Burger King O Muerte!
Would ya like fries with that?” the young woman behind the counter asks the bloke in an Atlas Concrete T-shirt who’s ordered two double whoppers and a cheeseburger. It’s a glassy autumn afternoon at Burger King Papatoetoe: the stock line will be asked a hundred times here today, thousands more across New Zealand’s 63 Burger King outlets (a total, incidentally, that places us amongst the Top 10 Burger Kingdoms in the world).
Kathryn Tucker, 31, sits inside a booth, under the famous photo of James Dean mooching along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, waiting for a minute with a worker. A representative of Unite, New Zealand’s fastest-growing, most militant union, Tucker comes from a staunch Labour family and still feels the sting of the Rogernomics betrayal of the 1980s. She remembers watching the 1984 election on television with her father. “I remember it cos we were winning,” she says. “Cos we won. We didn’t know about Roger Douglas. We didn’t know what was about to happen.”
Last month, Tucker signed up 340 Village Sky-City workers — 90 percent of the workforce — almost single-handedly. Over the next few weeks, she and a small army of Unite volunteers, plan to visit every BK in the country to recruit willing workers to the cause. Today is something of a trial run she says. “We’re starting with the smallest of the big chains and then we’re gonna hit KFC and McDonalds.” Unite could be the first postmodern union she says, smiling. “We dream of one day sending out a text to our members saying ‘Picket @ Maccas. Queen St. B there!’”
Yesterday, Kathy signed 14 of Papatoetoe’s 45 workers, but today’s she’s encountered most of the same crew. “There’s just a couple you haven’t seen,” says Peter Foggin, the store’s affable manager. He brings out Tilisa, a young Samoan woman with enormous brown eyes, and graciously hands Kathy with a complimentary cup of coffee Tucker starts her pitch. “At the moment you’re on an individual contract?”
Tilisa nods.
“We want to replace this with a collective agreement that offers a better deal for the workers,” Tucker says. “We want an increase to the basic rate.”
Burger King workers are paid only $9.10 an hour — 10c above the minimum wage — and the company pays its teenage workers (roughly half the 2000-strong New Zealand workforce) youth rates, $7.30 an hour. “We want to get rid of youth rates,” Kathy says. “Equal pay for equal work.”
Last month Unite’s Kathy Tucker signed up 340 Village Sky-City workers — 90% of the total workforce — virtually single-handed.
Common complaints among workers include the arcane rostering process, the lack of notice before shifts, and the fact they can be sent home just two hours into a four-hour shift if the store’s not busy. Tucker knows first-hand the frustation: she worked for five years as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. “We were all part-timers,” she says, “and we all wanted more hours.”
Tilisa, though, is a little different. After listening politely to Kathryn, she explains that she works just a single six-hour shift per week. She already has a full-time job and is a member of another union, the National Distribution Thanks, she says, but no thanks.
Across town at Unite’s head office, in the Trades Hall bunker on Great North Rd, Unite’s director Matt McCarten briefs 19 volunteers. Suit jacket off, wearing a cream Yves St Laurent shirt and a dark solid tie, he rallies the faithful with invocations of Labour’s perfidy in 1984, what he calls “Year Zero” for the New Zealand worker.
They’re an interesting bunch: there are several Socialist stalwarts here, gruff battlers with unruly hair and cockney accents, dressed in fishing jackets with ample pockets for their subversive leaflets. Then there are the anarchists in their black coats, army pants, Palestinian scarves. They buzz as Mike Treen, McCarten’s lieutenant, tells them of his muddling efforts to sell Unite to a Korean worker. “I drew an imaginary headband over my head,” Treen laughs, “pulled it tight, then thrust a clenched fist in the air.” Inspired, the Korean worker roared, raised his fist in the air, then grabbed a pen from Treen and signed up in the spot. “The language of the worker is international,” Treen chuckles.
This fires up one old socialist, tired of waiting for the revolution, who clamours for a strike that’ll break the American imperialist Burger Kings.
