McDONALD’S workers planning to strike on May Day know that they have the fast-food behemoth rattled.

BFAWU general secretary Ronnie Draper

Last autumn’s strike was among the most successful actions taken by trade unions anywhere in the country that year, prompting McDonald’s to announce an end to using zero-hours contracts and to rush through the biggest pay rise its staff had seen in 10 years in January.

The result was especially impressive given bosses at the corporation — the largest private-sector employer on Earth — had dismissed the strike as a minor dispute at two individual stores involving just a handful of employees, as well as denying that it had anything to do with pay or union recognition.

May Day’s strike will be bigger — both branches that saw action last September, at Crayford and Cambridge, are set to strike again while workers at a Manchester store and two in Watford — home town of McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook — will be joining them. 

Another London store is also balloting over action, I’m told by Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) leader Ronnie Draper, who will celebrate his birthday, which he shares with International Workers’ Day, on the picket lines.

But given last year’s action was a success, why do workers need to strike this time?

“Giving people a pay rise is OK if it’s big enough,” Draper retorts.
The rise offered in January brought staff over the age of 25 a rate of at least £8 an hour, a 5.3 per cent raise on previous rates, but it still falls well short of the living wage and the BFAWU demand of £10 an hour.

“Pay is still unacceptably low. We have members at McDonald’s who are literally homeless,” he says. “A member from Cambridge is sofa-surfing because he can’t afford anywhere to live.

“Contrast that with Steve Easterbrook on $15.4 million [£11m] a year.” His pay packet equates to an astonishing £5,700 an hour.

“And they say they offered workers contracts of employment” as opposed to flexible contracts. “Yes, that was a demand, but it depends what the contract says.

“Some workers have opted to keep the flexible contracts and McDonald’s has made a lot of this, but it’s because the permanent contracts offer no hope. If it just gives you eight hours a week, you can’t live on it and it can also say you can’t do overtime to people who have been piling on hours of overtime to make ends meet.

“But it’s not just about pay. It’s about union recognition. Workers at these stores know that they need someone to go in with the capability to fight their corner against management and that’s the union.

“They say it’s only a small number of people involved, but it’s so much more than that.

“Where action is taking place we have an overwhelming mandate — a 95.2 per cent ballot for strikes.

“Yeah, against a company the size of McDonald’s action at a small number of outlets might seem small, but I look at it as like a wasp sting. 

“Even one wasp sting is a pain and the stings are multiplying.”

McDonald’s bosses are still unwilling to talk to the union, refusing to meet Draper and TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady when they took a letter requesting a meeting to the firm’s London HQ during Heart Unions Week, but support has come from some unexpected quarters.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon promised Draper she would write to McDonald’s urging it to enter talks and O’Grady and Draper have also invoked aid from the Archbishop of Canterbury, pointing to his stated support for Catholic social teaching around the need to work with unions.

“Our campaign is growing. Years ago I told you it was like a ‘pebble in the pool,’ with ripples spreading every time we demonstrated at a workplace.

“More people are joining the union on a daily basis. We’ve recruited another three organisers specifically to work the fast-food sector, all taken on since the September strike.

“Our union has caught the zeitgeist — there’s a whole world of insecure work on crap wages that the McStrikers are speaking to.

“You have employers like 2 Sisters closing factories on a whim. And we need legislation as well as industrial might in the workplace to turn that round.

“Theresa May talked about being the party of the workers — that’s bollocks when they brought in the Trade Union Act to stop workers fighting back, the employment tribunal fees to stop workers making representations when they were treated badly. 

“The so-called living wage is a joke, far below the real living wage as defined by the Living Wage Foundation and with no protective legislation to ensure that, when it is introduced, management can’t take away benefits — time-and-a-half for overtime or on Sundays, for instance — which can leave workers worse off than they were before when the pay was determined by collective agreements negotiated with management by unions.”

Despite that, Draper is confident that the movement is in a better place than it was for many years.

“We have a very strong relationship with Labour — we were the first to nominate Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership. 

“There were difficult times under Tony Blair. People didn’t see any distinction between what Labour did and what the Tories did. It was tough to have people in your own party stabbing you in the back.

“Now we have a leader who stands up for us, not as a publicity stunt but on principle. And our policies are being adopted across the movement. We were the first to declare we needed £10 an hour, the abolition of zero-hours contracts and now they’re TUC policy, General Federation of Trade Unions policy, Labour policy.

“These strikes can be a game-changer for the movement. If we can move McDonald’s, if Unite can win against TGI Friday’s, we’re scoring victories within the most anti-union sector there is.

“There’s huge public support for what we’re doing. McDonald’s says hardly anyone was taking strike action in September and they’ll say the same on May Day.

“But that strike day, two stores walked out and we had protests outside another 30. Lots of those protesters were members of other trade unions or other campaigns. 

“There might only be a handful of McStrikers, but look how many people they inspire. Lots of the victories of our movement began with a small number of people who stuck their necks out — the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the suffragettes. 

“Everyone is looking to us now.”

Ronnie Draper is general secretary of the BFAWU and Ben Chacko edits the Morning Star.