Organising young workers: it can be done!

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/02/22/organising-young-workers-it-can-be-done

New Zealand union organiser Mike Treen and French union activist Axel Persson spoke on organising, unionising and fighting for the rights of — mostly young — workers in the fast food industry.

They were speaking at a No Sweat meeting in the University of London Union on Saturday 16 February.

Axel Persson

Union activism in the fast food industry first started up after a 2002 strike in McDonalds that lasted for over a year. About a year ago a few of us in the CGT union decided to do some serious union work in the industry. We decided that we needed at least one person in each restaurant if we were going to be successful. Given that no one was coming to the union by us leafleting outside, we decided to “colonise”, to send members in to work there.

I applied for a job at a Quick in Paris ; it is the biggest in France with over 150 workers. I needed to let people know that someone in the restaurant was a union member. Either I could try to talk to each and every worker (and of course I tried to talk to many people) or I could produce a bulletin to get out to everyone. The bulletin option proved to be the most useful tool, providing a backbone for the union.

The bulletin’s contents related to the working conditions of the restaurant; everyone could recognise what the bulletin was talking about — this was their working life. Facts about the inadequacy of the equipment, about a manager making a racist remark, about promises on wages being reneged on, and so on.

I produced this bulletin on my own initiative, but others in the union helped me to do it.

I started handing it out in front of the lockers, talking to people about what was in it. I also put it in each and every locker. The bulletin told the workers that the union would be operating in the workplace and if they wanted to discuss anything they could come to me.

Some of these workers had never met a union activist before, and maybe didn’t even know what purpose the union served. The first step then is to explain the role of the union, that it was there to stand up for the workers.

FULL story at link.