Matt McCarten: “You see the future of capitalism is not production, it’s the brand. What the bosses protect is not production, it’s the brand. They don’t want the brand sullied. So I don’t strike — I go for the brand.”
McCarten admires the old man’s spirit, but is less combative. “The bosses always ask me: ‘Are you gonna go out on strike?’” McCarten says. “My answer is always ‘No. Not unless we have to.’
“You see the future of capitalism is not production, it’s the brand. What the bosses don’t want is brand sullied. So I don’t strike, I go for the brand.”
The old guys aren’t convinced. McCarten steps up the rhetoric. “There are 400,000 people in this country on less than $10 an hour. You have the fucking Business Roundtable whinging about the minimum wage being too high — Christ, they should go across to Australia where it’s AU$13 an hour.”
The facts, he says, are simple. “In real terms, Burger King workers are earning little more than half what they got in 1984. I tell the kids that if you got paid what your parents were earning, you’d be on $16–17 an hour. That gets their attention.”
McCarten: “There’s a view that these kids are all Rogernomes who are just out for themselves. Look…. that’s bullshit. What’s happened is that these kids have been force-fed all this corporate jargon. They’re constantly being told that they’re all part of a team. And so they see very quickly that if they stick together as team they’ll all be better off.”
Not only do they no longer get penal rates, but laundry and uniform allowances, once standard in the industry, have gone. And breaks have been cut . “You’re dealing with a generation that has no understanding that this is not normal,” he continues. “It’s gonna take years to turn this back.”
Once the meeting has finished, McCarten and Treen stand out on the balcony surveying the People’s Republic of Grey Lynn. “There’s a view that these kids are all Rogernomes who are just out for themselves,” McCarten says. “Look that’s bullshit. What’s happened is that these kids have been force-fed all this corporate jargon. They’re constantly being told that they’re all part of a team. And so they see very quickly that if they stick together as team they’ll all be better off.
“What I’ve found quite exciting is that the workers start off very timid. Then they say ‘Hey this isn’t fair, That’s not right. C’mon. Let’s strike!’
“The crew have come to understand their power.”
“The workers are so far down the food chain they know they’re being screwed,” says Treen. “They go from one shit job to another. There’s a sense of ‘give it a go’ at least. They’ve got nothing to lose.”
“But their chains.” McCarten murmurs.
Unite’s ultimate objective is a multi-party agreement across all the fast-food chains. But to do that, they need numbers. According to McCarten, the union has been signing up 100 workers a week, and he hopes to have 5000 by the end of the year.
At the Takanini Burger King, however, Tucker is having little success.
Today is too busy, says the manager, a flustered thirtysomething Indian man. Come back at four-thirty. At four-thirty, he tells Tucker to come back at five. It’s still too busy, the manager says, even though the restaurant is mostly empty, just a group of working men in league jerseys and gumboots. Tucker smiles, politely says she will wait. “Perhaps he hasn’t read the memo from Glenn Corbett (BK’s general manager) advising the managers to facilitate our visit,” she wonders.
Eventually, during the change of shift, Tucker grabs Tracey, 16. “Are you on youth rates?” Kathy asks. “Yeah,” says Tracey. “They kinda suck.” Tucker asks if she’s on an individual contract. “I dunno. Didn’t really read it. I didn’t understand it. I was just told I had to sign it.”
“Would you like to join us?” Kathy asks.
“Oh yeah,” says Tracey. “Why not?”
Tucker is relieved. Next, she talks to Victoria, who seems the same age as Tracey. “We don’t think youth rates are fair,” Tucker says.
Victoria grins and gives the thumbs up. “Yeah,” she says, enthusiastically. It turns out she herself is not on youth rates — she is older than she looks — but she sympathises with her younger colleagues. “They do the same work we do,” she says. “They should be paid the same.”
“So you’d like to join us?”
“Yeah, sweet! You want my cellphone number as well?”
First published in Metro, June 2005. All photos copyright of the Unite Union.
