It could happen here. It's the show where we hate McDonald's. I'm your host, be a long professional McDonald's haater, and with me to talk about hating McDonald's is Mira, who's a freelance journalist. And you need an organizer. Miro, Welcome to the show.
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, so okay, So specifically, there are lots of the hating McDonald's is like an ancient anarchist tradition. I think I'm actually not sure how well it is known today, but I'm about eighty percent sure that the tradition of breaking Starbucks windows was actually originally like a it was actually originally a thing about breaking like it came from like a bunch of campaigns. I think it definitely in France.
I think also in Mexico that like anytime a Starbucks, Starbucks, Jesus Christ, anytiving McDonald's would open up, everyone would immediately start breaking the windows.
That's the only proper way to handle on McDonald's. And yeah, professional opinion.
But the reason we're talking about McDonald's is that, Yeah, you tried to organize a McDonald's union, which is I guess the other thing you could do with the McDonald's other than lighting it on fire, which is it you could? Oh, I guess, I guess there are those people in France who took it over and turned it into like a food co op or something.
But a third thing you can do with.
It, discovered a third A third thing to do with the McDonald's. Let's get the towers. Yeah, but uh, yeah, I wanted to talk about I guess what you know, Okay, I wanted to use Yeah, so you you've written a very good piece about this in strange matters, uh called my Mcunion that is really good, and I wanted to talk about sort of the piece, the sort of nitty gritty aspect of like what it's like to organize a union, and also just about McDonald's because Jesus Christ, good Lord, no, I.
Have so much to talk about, so more than happy too.
Yeah, So I guess, okay, I think I think we should start with just the sort of McDonald's miss of it all. I wanted to start with just talking a bit about what it's actually like to work on a McDonald's because I, well, okay, a, I feel like it's not actually universal experience anymore for like people who have worked at a fast food restaurant and b I think people who it's it's a thing you blought out of
your collective memory very quickly because it sucked. But yeah, yeah, okay, so what is it actually like when you show up to your shift.
So McDonald's was my first job, and it was a hell of an introduction. Yes, the moment you would come in, you would be most days bombarded with constant orders on the screen because they had these little screens both in the front and back drill area that like showed all the orders they had. And like a good sixty seventy percent of the time I came in, people would just be swamped with orders. They'd be running around being like, oh, thank god you hear. We need someone to get on
right now. And it's like you don't even get a moment to breathe. Like, as you're standing there waiting to clock in on their punching machine, you're just like, oh,
dear God, I'm gonna have a fucking terrible time. And as you're running around, you know, cooking everything after you clock in, you're getting streamed at by your bosses right by you because they're like, oh no, a customer complained because there was too many pickles on their sandwich, And then you'll hear someone yelling from the drive through window on top of that, and then you might have people at the front counter. This was before proven, so McDonald's
still had front counters when people would come in. I don't know if every McDonald's does, but everyone I've been to since has just closed down internally. And I envied that. But you would have people yelling from there, and if you were one of the unfortunate souls who ended up working directly facing the customers and not just cooking, you would be the one getting screamed at by all parties involved.
I later worked at a Windy's where I got a taste of that, and I walked out three days into March.
Yeah.
Stuff sucks.
Yeah, And I think that, you know, I think like one of the things I think like compounds this is, you know, okay, I will, I will, I will, I will do a theory, which is that I think people have a really weird understanding of what it means to have a job on a sort of theoretical level that dates back to a genuinely, very weird period in the
twentieth century where people actually had like stable hours. Yeah, and that's just not how any of this works, right, Like you know, you like, there is no actual stable amount of hours. You just get you get some number of hours like a week that you're assigned to. But then you know, but this these least to do a thing that we've out god like, like literally every single field we've talked about unidizing has this problem, which is just understaffing, because why the fuck would you have enough
people to do a job? Would you could have less than enough people to do a job and pave them less.
That That was my experience on McDonald and fast food in general. You would get such inconsistent numbers of hours that you wouldn't know how much money you'd be making in the month, because, for all you know, this month, you could be working you know, every regular day, every business day of the week. You could be working only weekends, or you could be like I was after the union got busted spoiler alert, uh, working three hours on Sundays in the mornings. And that's it if they really wanted to.
