present a paper with organizers from former ACORN affiliates – Madeline Talbott from Action Now in Chicago, Jon Kest from New York Communities for Change (NYCC) in New York City, Amy Schur from ACCE in California, Brian Kettenring from the Leadership for the Common Good (LCG, later renamed the Center for Popular Democracy, CPD) and representatives from other community and worker centers interested in low wage worker organizing in their communities.
NYCC had extensive experience working with unions to organize car wash workers and home-based childcare providers; Action Now had supported and assisted our home childcare and homecare worker organizing for over twenty years, and their organizers had helped to win some of our largest union drives; others had similar experience organizing immigrant and brown and Black workers in various cities.
We were brought together at the Blue Mountain Center (BMC) in upstate New York to discuss our successes, failures, and lessons learned with low-wage worker organizing in our respective cities and industries and the possibilities to do even more organizing in fastfood and other industries.
Later in 2011, these groups approached SEIU and were funded to initiate some of the organizing possibilities discussed at the BMC meeting.
Later, Madeline asked me to write a memo laying out everything I knew about fastfood organizing. I wrote the memo in the Fall of 2011, right before the organizing began.
The 11-page memo laid out everything I learned and remembered about fastfood organizing thirty years before in Detroit: from contact work at the store to house visit raps, agendas for meetings, and other details about fastfood worker organizing; to ideas on campaigns around wage theft, sexual harassment, OSHA violations around burns, cuts, and other unsafe working conditions, to ideas on one-day strikes, fastfood member-organizer brigades, paid and earned media strategies, and systems to collect dues and build organization. I shared it with the participants from the BMC as well as with national SEIU staff and leaders. Some of the memo’s ideas were later adopted, others were not.
I also implemented a training session for the organizers who began the drives in Chicago.
I was happy to make my tiny contribution to help what later became known as the Fight for 15. To date, the Fight for 15 has helped propel the $15 minimum wage to victory in many cities and states, and over 22 million workers won coverage through state and local $15 minimum wage legislation. Hopefully, it will become the Law of the Land.
Listed below are some of the invaluable lessons I learned organizing fastfood workers in Detroit from 1980 to 1983. I also included some ideas on how I would organize a union of fastfood workers today. Some may be applicable to organizing workers in other low-wage industries as well. I hope it helps you in your organizing.
Lessons Learned as a Field Organizer: Organizing Fastfood Workers
Having worked as a community organizer for barely six months before I began organizing fast-food workers in Detroit, I learned a number of critical lessons that informed the rest of my organizing career.
House Visit Workers at Least 3-4 Hours a Day, Every Day – No Excuses!
And longer on weekends if needed. House visits are often the only way to sign up members, find leaders, and grow the organization. This is the most important of a field organizer’s many responsibilities.
Listen
One of the best skills to have as an organizer is the ability to hear what people are saying about the job or neighborhood. This is how you build relationships and develop a road map for the organizing drive.
Make at Least Three Turnout Phone Calls for Meetings
The first at the beginning of the week, the second the night before, and the third the morning of the meeting. These are only turnout calls, you will be making more calls to prep leaders, inoculate against company attacks, and more.
Give Rides
Giving rides for meetings, actions, and elections is one of the few ways to guarantee at least some turnout. In the Greyhound Burger King drive, we won by two votes — with at least five of them coming from workers we gave rides to. You don’t have to do all the rides. As you build, you find other reliable drivers, and they can bring folks too.
Lead with the Workers
Everything about your drive should come from the workers you are organizing: from house visits, leadership prep, and phone calls, to dues signups, meeting setup, and communications work, members should engage in the work of the union as much as possible.
