3029. #MeToo Strike Hits MacDonald's

By Annelise Orleck, Jacobin, September 20, 2018

Hungry consumers hoping for an Egg McMuffin or a Big Mac for lunch on Tuesday found a surprise outside their local McDonald’s: picket lines. In a historic multi-state strike, women workers walked off their jobs at McDonald’s restaurants in Chicago, Detroit, Durham, Kansas City, St Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, and Orlando. Carrying signs that read “McDonald's, Hands off My Buns,” they joined a global #MeToo movement in protest against endemic sexual harassment in their workplaces.

In May, McDonald’s workers in ten cities filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), arguing that sexual harassment and unwanted touching were everyday occurrences at numerous McDonald’s restaurants and that when workers attempted to file complaints with store managers, they suffered retaliation in the form of verbal abuse, cuts in hours, and intentionally inconvenient schedules. (They also filed complaints in 2016.)

Folsom, California McDonald’s worker Kristi Maisenbach told the EEOC that her supervisor had touched her breasts several times and rubbed his genitals against her butt. He later sent her a text message offering $1,000 for oral sex. When she complained to the general manager, her hours were cut so severely that she had to quit.

Flint, Michigan McDonald’s worker Cortez Clerk says that her supervisor verbally and physically harassed her every day at work. Explaining her decision to file a complaint with the EEOC, she said: “McDonald’s monitors everything we do — from how fast the drive-thru is moving, to how we fold our customers’ bags. Yet when I filed a complaint against my shift manager for regularly sexually harassing me — which included him showing me a photo of his genitals — McDonald’s had no response.” Clerk also quit, unable to bear the harassment any longer. “I really needed that job and the money, and I considered remaining silent. But I believed McDonald’s had my back and would be horrified by the way I was treated. I was wrong.”

Tuesday’s one-day strike was workers’ way of ratcheting up the pressure on McDonald’s to finally take action — not only in its corporate-owned restaurants but also in its franchises. Strikers demanded that the company strengthen and enforce its stated zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, hold mandatory trainings for managers and employees, create a simple system for receiving and responding to complaints, and protect workers from retaliation. Finally, they insisted that McDonald’s convene a committee of workers, corporate executives, franchise representatives, and leaders from national women’s groups to formulate new policies to keep workers safe from sexual harassment.

Building the Pressure

Women workers have been organizing around the issue of sexual harassment for years, and they have won some important victories.

Last year, union hotel housekeepers in Chicago won a citywide “hands off, pants on” ordinance protecting workers in an industry where an estimated 75 percent of housekeepers have faced unwanted advances or lewd talk. That ordinance went into effect this summer, and hotel workers in California are hoping to pass a similar statewide bill. In Bangladesh, Cambodia, and other countries where clothing is made today, women garment workers are pressing the International Labor Organization for a global labor convention mandating zero tolerance for gender-based violence in the workplace. And, in March, women tomato pickers from Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) staged a five-day hunger strike in Manhattan to protest fast food chain Wendy’s decision to purchase tomatoes in Mexico in order to evade strict anti-sexual harassment rules now in effect on Florida farms that have joined CIW’s Fair Food Program.

Now, the #MeToo movement has hit McDonald’s, the world’s second-largest private employer and the flagship of a fast food industry in which an estimated 42 percent of workers experience sexual harassment and/or groping.

McDonald’s corporate claims that it has no — or little — control over the franchisees that own 90 percent of the burger giant’s more than fourteen thousand stores. But in a related case from 2016 (also filed by fast food workers associated with the Fight for 15), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that McDonald’s could be held accountable for conditions in its franchisee-owned stores. And while Trump’s NLRB has tried to rescind that decision, the president’s NLRB appointee has so far had to recuse himself in this case so the decision stands.

Meanwhile, the ten women who filed the EEOC complaint last May are spearheading the direct action campaign against McDonald’s. These women first met each other when they traveled to Chicago for the annual McDonald’s shareholder meeting in Spring 2018 to tell their stories. The experience of testifying together was powerful, and they decided to keep in touch. Their newfound bond, the knowledge that they were not alone, that this was not an individual problem but a systemic and collective grievance, moved them to form committees of women workers in each of their ten cities. It was those committees that organized, voted for, and conducted Tuesday’s strike.

The committees traveled to different stores conducting sexual harassment trainings. It was not difficult to mobilize their colleagues. Complaints to management have been ignored or even mocked, the women workers say. Women often lose their jobs — or are forced to quit — if they press their claims. Since a high percentage of those responsible for the harassment have been store or shift managers who have control over scheduling, wages, hiring, and firing, women workers know that retaliation is likely for those who dare to file complaints.

