Witness Statement - Daniel Cantor

name: Daniel Cantor

section: Employment

for: The Defence

experience: Union Organising Director

summary:

The witness recounts the vehement opposition and strategies that were encountered in the Detroit area when trying to establish a union prescence in McDonald's.

The material resources of a huge multinational corporation were brought to bear in a most antagonistic fashion against a small group of young workers. I don't believe that McDonald's can feel at all proud of their behaviour in Detroit in 1980.

cv:

My name is Daniel Cantor.

In 1980, I was the organizing director for the Detroit Fastfood Workers Union, Local 222,.

Full cv:
(not available for this witness)

full statement:

I am writing to relate my experiences in trying to organize employees of several McDonald's franchises in Detroit. Although this occurred some thirteen years ago, it is still vivid in my mind.

There were several dozen McDonald's franchises in the metropolitan Detroit area. In early winter 1980, following on the success we had organizing the workers at a downtown Burger King, we began talking with employees at about fifteen different McDonald's restaurants. There was great interest from many workers, as the basic wage in the fastfood industry is minimum wage, and McDonald's was no different.

Several employee committees were formed at McDonald's franchises around the city. One particular franchisee - Ralph Kelly - owned three McDonald's restaurants in which the employees wanted to form a union. Within a short period of time (perhaps 8 weeks), some 65% of the workers had signed union "authorization" cards (the first step in winning union representation). We were quite excited about this show of support, and soon filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. I should say that we were a young and, in retrospect, quite naive group of organizers, for we were not prepared for the enormous hostility that the company was about to demonstrate, nor the unethical (and in some cases, illegal) acts that McDonald's would soon be engaged in.

The first thing that McDonald's did was to challenge our right to have an election, but the Labor Board ruled in our favour. They wanted to wear down the enthusiasm of the union supporters, and find out who the ringleaders were. The reader should know that nearly all of the employees were young (16-19 years old) black people. Some were from strong union households (often the children of autoworkers), while others were quite poor, and relied upon the wages earned at McDonald's, however meager, to supplement family income.

McDonald's strategy against the union had two basic prongs. First, identify and isolate the "troublemakers" who were leading the union drive and, second, develop programs that would increase employee support for management.

In the first case, they fired a couple of outspoken pro-union workers (Donald Hughes and Wendell Jones), and especially tried to isolate and undermine the efforts of a young black women named Stephanie Douglas (she was a star worker, and couldn't be fired, so they changed her shift and otherwise reduced her ability to talk with her co-workers). Hughes (and, I think Jones) eventually won back pay from the company after filing a charge with the National Labor Relations Board that they had been illegally fired. I also recall that other NLRB charges against the company were upheld, and that McDonald's was instructed by the NLRB to post an official election guidelines that included a promise not to interfere further with employees' rights.
If that was the stick, the carrot was the contests, and celebrations and parties designed to show the workers that "Mickey D's" really was a great employer, and that the workers would certainly suffer the loss of these sorts of special benefits if they voted for the union. Most prominent in memory was "McHappy Day," which occurred just a few days before the election, at which time a very famous professional football star named Earl Campbell was brought in by management to give a pep talk about why it was unnecessary to have a union. (Campbell's own union - the National Football Players Association - lambasted him publicly for doing so).

Campbell's visit astonished many workers, but no more so than the "disco" sponsored by the company one (or perhaps two) nights before the election. All of the workers eligible to vote (approx. 150) were bused to the disco, and I'm pretty sure (though not absolutely) that those who missed shifts because of their attendance at the disco were paid as if they had worked. To substitute for these absent workers, other McDonald's restaurants assigned some of their own employees from unaffected franchises (that is, not owned by Kelly and thus not eligible to vote) to work at the three Kelly franchises., It was well understood by the workers that the only reason for such attention was the upcoming union election.

In the end, the two-pronged strategy produced a victory for the company. Our supporters could not hold on to their co-workers in the face of constant meetings with management, inducements, and fear. The union support went from having two-thirds signed up on cards to receiving just one-third in the election. The company won a grand victory, in their eyes, but not without having had to break the law at least a few times, and more importantly, having repeatedly broken the spirit of fair play that is supposed to obtain in American industrial relations.

There are other stories from other McDonald's, but they are not quite so vivid and in any case would just repeat the basic outlines of what I've written.

Let me state in closing that I am willing to testify for the defence to the facts outlined in the above statement.

date signed: 27th October 1993

status: Read out in court
references: Not applicable/ available

exhibits: Not applicable/ available

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