Essential workers aren’t going to stay quiet

It was over 100 degrees in Sacramento, and the air conditioner at the Jack in the Box where I work had been busted for days. It was so hot inside the store that some of my coworkers were getting headaches or feeling dizzy. Others were on the verge of fainting.

But when my coworkers and I approached our manager to talk to her about the heat, she said we were exaggerating. We were hot because of menopause.

Really? Menopause? It had nothing to do with the rows of hot fryers and ovens and having no AC in the middle of a heatwave?

It was hard enough approaching her in the first place. Often when we raised concerns with her, she called us names like “son of a bitch” and “stupid idiots.” But when she blamed the heat on “menopause,” we knew we had to do more than speak up.

We had to go on strike. On June 29, we walked off the job to send a message: The workers this country called “essential” during the COVID19 pandemic finally deserve to be treated like it.

Fastfood cooks and cashiers like me in California and across the country never stopped working, even during the height of the pandemic. We kept flipping burgers and serving fries, even as our employers often failed to give us masks.

Millions of essential workers like us got sick with COVID19. Over 10,000 workers died in California alone in 2020.

Now that things are starting to reopen, it’s obvious that some people would like to pretend we were never quite so essential in the first place. Big corporations want to keep paying us low wages and ignore our concerns about basic workplace safety.

My colleagues and I went on strike because we refused to let that happen, and because we know when we work together and speak with one voice, we have the real power.

And guess what — our strike worked.

The day after we went on strike, the Jack in the Box district manager stepped up and approved a permanent fix for the air conditioning in our store. We also learned that our “menopause manager” is no longer working with Jack in the Box. One of our coworkers who went on strike is being promoted to fill her spot.

I hope that our victory will inspire other fastfood cooks and cashiers to take action.

Our story is just one example of the countless problems fastfood workers are facing across the country. It’s more than excessive heat and broken AC units. We face the threats of wage theft, sexual harassment, violence on the job and more.

Our strike showed that when workers join together, we can force big corporations like Jack in the Box to take notice. But workers shouldn’t be forced to strike just so that we don’t pass out at work during a heatwave. Here in California, fastfood workers are united in demanding that our lawmakers make major policy changes to empower us with a real voice in the workplace.

That’s why my colleagues and I are calling on California lawmakers to pass AB 257, the FAST Recovery Act, when it comes up for a vote in the State Assembly next year. The FAST Recovery Act would create a statewide committee to give workers like me a seat at the table to develop new health, employment and safety standards that will help fix the many issues we still face on the job.

With this bill, we would be able to sit down with franchisees, state officials and representatives from big corporations to equitably discuss solutions to the issues that for decades have prevented fastfood jobs from providing loyal workers with a middleclass living.

We could also come up with plans to make sure that the next time we face a crisis like COVID, there are rules and protections in place to avoid the same kind of devastation the virus caused to essential workers, especially in Black and brown communities.

All around the country, fastfood restaurants are struggling to hire workers because no one wants a job where they aren’t paid enough to raise a family or where their complaints about the heat are dismissed as “menopause.” Companies like McDonald’s are even offering $1,000 signing bonuses or new iPhones to try to attract new workers.

But they’re ignoring the obvious solutions to their labor shortage: paying people a living wage and giving workers a seat at the bargaining table.

Workers need an economic recovery that includes us too — and we’re ready to keep speaking out, protesting and striking until we win it.