Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity
After more than three years battling management, the Burgerville Workers Union reached an agreement in December, becoming the first fast food labor union in the nation to ever do so. Employees from five stores with federal union recognition — the convention center, Montavilla, Hawthorne, Gladstone and Southeast 92nd Avenue and Powell locations — voted to ratify. Of the 75% of workers who voted, 92% of them voted in favor of unionizing.
The fraught push for a union was a protracted battle involving numerous strikes, public actions and federal mediators.
Signed in December, the agreement outlined requirements for salaries, paid vacation, paid parental leave, just cause protections and formalized already established union wins including free employee shift meals, paid holidays, wage raises and tipping. Many of their wins have been extended to all branches of the company.
In light of the historic labor movement sweeping Starbucks branches across the country, and other workplaces following suit, Street Roots sat down to talk with Mark Medina. Medina, a former Burgerville grill cook now employed as a labor organizer for the Burgerville Workers Union discusses the success of the BWU becoming the first fast food restaurant union and why it matters.
Piper McDaniel: You’ve finally reached a bargaining agreement?
Mark Medina: We are the only fast food workers union contract in the United States at the current moment. We negotiated that over the course of three and a half years and 51 bargaining sessions.
McDaniel: Can you talk about that? Why is that important?
Medina: It’s particularly important because this is a nearly completely unorganized industry. We want to increase the general standards that are expected of this industry and make this an industry (where) workers can have dignity, can have decent quality lives and expect that other employers will provide that. Because it’s nonunion, there is no human standard. And we have a good beginning, a first starting point, how we can build that unique standard for fast food.
McDaniel: Can you talk about the conditions you want to change? What sort of challenges or obstacles do workers face in the fast food industry?
Medina: One of them is the inconsistency of hours and not knowing what your schedule is going to be in advance. If you don’t know long in advance what your hours are, what days you’re working, it’s hard to plan — to have a second job, if you have a second job, or if you have children, or family or people that you care for, or just have a dignified life. That’s an important thing that needs to change is this, you know, being available for your employer 24/7.
Another one would be protections for undocumented workers. Food service has a significant portion of undocumented workers and those workers need respect, need security. There are people who depend on them. It’s a community that is often demonized, and it’s one that we need as a labor movement.
Another one — the glaring and obvious (one) that people know — is the lack of respect reflected in worker pay. This job is a difficult one. When the pandemic started, we saw the necessity of food service workers. When a CEO, you know, stopped working it didn’t affect the economy. If food service workers stop, that really does have a huge impact on everyone. And we all saw that at the start of the pandemic. Workers need to live dignified lives and that means dignified paychecks. A living wage, particularly for those who live in cities.
Maternity care is also important. There’s a whole host of other issues that need to be addressed. But I think the issues of scheduling issues, of pay issues, of intersectional solidarity with everyone in the working classes, including undocumented workers.
When employers have 100% of the say, they build an industry that offers nothing for everyone. When workers have a say, we can build an industry that looks more into addressing issues that workers need addressed.
"We went out and sought to organize workers and not wait for politicians to change the law, and not wait for organizations to decree it from above. We wanted to do it ourselves. Now we did."
- Mark Medina, labor organizer for the Burgerville Workers Union
McDaniel: What changes in pay rate will there be?
Medina: We got a commitment from the company that the pay will go up over the course of the contract up to $15 an hour, which is the goal. Currently it does go above the state minimum, which I think currently is around $14. Over the course of the contract it will go up to $15 and then be pegged to inflation, at which point we will be negotiating a new contract. We specifically wanted a short contract (so) that we could go back to the bargaining table, reassess what more we needed.
McDaniel: What happened with tipping?
Medina: We secured tipping for the union locations. The average take home pay per worker is between $21 and $25 an hour with tips. That is, of course, a sizable increase from what it was before when the company had refused the notion completely.
McDaniel: Can you speak to the difference that it made for people when they started receiving tips and their income rose to between $21 to $25 an hour? What did that mean for their lives?
Medina: Oh, enormous. Incredibly substantial. You know, when I first started at Burgerville, we had coworkers who slept in their cars at night. I knew coworkers who lived from time to time in parking lots and came to work the next day and took showers at a local gym.
And the workers might work two, three jobs. These are real people. I personally had several workers in my apartment for, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple months, because of the poverty of this situation.
It was a coworker who I have, who had to give up her son for adoption due to the poverty situation. It was a pretty disastrous and terrible situation. I remember crying with her at three in the morning in my garage as she made the most difficult decision she’ll ever make. And those are the kinds of situations that were common, and are still common, in the food industry.
