I'm not on the menu: McDonald's workers strike against sex harassment

September 19, 2018 10:26 AM

The Guardian: Workers at McDonald’s restaurants in 10 cities [across the United States] walked off the job on Tuesday to demand that the company address sexual abuse and harassment....Organizers said this was the first nationwide strike ever called specifically to protest sexual harassment. According to a 2016 survey, at least 40% of American women in the fast food industry have been sexually harassed on the job, and 20% of these women experienced retaliation from supervisors after reporting the harassment--higher for women of colour. In May 2018, the national US labour organization Fight For $15 backed ten women from different American cities who filed a federal suit against McDonald's for failing to respond to harassment or retaliating after a harassment complaint.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl (11 comments total)

What’s next for #MeToo? The McDonald’s strikes have an answer

That McDonald’s workers are fighting against sexual harassment isn’t surprising. A 2016 survey of fast-food workers showed that 40 percent reported being sexually harassed, and 42 percent of those who experienced harassment felt keeping their jobs required they accept the behavior. Of those who did report it, more than one in five said they were retaliated against for doing so.
...
We live in a world where sexual harassment is, for the average person, very common. As Saru Jayaraman, president of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit workers’ center that organizes around sexual harassment in the food service industry, told me, many restaurant workers don’t even consider that the behaviors they experience at work are sexual harassment or that they have protections against such behaviors.

It's weird to me now that the generation of parents who's teenage kids now work at fast food restaurants would have had those jobs when they were teenagers don't seem to make the connection between what work and bosses were like for them and what it is still like for their kids.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:00 AM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's weird to me now that the generation of parents who's teenage kids now work at fast food restaurants would have had those jobs when they were teenagers don't seem to make the connection between what work and bosses were like for them and what it is still like for their kids.

Since "do you want fries with that?" is the ultimate cliche diss (see also: flippin' burgers) from parents to kids when it comes to choosing/not choosing certain kinds of careers, I disagree with this premise. If the parents had life experience working that kind of job, they wouldn't use it as a threat against being an artist or whatever.

I've mentioned this in other threads, but almost the entirety of the McD directors layer is naturalized US citizens. That's because while white parents where yelling "do you wants fries with that??????" at their kids, kids fresh into the country had to get whatever job they could get. 20 years later some of them stuck around long enough to run McDonalds.

Anyway, my main point is: These aren't the kids of white suburbanites getting abused. It's recent immigrates who will do whatever (and put up with whatever) to put food on the table. That those groups have been taken advantage of in way the article describes since time immemorial.
posted by sideshow at 11:18 AM on September 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

It's weird to me now that the generation of parents who's teenage kids now work at fast food restaurants would have had those jobs when they were teenagers don't seem to make the connection between what work and bosses were like for them and what it is still like for their kids.

There's also this strange trend of conservative-identified, older, almost-exclusively-white women who side with harassers because of arguments like "I had to put up with this, so you should too / you're all a bunch of whiners / etc", as if facing harassment is some kind of "paying your dues" test for womanhood.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:34 AM on September 19, 2018 [12 favorites]

It's framing harassment/abuse as a rite of passage, to make their own history less appalling.

(Victims and predators do this).
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:00 PM on September 19, 2018 [19 favorites]

Hmmm, I am of the generation you are talking about, Space Cowboy. I worked at McDonalds as a teen and am of an age to have children working jobs like that now (though I am childless). When I think back on my days working at McDonalds and whether I was harassed there, nothing like that stands out to me. Not that I didn't experience things there which I now might call sexual harassment, and not I didn't find the job awful. But I swam in a sea of harassment of all types, and my job was no worse than any other place. And also, the sexual components of the harassment didn't stand out; it was just a more confusing kind of bullying. I agree with the quote about sexual harassment being very common for the average person.

McDonald's was very structured; I would have expected them to have processes in place to protect against workplace sexual harassment even in 1984, though I don't know how they could have protected me from the things following me from the high school and I wouldn't have thought to ask them to even try. I already knew that authority figures didn't want to hear about Lord of the Flies stuff.

Anyways, if I had a kid who wanted to work at McDonalds I would let them. But I'd believe them if they told me they'd experienced harassment (there or anywhere), and I'd encourage them not to stay in a bad situation. I don't have any idea what else I could even do about it as a parent. I am glad I am not a parent confronting my kid's terrible job situations.
posted by elizilla at 12:19 PM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also my own parents had this highfalutin' notion that they went on about whenever I complained, that my time at McDonalds would give me sympathy for the working poor, etc, and maybe it is true and it did. But it also gave me exposure to a lot of people who despised their peers and are probably wearing MAGA hats right now, even if they are still in food service.
posted by elizilla at 12:28 PM on September 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

If I've missed it, I'd appreciate someone pointing me to it: do any of these surveys break down "harassment on the job" into "harassment from other employees" and "harassment from customers" categories? Neither should be acceptable, of course, but it would seem to require different sets of actions to address both types of harassment -- and in my experience, harassment seemed much more common from customers than from co-workers or management.
posted by halation at 12:38 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

This survey is for the restaurant industry as a whole—it breaks down into types of harassment (ie from customers, colleagues, managers).
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:14 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Well, you can count me as part of that depressing statistic. When I was working fast food I was so grateful that at least I spent most of my time behind the service counter where I couldn't easily be physically touched. Things are even worse for regular restaurant wait staff.

Our boss prioritized money over our well-being, so the most he ever did was tell one particular repeat offender that he couldn't just come in and hang around in the shop (to verbally sexually harass us) he needed to buy something.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 4:15 PM on September 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Historic McDonald's Strike Brings Anti-Harassment Fight to the Picket Line (Truth Out)
posted by The Whelk at 8:49 AM on September 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's a great article, The Whelk. Good explanations of the legal battle (esp for non Americans like me). I'm sad that Trump's NLRB is undoing the steps toward labour justice that Obama's NLRB had started.

Despite the fact that McDonald’s has been dealing with sexual harassment complaints for years, Carlson told Truthout that the company could easily do more if it really wanted to.

“When they have a problem with bad lettuce going to their stores, they fix it,” said Carlson. “So they can certainly fix their approach to sexual harassment.”
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:48 PM on September 20, 2018