And there's nothing that outside of a union you can do to prevent them from and outside of you know niche legal areas where you can maybe push back, you can't really do much if they decide just not to staff you. And there is people working there who they had like full blown kids, families relying on them in that job. They weren't making much Pennsylvania, butimum wage was
seven twenty five and you know they were paying us that. Yeah, and so from what little they could get, they would maybe get like at best a one hundred bucks a week with their hours, unless they were able to get into like a managerial position where it's the only one where you'd be kind of guaranteed ours in the sense that they desperately need you so they'll throw you on whatever. Beyond that, it's you also don't know the days you're going to work too. Yeah.
Yeah, This thing I was gonna ask is like, what, like how how much time do you have between finding out you're going to be on a shift and then like being on the shift.
You can have anywhere from several days notice to under twelve hours notice, And there is no way to predict what's going to happen the next week. Is it all depends on when you're going to get staffed. There were points I found out day out when I was going to be working.
Jesus Christ. Yeah yeah, and like this, I mean, this is the thing that like is becoming. This is the way that labor used to work in like the eighteen hundreds, and then you know, it was just sort of like phased out because it turns out this is actually a stunningly inefficient way to actually like like run a business. But you know, we've reached the thing that happened at
the end of history. Is it's not the history ended, it's that like capital needing to be efficient end and now they just like do this shit and it's like, well, okay, so it doesn't matter if this is like a terribly an efficient way to run things. It's you just like it's it's it's it's a mechanism designed to just like absolutely destroyed like the sort of psyches and lives of the people who are doing the thing.
Yeah, that is completely accurate. They do not give a rat's ass about anyone working there. For a second. Everyone working there is completely expendable, even if they're a manager. There's been points people have worked there for like three four months and got promoted to a manager. There's everyone is expendable, and they they make sure you know that too, and how they treat you, You're not treated with any dignity,
with any respect. You're just completely thrown around at their whims and the whims of upper management, you know, the the regional managers and the like. And it's it's awful because how they get away with that model is they know there's always going to be some people who are desperate to work at McDonald's, either because they're young and need to get a first job, or they're down on their luck and need to get something to pay the bills.
I've even hitting hard times trying to reapply at McDonald's since working there because I needed to pay the bill. I was in that exact position again and fairly recently, and so it's it's not a fun place to be, to put it mildly, Yeah, of course they didn't let me work there again because I believe I'm banned from ever working at a McDonald's again.
That's a That's another thing that I think is not that well understood, like loss of companies just have basically not even like there are there are people that I know who are blacklisted, like from shit they did dream occupy like people like, yeah, like like that they're these these things, these things suck and if you like, you know, this is I guess one of the sort of issues of doing any kind of organizing is that like if you lose, like stuff can go like very badly for you,
which sucks. But also simultaneously, if you don't organize things we go very badly for you. So it's you know, so it's a double or yeah, yeah, I guess just one everything I wanted to ask, which I don't know, if you know do you do you know if you're if you're uh, if your McDonald's was a franchise, if it was like actually owned by the company.
So yes, it was a franchise. It wasn't don by like the official company in any major sense. I actually met the franchise owner during the course of the union, which was a fun time when we were in the process of getting busted. Oh boy.
Yeah, So do you want to explain what a franchise is? And I guess, like how that sort of model works.
Yeah, So most McDonald's out there are franchises, which basically means McDonald's will kind of let independent people buy out their stores and own and manage them in a certain region. For a portion of the profits in the Scranton area, which was where I did the union, they were all owned by one single family who was ultra rich, in part because of the McDonald's and in part because of family inheritances, and these folks they would be the kind of be treated as like the head Honchow's, the same
way that CEOs get talked about at most companies. They weren't the CEOs, of course, but like as far as in terms of managing greets, rant and area McDonald's went, they were the main ones in charge. Of course McDonald's corporate always have the final say over everything, but they manage tens of thousands of restaurants across the world, so they don't really get involved in any of the nitty gritty, which is why they kind of let people own these franchises.
