Day 192 - 27 Nov 95 - Page 12
1 your resignation here, because I don't believe you're being
2 loyal to us.' I mean, what law says you can only have one
3 job?
4
5 "Then I went camping in the summer and when I got back
6 I started trying to organise again. This was just after
7 I had been taken off 'drive thru', because I don't smile
8 enough."
9
10 In the next column now:
11
12 "When the SEIU called me back, I remember thinking
13 Rue Amorim, the organizer, was some rough, tough business
14 man - just because of his voice - and I was thinking, oh my
15 God, what am I getting into? So he showed up at my door
16 and met three other people who were interested in doing
17 this, and he said, 'Well, OK, you don't have to convince
18 me. I'm sold on the idea. You've got to convince the
19 director of organising.' So we had to get more numbers and
20 invite them to an August 25 meeting to show, hey, we can do
21 this. They came, and we got the cards. Things just
22 started from there. We knew what we had to do.
23
24 "Signing people up was like, for me, getting up at six in
25 the morning and going to bed at four in the morning. It
26 totally wrecked your normal day. We signed 67 out of 102
27 people.
28
29 "It was difficult sometimes. Some people didn't understand
30 what a union meant, so you had to go back to the very
31 beginning and explain. Some of them were totally
32 anti-union. And some of them signed as soon as they heard
33 it. Some people thought that a union was just a
34 money-hungry company that wanted to take you for everything
35 you had.
36
37 "We applied for certification on October 1, and I don't
38 know what the hell happened. The company sent people from
39 McDonald's and they interviewed staff one at a time. There
40 was an anti-union petition going around. Some of the
41 anti-union people called the day staff and said, lookit,
42 Cam knows who's signed cards, so you'd better hurry up and
43 sign this petition or else he's going to think that you're
44 not loyal to him. They didn't call me.
45
46 "Cam held a crew meeting when he found out about the union,
47 and I went to it. He tried to intimidate me there. He was
48 saying that unions weren't good things, that they would
49 destroy our big happy family, and take everything away we
50 had now. 'We give you enough,' he was saying. 'We give you
51 half price food, we give you free uniforms, we pay for your
52 breaks.' You know, that sort of thing. 'We have flexible
53 scheduling.' They don't schedule anyone enough hours.
54 I mean, what could be more flexible than that?
55
56 "A lot of people were asking him questions about the union,
57 so he said, why don't you let Sarah answer your questions?
58 Well, we were holding a union meeting the same night.
59 I said well, if you have questions, you can go to
60 such-and-such a place and we'll be happy to answer them