You don’t realize that the people that are serving your food are oftentimes dealing with very, very real struggles like that. That’s the reality of the real world, you just don’t see that when you have that interaction with them. Thankfully, as a result of this contract, that story is less prevalent. I hear fewer and fewer workers need two jobs, two incomes. Fewer workers need to struggle that way. And I think that’s a real enormous positive.
McDaniel: How did it come about that employees made the decision to unionize?
Medina: There’s a certain way that people view ... change happening. They have this perception that, you know, a worker will look at their paycheck and see how low it is. And they’ll turn to their co-worker, and (someone) will say union, like nod their head, and then an organizing effort will come as a result of that.
The reality is people who have really been in terrible conditions just kind of suffer through that in silence, and then go on to the next job that will continue to mistreat them and continue to underpay them.
Pretty much how it started is that we, a bunch of like, poor workers, decided that we wanted to see a change in the world, and we wanted to be a part of it. And we went out and sought to organize workers and not wait for politicians to change the law, and not wait for organizations to decree it from above. We wanted to do it ourselves. Now we did.
McDaniel: What was the response?
Medina: Workers were ecstatic about organizing a union. And by April of 2016 we went public at four locations, and then two weeks later at a fifth location. I think almost immediately within the first week, we had well over 80% support for unionization at all these locations. And we went from there.
We’ve since gone on strike seven times for this first contract. We’ve had well over 100 workers out on strike for over four days. And that was important in getting us to concessions.
McDaniel: I’m wondering if there are any stories about how employers can push back?
Medina: Oh, absolutely. The contract is ratified, so we can say whatever we want.
So the most common things that employers will do is what the company did, and what everyone does, which is: as soon as we went public, the company sent out letters to everyone saying not to join the union, (that) it ruins the family that we have here, the relationship that you have here with workers.
And then came targeted attempts at letting off steam. At the end of 2016, the year that we went public with our union campaign, they gave everyone a 60 cent raise across the board to all workers. This is a company that’s kind of releasing steam and workers’ interest in organizing. ‘We give them this pay increase and we tell them, it’s because we’re still magnanimous. Hopefully that will, you know, let off some steam.’
What it did, thankfully, (was tell) workers, ‘hey, if they had it in mind to give it to you now, they had this money to give last month.’ If anything, it just made workers think ‘we can get more when we file for election.’ I think that the main thing that we would see is, after the first election, more and more intentional misleading of workers. Lying about what a union would mean, saying you wouldn’t be able to talk directly to managers about your concerns, the union would have to have to do that, making all sorts of bad faith interpretations of contract language to try to scare workers, bringing up the notion of union dues — which by the way, we still don’t have. And all sorts of just misrepresentations.
During the elections, the anti-union (efforts) escalated. By the time we got to the convention center location election, our fifth location, the company had hired threatening security to stand in front of the only entryway to the ballot box in the back. After 90% of workers signed a petition for union representation, the company the next day disciplined 90% of the workers at that location for completely innocuous reasons and attempted to fire a pregnant mother who was days away from going on maternity leave. And these things were common, I think. I mean, they were more prevalent after the third election. And by the time we got to the fifth election, the company really did not want the union to spread further.
McDaniel: You’re part of this landmark movement in an industry that’s traditionally very undervalued. In the larger sense, why does this matter? And what does it mean?
Medina: I, of course, think unions are very important and should be a more important fixture in our society. I think it’s why we see so much class division and so much needless political strife. There’s reasons to disagree, but there isn’t as many as people think.
And when you see workers with allegedly different political backgrounds on the same picket line, different racial and ethnic and (gender) backgrounds on the same picket line, fighting for one another, and believing in the solidarity of one another, it is a beautiful thing. I think that’s really kind of enshrined in union organizing in the workplace. I think people’s lives and politics are transformed as a result of that solidarity. I think that’s an incredible thing. An incredible thing that’s been lost in the last couple decades because of the sharp decline in unionization.
How we’re going to get to a better footing as a society is bringing those ideals of solidarity. Not in a theoretical sense, but in a practical sense, in the workplace, in our communities. Workers, particularly in food service, have this perception of themselves that’s negative. And because of that there’s a lot of self-hatred.
Martin Luther King Jr. said all work has dignity. Burgerville workers tell me that, for the first time in their entire life, they were proud of the work done. And I think that kind of experience only happens when you, and your co-workers, and people in your class, truly have destiny in their hands. I think it was a beautiful thing to see this happen. I want to see it more. I think that we workers need to have a lot more pride and a lot more power. And I’m glad to see a link in the chain to help that happen.