Yeah, which I think is really interesting. It's like they've managed to somehow combine it like the worst aspects of working for a major corporation with the worst aspects of working for like a small business tyrant. Which it's interesting too because it's like, I don't know, this is like one of the weird things about McDonald because like McDonald's,
McDonald's Corporate doesn't make money from hamburgers. They're basically a real estate company that like sells franchises to people, but simultaneous. But that means that like they can do things, like they can force their franchises to do things that are like unprofitable because it doesn't matter to them, Like there's they're still getting paid, Like they're still getting paid there like licensing, like franchising fees or whatever, like no matter
what sort of like shit is happening there. Yeah, And that's I don't know, it's it strikes me. It's like a really interesting It strikes me as like the exact arrangement that's like the most likely to create a fascist, just like because like you know, you have a group of people like and I think I think it's a good agm with this. This is what like quote unquote
economic anxiety is. Is you have like a you have like you have a sort of middle level of like this, you know, the middle level of person who is a capitalist but is also getting squeezed from the top down like by a by larger corporations and then also is facing bought about pressure from workers, and so their solution to this is just like ruthlessly, like you know, just just like ruthlessly do a fascism against like everyone who's working for them.
Yeah, scratch a liberal and the fascist reads.
Yeah, it's a more.
True than McDonald's and fast food really than anywhere. Yeah, the mcfascists reign supreme. Ah.
So speaking of mcfascists, Uh, the products and services these are too. These are two distinct sentences. They are not related. Uh FCC please, actually, no, fuck you. The SCC doesn't well no, no, the SCC. The SCC does not regulate us. I think we're actually regulated by the FTC. So fuck the SEC. That's why I could swear on this podcast
because they don't recomplain us. And we're back. Okay. So, having having returned to more mcfascism, Yeah, okay, so I guess we should start talking about how the union organizing started and how I guess the sort of immediate mistake that y'all made attempting to get this, to get this off the ground.
Yeah, So it started with me. I was the first one there to bring up the concept of reunion because then I was like only seventeen, I was new to anarchism still, and so I was young, green, and eager to get shit done. I still am all the above, Yeah, but I had a few contacts to local IWW people through just the very very faint activist networks that were up there, and by faint, I mean a total of like five people. So I got in contact with the
IWW guy I believe. I used the name Mark. Yes, I used the name Mark in the article to protect his anonymity, so I'll just keep consistency. And Mark was the one who convinced me to take more major steps. He was the one who I talked to and got consultation about it, and he was the one who gave all that initial guidance. And there was a few friends of mine I had there there also, not really anarchists.
Most of them were just like your soci dems, but they were They were eager to get something done and help out, so you know, can't complain there. And it was like a small core group of us who all wanted to get involved and get this out and done. And we had never done anything like this before. Northeast Pennsylvania does have a strong history of unions there, but we were not part of that history initially, and so
it ended up going south unfortunately. Pretty it went well at first, but I think some of the main issues we had in hindsight doing things, especially now having more experience in organizing under my belt, in hindsight, we rushed things way too much. We were trying to get everyone
on board. We didn't do sufficient one on one conversations with people, We didn't do sufficient intel gathering, and we didn't we relied too much on our technical tools and left too much incriminating evidence that we trusted too many people with. We didn't really have a strong way of going about it that would have been better for what we were doing.
Yeah, and I guess this comes to one and I think of the main things that you're talking about here, and I think is one of the main things about you know, union organizing that like, like pretty much no matter who you talk to wright politically, the the things that are important to get a union to work are kind of similar, which is that, Yeah, Like it's usually
a very slow process. It's a process of building relationships, and it's a process of figuring out who in your work, well, who in your workplays people sort of trust and respect and like make friends with and figuring out how to sort of how to get them involved in how to get I don't know how how unions are not just sort of like abstract things like they're they're they're they're built of actuals, like social relationships that you have with another person and another and other gifts and in the
relationships that they have with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, Yeah, I wanted to ask about how, how okay, when when when you were sort of starting to do this right, how how were you sort of identifying the people you needed to talk to and what kinds of things were you doing to try to get them involved and try to like map out how the workplace functioned.