Collect Dues
Dues are a method to test and build financial commitment and grow organizational self-sufficiency. In my experience, almost all workers — and especially poor workers — want to join and pay dues, make political action donations, and support other types of fundraisers. One skill that the labor movement has lost is signing up members and collecting dues, either in cash (pre and post-Covid), on bank drafts, credit cards, cell phones, or other methods yet to be discovered. We signed up members in fast food, but not as systematically as needed. In homecare and childcare, it was a longer process: at first, we began collecting cash dues, then we learned how to collect bank drafts, and then we won dues checkoff from members’ paychecks. We eventually signed up tens of thousands of workers with a very weak “meet and confer” agreement and no union contract, until we built our strength to win legislation allowing a process for recognition and formal collective bargaining. We not only built up our dues incomes and systems but also set up additional political action committees through separate voluntary donations that helped build up our political and electoral capacity. We will need to do the same and utilize new technologies going forward in many of the new industries that need to be organized today. Especially in light of how checkoff laws are being eviscerated locally and nationally.
Engage in Direct Action Around Issues and Targets
Always have a plan of small and large direct actions against targets on and off the job. Direct action builds members and leaders, so start early around targets of opportunity as you are building your organization – in fastfood, we would hold pickets at stores where an owner or the corporation was harassing workers, we would hold recognition actions on the boss to demand recognition, we would do actions and pickets at government agencies around wage and hour/wage theft violations, OSHA violations, racial and sexual harassment, and discrimination. Anywhere you think you have the strength to move collectively in action, and where the workers want to, you should. The only limits are your or your members’ imaginations.
Build Community Support and Relationships
We would not have been successful as we were without community support from all segments of the community – in our case, with Chicago ACORN, Action Now, and many other community and labor organizations, racial and gender justice organizations, religious partners, and others in the community. These cannot be “one-offs” that some unions try to use at contract time or when they need help with an employer or strike or other campaigns, but both real transactional and transformational relationships.
Independent Political Action
I can’t emphasize enough that independent political action is a major reason we were successful – be it electoral, issue campaigns, candidates’ days, or other political work like forming independent political organizations, voter registration, voter education, and get-out-the-vote and building your own political action committees; it all has been key to our success. Like the old saying – “What you win in the bread box, can be taken at the ballot box.”
Know Thy Enemy
Get to know as much as you can from the workers about their employer and then find out as much as you can through your own research. Key to inform your future course of action.
Have A Media Plan - Stay Underground as Long as Possible
You want to choose the time to go public with the Organizing Committee – and always have a backup plan in case you surface or are surfaced too soon. And you will need a good worker-driven media plan once you do go public.
Constantly Engage in Staff and Leadership Training
Always good to keep your staff and leaders and organization healthy and ready to take on the next challenge. From roleplaying your house visits to on-the-job training for staff to leadership stress tests, and more, it’s all well worth the time.
Learn “Organizer Math”
Always know how to count – especially your Yeses, Nos, and Maybe’s for elections, meetings, actions, and all your activities. It took me a while to figure this new math out, but I eventually did.
Don’t Listen to Prevailing Wisdom
It’s frequently wrong. When we first started organizing fastfood, homecare, childcare, and other workers, the prevailing wisdom was that you could not organize low-wage workers, women, Black workers, or recent immigrants – the workers proved that prevailing wisdom wrong.
Be Ambitious
Always good to not only keep your eyes and ears to the ground to see what’s right in front of you but to keep your head in the clouds to have a whole picture of what’s happening in the greater world. Thinking big helps you to organize big as well.
Always Go Area-Wide
When organizing in an industry in a city, always organize across the industry in the jurisdiction – it worked in homecare and childcare and in fastfood to have organizing drives going in many of the large and small, public and private employers and agencies – it builds your organization, solidarity, and support among workers across the industry and serves as a safe place where workers can gather and make a plan to organize their employer or workplace.
Music and Culture
Always try to incorporate music and culture in your organizing: whether it be prayers in the meetings or songs and cultural traditions - if they’re not racist, sexist, homophobic, or anything hurtful, use it. In our early fastfood drives, workers used to close the meeting by singing a version of “Rapper’s Delight” and adlibbing lyrics related to organizing with the union. In the first fastfood worker organizing committee meetings in Chicago, music and culture were present at every meeting, as were budding singers, songwriters, cartoonists, and more. If it works, use it.