That’s why they need a union, workers insist. A union brings more than solidarity. If recognized, as McDonald’s has done in Denmark, South Korea, and New Zealand, a McDonald’s workers union would bring legal contracts guaranteeing their rights.

Just a Start

It’s been a long time since a strike in the US directly targeted sexual harassment. One hundred and six years ago, young women garment workers in Kalamazoo, Michigan walked off their jobs, joining a wave of strikes in the century’s second decade that spread from New York City to Chicago, Boston to Cleveland, Philadelphia to Kalamazoo, and back to Brooklyn.

These strikes were historic because many male labor leaders believed that young women could not organize, and that they would not hold solidarity long enough to wage a successful strike. But the Kalamazoo strike was also groundbreaking because the strikers spoke out about sexual harassment, demanding that foremen be fired for extorting sex from young women workers.

At the time, male union leaders, and even some female organizers, believed that the issue was best dealt with in behind-the-scenes negotiations. A century later, things are rather different. Spurred on by the rise of #MeToo and the organizing of their fellow workers in hotels, farm work, and garment shops, McDonald’s workers took direct action against their bosses and demanded an end to sexual coercion — with women of color playing a leading role.

Still, workers say Tuesday’s strike was just a start. They are continuing to file complaints, locally as well as nationally. They are strategizing about how best to protect undocumented workers who fear deportation if they make themselves visible to the federal government. More strikes are almost certainly on the horizon, and organizers anticipate that the next round of actions will be bigger and will involve more cities.

McDonald’s women’s committees are regularly meeting in the ten cities where the strike took place, and more are being organized in other parts of the country. Online phone calls led by women who organized the strike are working to enlist the general public in distributing Know Your Rights leaflets at restaurants around the country. Workers have launched a sexual harassment hot line (844-384-4495). They will continue to press McDonald’s to form a committee on sexual harassment. We are looking at all possible paths to pressure the company, they say.

Strikers may already have won one of their demands. In a stunningly oblivious (or intentionally belligerent) move, McDonald’s announced ahead of the strike that it was employing the Chicago law firm of Seyfarth Shaw to help the company “evolve” its sexual harassment policy. Strikers demanded that McDonald’s cut ties with Seyfarth Shaw, which is not only notorious for its union-busting, but also represents Harvey Weinstein and Kay Jewelers in sexual harassment suits. After the strike, McDonald’s press releases regarding sexual harassment no longer mentioned Seyfarth Shaw. Whether McDonald’s has simply decided to hide their work with Seyfarth Shaw we do not know. But, in any case, the strikers’ demands are being heard. McDonald’s also announced that it will contract with the national anti-sexual violence organization RAINN to do sexual harassment trainings, but so far, RAINN says, this is just talk. Nothing formal has been decided.

#MeToo didn’t start in Hollywood. Women leaders in the Fight for 15 have been talking about sexual harassment since the movement began. Women farm workers in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, hotel workers in UNITE HERE, and garment workers in the International Trade Union Federation have all been organizing around sexual violence and harassment in the workplace for years. They spoke out long before #MeToo became front page news and they are continuing to. What may make this time different is the moment we are in. And the fact that low-wage women workers have no intention of stopping their agitation any time soon.

2776. #MeToo Movement: Facing Extreme Harassment, Some Afghan Women Risk Speaking Up

By Rod Norland and Fatima Faizi, The New York Times, December 10, 2017

Afghani women protest against sexual harassment in Azadi (Freedom) Street in Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan — “You’re ugly, Maryam, everyone says so, but I guess you’re a virgin so when you’re ready to have sex, let me know and I will be glad to …” Her male co-worker, writing on her Facebook account, finished the sentence obscenely.

It was 10 a.m. on a normal day in the life of an Afghan working woman. The journalist Maryam Mehtar, 24, said she had already that morning been harassed or assaulted at least five times: in the bus to work, on the street waiting for the bus, by a man who grabbed her buttocks, by another man who asked how much she charged and by a young boy who said she had a “pretty vulva.”

Finally, in the relative safety of her own office, she opened her computer to read the Facebook offer from one of her colleagues to deflower her.

Emboldened by the uprising of women in America and Europe against sexual harassment, a few particularly courageous Afghan women are speaking out, too, in the face of a problem long just accepted as commonplace and unsolvable.

“Most of my friends are silent,” said Ms. Mehtar, who works for the Afghan news agency Sarienews. “They think if they talk everyone will blame them, and they’re right.”

Ms. Mehtar is one of the few Afghan women willing to name and shame her abusers, something most are afraid to do — and not just because of fear of public humiliation.

When women speak up, they take a big risk, said Shaharzad Akbar, 30, who works as an adviser to President Ashraf Ghani and says she was sexually assaulted when she was an intern early in her career. “In Afghanistan, women can’t say they faced sexual harassment. If a woman shares someone’s identity, he will kill her or kill her family. We can never accuse men, especially high-ranking men, without great risk.”They fear not only the vengeance of the abusers, but sometimes even that of their own families, Ms. Akbar and others said.

