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

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