Dinking back and forth with the Pope on my private jet’s outdoor pickleball court (Taylor Swift and Oprah tore the hell out of the indoor one), I was thrown off my GOAT form by the realization you can’t believe everything that’s aired as fact these days. And if it’s what a longtime adversary of the restaurant business has been shoveling, you’d best not trust any of it. As my pal Elvis advises, just keep flushing.
If those reports were true, fast-food restaurants in Southern California would have been left dark and whimpering two weeks ago, the result of an employee uprising large enough to bring down a government. The organizer of the supposed strike, the Fight for $15 and A Union, estimated the likely turnout at “hundreds of thousands” just in Los Angeles.
News sometimes rolls slowly from the West Coast to the East, but we heard nary a word in Chicago or New York about a business-halting worker revolt. Nor did our Southern California colleague report any disturbance in the very epicenter of the alleged revolution.
A tendency to exaggerate grossly is hardly new for Fight for $15 and its backer, the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU. Years ago, our Chicago-area office overlooked the then-headquarters of McDonald’s. For days we were alerted by Fight for $15 that the restaurant outside the McD’s headquarters would be paralyzed by a worker’s action.
When the day arrived, we witnessed about eight people in McDonald’s crew uniforms picketing outside the restaurant, plainly for the benefit of TV video crews. A legal brouhaha that erupted afterward revealed the picketers had been paid by SEIU to strike. They weren’t forgoing their pay to make a point, but merely shifting what they did for the money.
Similar non-events have followed the dire warnings from SEIU of other devastating walkouts and strikes. Hyperbole is apparently intended to make up for a lack of bodies.
Now the SEIU is supposedly putting unionized Starbucks workers on busses for a nationwide blitz of units whose staffs have already unionized. The show of force is intended to scare Starbucks’ leadership into negotiating in earnest with the teams. It hasn’t hurt that the mere announcement of the effort has generated headlines in local and national media about Starbucks’ alleged resistance to doing right by its workers. If unicorns prove easier to spot than these busloads of union foot soldiers during the four-week campaign, so what?
Of course, the SEIU and its affiliates haven’t been the only truth stretchers. We found it hard to believe, for instance, that one of the two stores Chipotle workers tried to unionize just happened to be one that had already been earmarked by corporate to close.
There’s also considerable untruth masquerading as denial. Employers make restaurant jobs sound like playing for pay, or that the wages and benefits would make Elon Musk regret his career decisions. That’s just not the case. Employers know it as well as their employees do, often having lived through those low-wage days themselves. Don't kill the messenger, but labor has a point.
Recruitment and retention have become at least as important in the business as attracting and keeping customers. The difficulty is a curse that just won’t lift.
It’s certainly not going to ease any faster if unions and employers are more concerned about spin-doctoring than finding common good.
But I gotta run. Elon’s calling in a minute for our weekly checkers game, and then we have karaoke with Adele and Cher.