The day the staff walked out
Fast-food workers have long put up with dismal pay and casual disrespect from management, said Greg Jaffe in The Washington Post. With jobs plentiful, some of them are deciding they just won’t take it anymore.
DUSTIN SNYDER WAS tired of the low wages, the 60-hour workweeks, and the impossible-to-please customers, and so in early September the assistant general manager at a McDonald’s in Bradford, Pa., drafted a petition that laid bare months of building anger and frustration. “We are all leaving,” his petition threatened, “and hope you find employees that want to work for $9.25 an hour.” Nearly all of his two dozen employees had signed it. A few added their own flourishes.
“We need a RAISE,” one scribbled next to her signature.
“Piss off,” wrote another.
Dustin, 21, could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he fed the petition into the fax machine in the McDonald’s office, punched in the number for his bosses 80 miles away in Buffalo, and hit send. Another low-wage worker rebellion in a season full of them. All over America people were quitting jobs at record rates. Even in a place such as Bradford, with its shrinking population and 30 percent poverty rate, low-wage service workers sensed that they finally had a little power.
Soon after Dustin sent the petition, the phone was ringing, and the regional supervisor in Buffalo was demanding to know who was behind it. Dustin’s first instinct was to panic and plead ignorance. An hour later he called and confessed. “I was trying to get better pay for my people,” Dustin said.
“There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give in to threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If the workers did not like it, they could quit.
Days earlier Dustin had accepted a job at a lumber mill that paid $11.50 an hour, or 60 cents more than he made as assistant general manager. But he did not really want to quit McDonald’s. He liked his co-workers, who had become some of his closest friends, and he liked being a leader. He just wanted some affirmation and a little more money, both for himself and his team.
Dustin asked his employees to gather around him in the kitchen. Egg McMuffins sat half made on the counter. A clock on the cash register that tracked the restaurant’s drive-through times and transmitted the data back to corporate ticked away the seconds since their last completed order. “Why would you want to work for a company that doesn’t value you?” Dustin asked. He turned to one of the restaurant’s longest-serving employees. “You’ve been here for five years,” he said. “What have you got for it? Nothing.”
The workers, clad in their uniforms, ball caps, and nonslip shoes, stared at him, unsure what they were supposed to do next. Dustin explained that he was leaving and locking up the restaurant. If they followed, he promised he would help them all find better jobs. “How many of you want to go with me?” Dustin asked.
Initially, there was silence. Then seven of the nine raised their hands. Two who decided not to join took seats at a table in the empty restaurant. The rest tossed aside their headsets and abandoned their posts at the drive-through and registers. Instead of racing to serve customers, they began making food for themselves: a Quarter Pounder, a large fries, an iced caramel coffee with whipped cream and extra pumps of caramel.
Dustin’s anxiety, which had been building since he sent the fax, began to ebb. His co-workers were ebullient. “It’s a walkout,” one yelled as they headed out into an economy where lowwage workers, long accustomed to feeling scorned, ignored, and invisible, were realizing they suddenly had some agency.
THE DISCONTENT driving the Bradford workers and so many others had been there for years, an ever-present aspect of an economy that could be especially cruel to anyone without an education. The pandemic—the fights with customers over masks and the fears of falling sick—added to the strain. But it was the labor shortages, which extended to just about every part of the country, that caused workers’ longsuppressed anger to burst into the open.
Unlike the strikes of an earlier era, most of the walkouts included no picket lines. Rarely did the workers even make demands. “WE ALL QUIT SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE,” read the message last June on a Burger King marquee in Lincoln, Neb., where, according to the workers, the air conditioner had been broken for weeks and the temperatures in the kitchen soared past 90 degrees.
Sometimes, workers left behind notes that resembled parting primal screams: “The staff at this location has walked out because we were being treated poorly, overworked and underpaid,” read a message from the employees of a Biggby Coffee in Toledo, Ohio. Often the dashed-off notes became hits on social media, passed along by equally fed-up workers.
From the restaurant’s windowless back office, Dustin called Stephanie Kelley, the Bradford McDonald’s general manager, to tell her what was happening. Stephanie, 36, had recently accepted a job at a bank in town and, like Dustin, was finishing out her final two weeks. She’d spent nearly a
decade at the Bradford McDonald’s, working her way up from the bottom to the restaurant’s top job. To join the protest was to throw away a reputation for hard work she had fought to build. To stay home was to abandon her employees.
Stephanie was now deciding whether she wanted to be one of them. Like her staff, she had come to feel “degraded” and “belittled” by her bosses and some of the customers. The franchise owner had set the Bradford McDonald’s starting wage at $9.25 an hour, while new workers at his McDonald’s less than 20 miles away in Olean, N.Y., where the minimum wage was higher, were earning $15 an hour. The low pay had made it almost impossible for Stephanie and Dustin to retain workers and keep the restaurant running.