So the first people identify for people that I thought I could trust, and the core group of people I had were folk that in regards to the union, I in hindsight was able to trust. We all agreed on the same issues, and we all had the kind of a similar more gung ho attitude. I think me definitely the most out of everyone. We fell into a pitfall where I was kind of pushing the union by myself
for a bit, which is definitely easy to fall into. Yeah, but we in terms of identifying the workplace leaders, the natural leaders found there, we mostly relied on conversations with Mark to do that. We talked with him about who
worked there. We gave a brief list of everyone who worked there, and we kind of just pinpointed them the specific people we saw as leaders and left spent that And I mean, as far as basic charting goes, it wasn't terrible, but there is definitely a lot to be desired and it could have been far more fleshed out.
What do you think that would have looked like? Or you know, what does it look like in sort of like other campaigns that you've run that were like the first one you ever tried to do at seventeen.
So charting as I would do it now, it should be done from the start before even approaching the first person unless you extremely trust the person, like you are just bonded for life. You know, you can't go without them unless you have like really deep trust with the person. Initially, you shouldn't approach anyone but you going into it. You should start off with if you can reaching out to
an IWW rep. But if you can't make a detailed chart of who's in your workplace, what positions they're at, what team they're on, Like in terms of if they're on one person's managed area or another person's managed area, you should should figure out who they're close to, who they listen to, live in demographic information because you want your unions to be intersextional, and you want to be able to figure out above all else, whether or not you've had away from work one on one with them,
and whether or not you've had any talks with them prior about unions and where they might stand on unions. You want to document all that and it doesn't have to be the most detail. You can just do a spreadsheet with it, but it can definitely be a lot to document. And it's it's no joke. It's not something that should be rushed. It's not fun. I you know, there's there's nothing really that's a blast about trying to sit there and be like, ah, yes, let me fill
out paperwork about my workplace employees. But it will come back and save you so many times and give help you formulate strategies for going word and we we rush things and talk did things like talking to people on the workplace floor and just said, hey, do you want to do a union yeah, and call that a day and said that was one on one and it wasn't.
Yeah, should we explain what one on one like is supposed to be?
Yeah, So one on one is. It doesn't necessarily have to be on one on one, but it should be between at least a union organizer and another person. It could potentially be another more seasoned organizer helping be a more noviced one along with during the one on one.
That could be a thing, but ideally they are just one or two organizers talking to one workplace employee about initially anyway noncommittal discussion on where what their issues are in the workplace, what griefances they might have, and what their current stances on workplace organizing.
Yeah, okay. Another thing I wanted to sort of get into is the role of like having having a way to talk to people outside of work and having just sort of a collaborative space where people talk about and I think this is something that like I don't know, I think this is you know, this is one of
the big things. I think that that this is one of the big things that's changed in the past, you know, maybe like decade and a half or so is that how like the the the actual space in which people talk about a union like tends on to be a physical space anymore. It tends to be sort of either like a signal chat or like a Facebook chat, like
a I guess what'sapp technically is owned by Facebook. But yeah, and so yeah, I want to talk a bit about that, and also I guess get into the sort of security problems that you can have with this, because yeah, yeah, so.
That's what we did. We had a group chat on Facebook Messenger to talk to everyone about the union and everything like that. And there's a lot of pros to having a centralized group chat, don't get me grown. It makes an easy way to communicate when you're trying to take actions to other people. It can be helpful to do any last minute coordination needed. It can be useful to make sure everyone's on the same page. But there's
also major drawbacks to it. One. As you mentioned, there's big privacy concerns, and we ran into that during the campaign. If with anything organizing, you're only as secure as your weakest link, and if you have people you do not completely one hundred percent trust in your group chat, someone could meek everything either wittingly or unwittingly. In our case it was wittingly, but you very well could have someone who isn't being careful and might show the group chat
to someone else who they shouldn't on accident. And unless everyone's on the same page about best security practices, you're not going to get very far with having that. And for another, doing any form of organizing over texts and a major capacity is really hard. Yeah, there's so many issues with like making sure people are understanding their tone and undercommunicating properly and just meeting each other on the same level that you really can't do over text like
you can do in person. If a text medium should in my view, only be there to facilitate interactions that are later done at best in person, but if not, they can be done through like video calls.