Don’t Rule Out “Hot Shops”
Some unions do not like to organize “hot shops” where the workers are ready to organize or maybe are well along. Although I realize the thinking behind that, I think it’s fine to do if you have a plan to test the commitment of the workers and don’t waste time with drives that will ultimately fail.
Don’t Be Doctrinaire - Borrow from Others
In our early ULU drives and models, we freely borrowed tactics, songs, strategies, constitutions, by-laws, etc. from other organizations and movements: from Welfare Rights to ACORN to 1199 to the UFW, to political and electoral organizing models. If it works, use it.
READ and LISTEN!
Keep reading or listening to books that could help our organizing from any and all subjects: on community and labor organizing to self-help books to romance novels to history to gender and racial justice. Keep reading, attend book clubs or organize your own. And make sure you read the local papers and other online news sources daily.
Have a Sense of Humor
Can’t take yourselves or the work too seriously or it will end up killing you. Very important to learn to laugh at yourself and your circumstances, especially when it seems like you are doomed. Even in my darkest days in Detroit and later Chicago, when I thought we might be on the road to defeat, I would say something tongue-in-cheek like “They can kill us, but millions will come in our place!” It would crack us up, calm us down, and break the tension,
Practice Self-Care
You can’t build a healthy organization if you don’t feel mentally and physically healthy yourself. Very important to take the time for self-care – make time with friends, away from work and work-talk - have places to go bowl, or play cards, or dance, or hang out, or whatever you like to do to relax. Don’t drink too much or better yet, don’t drink or do drugs at all. Make time for regular nights out with staff as well as regular nights out with friends. It’s also good to know of community mental health clinics and support services in case you ever need them. And knowing a good therapist is always a plus. Having a healthy diet and regular daily exercise routine is a must, as is regular meditation time if it helps you.
Always Have a Good Mechanic
Your car is your lifeblood! In most cities and towns, you will need your car to get around and to carry members and leaders around, so ask around and find a good, low-cost mechanic.
Use Technology
Always be on the lookout for new technology to help improve your organizing and mobilizing. Many new technologies were key to organizing fastfood, homecare, and other workers – whether it was direct mail, email, cell phones, texting, or any other apps or new technology, learning to use it and adapt to our work contributed much to our success.
How to Build a Fastfood Union Today?: Build Organization and Act Like a Union!
Essential Workers Need Essential Lives – these are some of my thoughts on how I would build a fastfood workers – or any essential workers – union today, in light of past mistakes made and lessons learned:
Don’t Begin Organizing Through the NLRB
In hindsight, if I was doing it over again, I would take the time to build organization before going directly to the Labor Board. I would take the time and build storewide and citywide organizations. There were good reasons why we went through the NLRB in 1980, but if we did a rerun, I would build through membership recruitment, direct action, and organizing around high-profile issues and campaigns, including strikes and other direct action. While we did hand collect dues and had a good number of fastfood workers who paid their joining fees and monthly dues in Detroit in 1980, we were not as disciplined and systematic about it as we were later when we were organizing homecare and childcare providers. My experience building organization: first through membership and direct action - as we did with homecare and childcare workers – until we built enough strength to win local and state legislative victories around wages and benefits, convinces me that this would be a way to go.
We Need to Signup Members
I am encouraged by our experience building a union representing over 90,000 homecare, childcare, hospital, nursing home, and other workers. Fastfood and other low-wage workers want to be union members, too, and we need to find a way to enable these folks to join our union like we built our homecare and childcare workers union from scratch – signing up one member of a time. First, we hand collected dues, then we used bank drafts, and then we won dues checkoff, and then we won a Union Shop with Fair Share. We were so successful that the US Supreme Court had to step in with the infamous “Harris v Quinn” case and wipe out Fair Share for homecare workers and childcare providers. And then later, they did the same to public employees with the infamous “Janus” decision. Luckily, we still had the internal culture and capacity to signup a supermajority of the homecare and childcare providers after the HvQ decision and we need to use this capacity with other low-wage workers. While none of this will be easy, we must again find a way to allow fastfood workers to pay dues and become union members – either with bank drafts, credit cards, cell phones, checkoff, or any other way we can secure dues deduction and allow workers to pay their dues and become union members. Most of the strong labor organizations began this way; from the UFW to the UAW, to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to the public employee and teachers unions today, as well as the homecare and childcare unions – until they were strong enough to demand and win a union shop. We need to reclaim and remember our history and do it again.