Stephanie decided she could not let Dustin and their day-shift crew “do it alone.” She hung up and texted the night-shift staff. “I want you all to know that everyone on the day shift just walked out and quit,” she wrote. She said she was joining the walkout— “Effective 10:51 a.m. I no longer work at McDonald’s”—and encouraged the rest of the staff to quit too.
“I believe that you all are worth more than anything they’re giving you,” she continued. “I am proud of all of you. Every single one of you. Whether you quit or not, I am proud of you.”
Then she drove to the McDonald’s where she saw cars backing up in the drivethrough. Most of the workers were gathered in the parking lot, laughing and smiling. The worker who had been with the restaurant for five years was sobbing. She had been swept up in the initial excitement of the walkout but was now worried about finding a new job and paying her rent. She was terrified of losing her subsidized apartment.
“We will help you get a job that pays better,” Dustin reassured her. He and Stephanie were going to drive everyone to the Burger King, two miles away, where Stephanie knew the general manager and the pay started at $10 an hour. Before Dustin locked the doors, he realized there was one last thing he wanted to do for his McDonald’s customers. He could not find a pen so he snatched a blue highlighter from the back office. “Due to lack of pay we all quit,” he scribbled.
Through the night the workers kept texting. On the text chain, they dubbed themselves the McRejects. “We’ll be friends forever,” wrote Matthew Arndt, who is developmentally delayed and autistic. “Remember my door. My heart is open.”
DUSTIN ROSE AT 4 a.m. and headed out the door to his car, still clad in his camouflage pajama pants and a hoodie. A month had passed since the walkout. It was his day off, but he had promised two of his former McDonald’s crew members, whom he had helped land jobs with him at the lumber mill, that he would drive them to work every day. Neither had cars. “Jesus it’s cold out this morning,” Dustin’s first pickup of the morning said as he slid into the passenger seat. “I left my window open last night and just about froze my balls off.”
Of the Bradford McDonald’s workers who remained after the waves of spring and summer attrition, five had intellectual or physical disabilities that made it hard for them to find work at better pay. Most of the McRejects found new jobs for higher pay at Burger King, Dunkin’, and the SaveA-Lot grocery store. Shakira, a 17-year-old girl who’d been kicked out of the house by her father and his new girlfriend, landed a $10-an-hour position stocking shelves at a Crosby’s convenience store and was living with her boyfriend’s family.
Matt and his best friend from McDonald’s, David Putnam, were making $12 an hour at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop. The extra money meant David, who was raising his 2-year-old son on his own, no longer needed donated food from the “Blessing Box” near his house. He had recently even been able to treat his mother and stepfather to dinner at the Hunan Buffet across the parking lot from his new job.
Matt’s finances were still tight. He lived in a two-story rental with three housemates; one had recently been kicked off disability. Matt was the only one in the house with a job, and he was using his extra pay to help cover her portion of the rent.
After just three weeks at the lumber mill, Dustin got a $1 raise to $12.50 an hour, part of a companywide pay hike. He hoped the money would help him finally afford his own place. For the moment, he was paying his mom, who was on disability, and his stepdad, who did not work, about $850 a month to live in his childhood bedroom. The money he paid helped to cover their rent and the food stamps they lost because of Dustin’s income.
Most of the workers in Dustin’s section had been at the mill for only a couple of months, and Dustin attributed the heavy turnover to the tedious nature of the job, standing in one spot for 10 hours a day and stacking wooden boards. He tried to fight off the boredom, as best he could, by asking questions about the different kinds of wood they processed and how the different machines worked. He chatted up the forklift driver who had been at the mill for almost three decades and was making $30 an hour. If he could just make it to three months, Dustin knew he would qualify for a $300 bonus, a 401(k), and health insurance— something he had been without for more than three years.
“It’s super easy,” he said of the lifting and stacking. “You barely move.” The downside was the monotony, which was numbing in a way that McDonald’s had never been.
Weeks passed and Dustin found it hard to stop thinking about his old job. He missed the friendships he’d built at the restaurant. He missed the challenge and satisfaction that came with helping his intellectually disabled workers master a task. He missed being a leader.
About six weeks after the walkout, Dustin noticed that the owner had changed the sign on the restaurant’s marquee. “Hiring starting at $10,” it now read. The 75-cent raise was all that he and his staff had really wanted and all that they had been fighting for. To Dustin, it still felt like a “slap in the face.” His former bosses seemed to be sending him a message that their fight was never really about pay. It was about status and power and proving to Dustin and the others that, despite their modest gains and whatever changes might be taking place in the U.S. economy, they were still replaceable.
Dustin did not regret the walkout. He had “refused to bow down to the big scary corporation,” he said. He had rallied his friends and helped them find similar work at higher pay. Dustin’s lumber mill job would do for now. Maybe the meaning he had been searching for would come later.
A version of this story originally appeared in The Washington Post. Used with permission.