Yeah, And like, as much as zoom can be really annoying, like it is way more productive than trying to do things too text Like Yeah, just like having just like just like having a weekly zoom meeting. You know, like like there there's there's a lot of like cases where you like, you know, you literally physically can't be in the same place and you know, and if that's that's the thing you're dealing with. Like, yeah, doing video calls and stuff like that makes it way way easier, for sure.
It It is a way better medium to do anything union related with. And it's also much easier to bond with people over video chat too, And that's a huge part of the union is connecting with your other film workers and meeting each other on that same level and bonded over your shared interests, over your share what you desire from union, what you desire from your workplace. You
can't really do that easily anyway over text. I'm sure someone somewhere has done it, but it's not recommended for me anyway.
Okay, Unfortunately, we need to do another thing that's not text, which is ads. You can tell do great on the ad pivots here, it's fine. I was I was watching what's his name, the guy the right Way, ship head guy who like had a thing with Samantha Bee for a little bit. Glenn Beck, That's the one I was watching, Glenn Beck, and I was like, oh no, this guy, this guy's this guy's ad pivot was just racism. So
you know, we could do it could happen. Here are our second slogan better ad pivots than Glenn back, and we are back, hopefully.
I don't know.
Maybe we'll get extremely unlucky and everything will be broken and this will immediately cut to a third AD. But assuming that it doesn't, I wanted to talk a bit also about sort of the kinds of things that are necessary to get people to believe that a union can work, because that's you know, like or organization isn't just sort of a purely like it isn't just sort of a purely mechanical thing. It's also about morale, you know, like as much as it's about social Relationshi's about sort of morale,
about people believing in the thing. So I wanted to ask, Yeah, I guess talk a little bit about what that process is sort of like and what can happen to it.
Yeah, So that's something an issue we ran into and make a union fairly early on was keeping people motivated for the union and getting people wanting to be involved, because one of the most common things you'll hear when trying to organize the union is people like, oh, I can't afford to lose this job. I have a family to feed, I have bills to pay. You'll see people saying they don't want to risk their careers. If you're in a more professional environment, you'll see people just not
wanting to take the risks that could jeopardize them. And it's important when you're kind of trying to address those concerns to meet them where they're at. You're not gonna you can't make those concerns go away, because they're real. When you're organizing a union, there is a risk you could get fired and get punished for it. It happened
to me. It comes with the territory. But if you do things safely and you do things right, it's a much safer option than not doing any And that's the main thing you kind of want to talk to people about, is detailing their grievances and talking about how nothing's going to change without you. And you can't butter up to your bosses and expect them to suddenly turn around on you. The most they'll do is play pretend for a little
bit until things go right back to normal. And you kind of want to talk to people about also why it's more beneficial to them to just stick with the union because their strength is in numbers, and that's something that a lot of regular folk can kind of lose is that they're not going to be an envelope. When someone's viewing getting involved, a lot of the time they're thinking, oh, if I get involved, I'm going to get fired. They're
not thinking about the strength envemnors. Sure you just you yourself as the only one pushing for change in a workplace, Yeah, there's a decent chance you'll get fired. But if you have a whole crew of ten people, all who are essential running the operations, pushing for change, suddenly you're going
to see things shifting a much different way. And so building that solidarity among people is important, and I think is the I don't want to say the absolute best way, because there isn't an absolute best way to handle those concerns, but it's definitely a way that can be effective if done right.
Yeah, and I guess, okay, I guess I guess we should go into how it sort of came apart. Yeah, because unfortunately, you know, and this I think is the thing that is depressing but true, which is that a lot of union like statistic well, actually I don't have the numbers. I'm not going to I'm not going to actually say that, but a lot of union campaigns don't work, and you know, sometimes it's because like something bad happens, sometimes because it's just you know, stuff happens out of
your control. Sometimes it's I don't know, like a pandemic starts. But yeah, I was talked about what happened here and how to sort of avoid that because it sucks.