We Ran Campaigns On the Job and Then Area-Wide, City-Wide, and Nationally
We need to run campaigns on the job to raise wages and benefits for low-wage workers. We were able to do it in the early days of SEIU 880, we need to do that again with fastfood workers joining and becoming active in campaigns.
We Need to Identify Leaders and Train and Build Members and Leaders
Where there are members, you will find leaders by getting folks together to decide on what campaigns they want to engage in and move members through direct actions in their own organization to win what they want. Small issues at first and then larger issues, but I believe that the movements today are showing us how we can win BIG issues as well.
We Took Direct Action to Win Our Campaigns
You seldom win serious campaigns without the threat of mass direct action, civil disobedience, and disruption. We’ve done it before and we need to do it again.
We Found and Engaged with Our Community and Labor Allies on Campaigns
We need to work with community allies in these campaigns. Without Chicago ACORN, Action Now, other community organizations and groups, other unions and labor organizations, and our allies in the Disability, Senior, and other movements, SEIU 880 and HCIIMK would not have won many of their most important campaigns. And without our organizing work on housing, senior issues, and many others, we will not succeed. We need to act like a union and do this again with fastfood and other workers and allies.
We Need to Get Involved in Independent Politics
We need to get involved in independent political action around campaigns and candidates for our members’ interests in order to win on the issues that are important to them.
If we can execute a similar plan for Fastfood workers, we can build a union for fastfood and other low-wage workers.
Summary of ULU Fastfood Organizing, Detroit, 1979-1983
February 22, 1980 - We won the Greyhound Burger King unit of 50+ workers by a vote of 25-23.
May 2, 1980 – We lost the election at three Kelly McDonald’s Franchise stores unit of 160+ workers by a vote of 46-104.
May 28, 1980 – We lost the election of 30+ workers at Corporate Burger King #768 by a vote of 21-1.
May 1981 – Rerun organizing drive of BK#768 (30+ in unit) - workers take over and seize the store, demand recognition, company refuses, we file for election and company sells to store to a “franchisee” who weeks before worked for the Burger King Corp HR Department – we file charges and lose.
1981-82 – 120+ mostly black women organize their three White Castle stores, sign up 70+% for the union, demand recognition from White Castle at regional offices, refused, file for election – election is held, ballots are impounded because of company unit appeals to the NLRB and courts, the White Castle Corporation loses appeals, and votes counted several years later. Union wins vote but since the union affiliated with SEIU and name is changed, the election is null and void.
1979-1983 – Many other drives attempted at Wendy’s, Corporate McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin’ Donuts, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, and other stores involving hundreds of workers.
Unemployed Organizing Drives – organized in Detroit, Boston, and other cities with ULU, ULO, and ACORN.
March 2, 1981 – The Fastfood Industry’s “Subminimum Wage” Defeated – this was one of the most significant national victories for the relatively tiny ULU and its allies at ACORN, and the National Center for Jobs and Justice (NCJJ). It began in 1981 with national campaign action kickoffs in Detroit, Boston, and other major cities in a campaign to raise the Minimum Wage and Defeat the Subminimum Wage for teenagers, nicknamed the “McDonald’s Amendment” by Congressional staff and reporters. The Minimum Wage increase failed several months later, but the McDonald’s Amendment was also defeated, delivering a huge blow to the fastfood industry’s attempt to lower the minimum wage for millions of workers. ULU, ACORN, and its allies in the National Center for Jobs and Justice (NCJJ) were credited by the Washington Post and others with helping to defeat the amendment.