So there's a lot of things that can be a downfall in the union. In the case of McDonald's, our main downfall. There was a lot of you know, little things we did wrong that didn't help at all that definitely just made matters worse in the end. But the straw that broke the camel's back was not being careful with who we trusted. And Dan, as I referred to in the article, he was the one that caused the
penultimate destructure of it. The COVID contributed heavily, but I feel like if it weren't for Dan, the union could have had still a fighting chance in spite of COVID. Now, if it weren't for COVID, I think the union also could have stuck around. But the mixture of external factors and internal did the downfall. But in terms of things we could have actively prevented. Dan was the main thing
that we could have done approached way differently. We could have approached handling new people in a much better light. We should have had a centralized group being the ones with all the communications everything, and let people prove their trust to the union over time, doing taxes for it and just by building relationships with people and fostering stuff that's already there. Because Dan was two faced, we all thought he was our friend, which is why we thought
we could trust him. But he was in it just to try and get some benefits for him, which is why he snitched. He thought maybe he would get, you know, some type of promotion or something he didn't which side note, it doesn't help you to snitch on your union. If anyone out there is thinking of doing it, you're just going to screw yourself and everyone else over and nobody
likes to snitch. Yeah, but we should have been a lot more cautious with how we approached people and shouldn't have just been doing things for the sake of doing them, Like we shouldn't have been approaching people inside the workplace. We shouldn't have been inviting and the one and everyone to all our confidential group chats. We should have been cautious of who we were around and what we were saying around people and how we were going about it.
That's the core of it. I mean, yeah, it's recklessness.
Yeah, And I mean I think, like, you know, obviously it is not good if the exist, like if the existence of your union and a bunch of your stuff gets leaked like this is not necessarily fatal, Like I've been involved in campaigns where like that's happened and we want anyways, but it could definitely be like you know, especially like especially early on in the process and especially like the more precarious stuff is uh, yeah, it's not great.
I get yeah, pretty bad pretty quickly, you know. I guess the thing that I wanted to sort of ask about was like, Okay, so historically up until the last I mean I think was was was Burgerville the first like modern fast food union. I think it might have been.
It was either Burgerville or Jimmy John.
Yeah, it was one of the two. Up up until like really the last like like I think, like post like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, fast food has been really really difficult to organize and a lot of a lot of unions either just didn't try or did these kind of like weird PR stunt campaigns that were you know, like Fight fifteen attached things where it's like, well, we're not actually really trying to get a union, we're trying
to like get PR stuff for Fight fifteen. But this is I don't know, this is the thing I think it's interesting about the idea, about about the idea. This is the thing that's interesting about the industrial workers of the world specifically, is that they've actually like gone in and seriously attempted to do it, and they sort of finally broke through it a couple of places, and you
know this this McDonald's campaign didn't work. But what was kind of interesting to me about it is like, I don't know, like how kind of I don't know if normal is the right word of a campaign it was, but it's it looks a lot like I don't know, it looked like it looks a lot like campaigns that I've been involved in that were like not in the
fast food industry. And now I guess I was wondering a bit about like to what extent were the sort of tactics shaped by like the very specific weird conditions of fast food, and to what extent it was just sort of like the stuff you'd use in any workplace.
So a lot of our base model was just stuff you'd use in any workplace. Because at the time we're doing this, I think the only fast food unions that were around were like Jimmy John's and Burbertville. I think those are the only two that had any publicity. This was before all the major Starbucks campaigns.
Yeah, that's all pretty recent.
Yeah, and so we didn't have much of a playbook for how to approach things in a fast food environment. Specifically, a lot of what we're actually emulated the model on was factory environments and things like that, because there is somewhat of a similarity of having worked in both between fast food and factories. With factories and both fast food, you have a kind of assembly line model, you know, crank out or crank out work. Crank out work, get things out at a rapid pace, and stick to your job.
Maybe do it a little bit of clean up now and then, but you stick to what you're doing, and you're kind of isolated from other stations a bit. You have some overlap, but only in so far as your job will allow, but you might be able to talk to each other and you shared break areas. That kind
of structure informed how we approached it. By us, what we tried to do was talk to people we didn't have external contacts with in areas that were away from cameras, in areas that were away from other people who might be able to hear. But there is better ways of doing it, and I think other campaigns benefited out there, likely benefited from having more seasoned organizers at the core of it, because that's also, at least for me and
my experience with it. Something that didn't help us was having someone who with no real experience doing something at the forefront of that. I'm not to say that someone of no experience can't do amazing things. Countless examples of unions that were ran by people with no experience at all who's just jumped right into it and did amazing jobs. But it's important to get a diversity of people with different walks of life at the core of it, people
with different perspectives. Just so many different people involved at the core as a kind of central organizing committee can do you wonders with a union because We had just a few young left leaning people, a few young left leaning white people, most of which were male presenting. I wasn't out as trans there, so I was presenting as masculine. The other people I was with, they were all CIS men, with one exception, two exceptions. Sorry, my memory is a
little on the fritz. But we needed more people with different perspectives in there. We needed more, and there was plenty to be found in the workplace, but we just we neglected to include them in the core organizing the committee. And I think that's something that could really benefit unions and probably is a major strength of a lot of the successful ones is having a diverse, main primary group
of central organizers. I don't want to say central organizers, more like core organizers, because the solidarity union model isn't like hierarchical, but this is a central group of people involved that seek to do the main light work.
Yeah, and you know, I mean this has been I think like one of the things that made the like the Starbucks campaign's work was like they well with was STARBARCKSNA specifically, it was a lot of like find the queerest person in the world place to start talking to them, but having the core group of people working on things. Being as diverse as possible is good both in like an immediate practical sense and it is sort of like long term to chief sense, and the faster that happens
the better. Yeah, okay, do you have anything else that you from this that you think people should know about?
I would say, if you can get external help from a union if you've never done it before, and even if you have, having someone to balance ideas off of can wonders. There's a lot of fun with the IWW that are more than willing to offer helping hand to people trying to get started on a union campaign. All you got to do is reach out and ask, and I'm sure there will be someone in your local who's
willing to help. But even if there's not, you can probably get someone to help you more remotely too, And even just a little bit of guidance can go a long way.
Yeah, union, good McDonald's bad eye. Be careful while you're organizing, and yeah, be strategic inspired about it. Well, okay, do you want people to find you first? And if so where?
Uh?
Yeah? I can be found over unfortunately for now on Twitter at my regazine. Also on Mastdon much more preferably, And those are the main places I'm at. If you want to reach me to, my email is found on my Twitter and masked it on my relating at gmail dot com. It's the best way to get hold of me.
Yeah.
Well, we'll put a link to the strange meta article in the in the description so you can read that to you because it's great. Yeah, Mirat, thank you so much for joining But I was gonna say us, but I guess, thank you so much for joining me. Uh, yeah, it was. It was great talking to you is fuck McDonald's play sucks ass.
Thank you so much for having Yeah, it was really been a huge fan of this podcast for a while, so I was like, when I first heard about potentially being on here, I was stoked. And also, yeah, fuck McDonald's.
Yeah, I guess, yeah, this has been the podcast that you're listening to. You can find us that Happened here pod on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us the rest of the stuff that people do at cools on media.
I guess, I guess.
I actually I have not plugged the do show that's been happening. There'll be a couple of episodes out by the time we do this. But cools On has done a show with Jake Canahan called Sad Oligarchs. That's about the Russian oligarchs who've been mysteriously dying over the past, like as the start of the Ukraine. Yeah, probably only getting more relevant as whatever fucking bullshit is happening there right now plays out. I don't know, but by the time this goes up, you'll probably have a better idea
of what happened or didn't happen. But yeah, go listen to that. Yeah, and go start a union in your workplace or alternately, light light light something on fire legally not the place something campfires explorers, if we can make those, we have the technology.
Union sores.
Best kind.
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.