Zubaida, 26, was a police officer whose superior groped her breasts and demanded sex. She quit her job, but does not dare give her own full name or her abuser’s. “If I said his name, definitely he would kill me or one of my family members,” she said. Worse, if it became public, she said she would fear that her own family members might carry out an honor killing against her.

Even rape victims are sometimes killed by their own relatives, who believe the shame attached to rape is worse than the suffering of the rape victim.

“In Afghanistan, we are both the victim and the criminal,” Zubaida said. “I can’t even tell my own family that I quit because of sexual harassment. Western women are so lucky.”

One 31-year-old woman, who feared that she and her children could be killed if her name were used, had returned to Afghanistan after years of living in Iran. She had done well in school there, and as an educated woman she quickly found work, first in a provincial government office in Ghazni Province.

On her first week at work, the director of her department threw her over a piece of furniture and tried to sexually assault her; she fled the office and quit. In Kabul, she went to buy a plot of land from the government, and the director of the department began sending her nude photographs of himself and asking her for sex, mostly via Facebook messages.

The harassment many of them face extends even to Afghan employees of international and Western institutions, according to numerous women interviewed for this article.

One woman gave up on government employment after repeated harassment and started her own nongovernmental organization. She began applying for grants from the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development and various Western embassies.

“Every time the same thing: The Afghan staff would say, ‘I’ll approve your proposal, if you have sex with me,’” she said, asking that her name not be used because she still hopes to find a grant and does not want to anger potential donors. “Everyone thinks that those women who work outside the home are whores, and Afghan men can say and do anything they want with them.”

Women in the media are particularly frequent victims, in part because they have public profiles, and often use social media with their real identities. That often attracts men who hurl sexual abuse at them with abandon — often not even bothering to disguise their names. The abuse frequently includes sexually explicit photographs.

When Ms. Mehtar posted on Facebook her view that “Afghan women are not safe even in their own homes,” she was deluged with a mixture of hate mail and sexually abusive comments. She received hundreds of Facebook and Twitter messages — which she has archived. One came from an Afghan writer named Jalil Junbish, who described himself as an authority on women’s rights. It read: “You’re a whore and have had sex with many men.”

Contacted by Facebook Messenger about the abuse, Mr. Junbish not only confirmed that it came from him, but repeated his accusation. “Maryam is a whore,” he replied to a female Afghan reporter for The New York Times. “Why are you her friend?” He added, “You’re a whore, too.”

When the reporter contacted Mr. Junbish by telephone, he confirmed that the Facebook account was his own, but he then claimed that it had been hacked by someone else who sent the abusive messages.

The Afghan entrepreneur Hamid Samar this year came up with the idea of starting a television station, Zan TV, pitched at millennials. All of the on-air personalities, newscasters and producers are young women, 35 to 40 of them, with far fewer men behind the scenes (although they are the ones in charge). Some American officials enthusiastically praised the idea, and the station is seeking American funding.

Within only a few months, however, rumors began to circulate that many women were complaining of sexual harassment at the station, and there was a wave of resignations, according to two women who said they were among those who quit because of that. They were interviewed in the past week on the condition of anonymity because they feared being unable to find another job if they spoke out.

Mr. Hamid, the owner, said sexual harassment was not tolerated at Zan TV. “Zan TV is a safe place for women,” he said. “Families trust us and send their daughters outside to work for us, and we never break their hearts.”

Sulieman Samar, the public relations coordinator for Zan TV, and a brother of the owner, denied that there had been any resignations over harassment. “Everyone who works here signs contracts promising not to sexually harass anyone,” he said. “Sexual harassment is wrong.”

In one of the country’s most outrageous cases, last month, an Afghan air force colonel was accused of demanding sex from a subordinate. The woman secretly videotaped his assault on her, with his face and identity clear. Posted on Facebook anonymously, that video and a more explicit second one went viral in Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the spokesman for the defense ministry, said that Col. Ghulam Rasoul Laghmani had been detained and was under investigation, but so far no one has formally accused him of harassment. General Waziri said the authorities had been unable to find the woman, whose identity in the video is unclear.

The Afghan government has made some efforts to combat sexual harassment, which is widely seen as one of the main reasons the country has never been able to meet its goals to recruit female police officers and soldiers, who are still less than 1 percent of the security forces.

Recently, the Ministries of Interior and Communications jointly set up hotlines to report sexual harassment, with separate numbers for women (989) and men (999). Since the interior ministry is in charge of the police, many assumed the hotlines were for reporting problems with police officers.

A woman who answered the 989 number said that was not their role; they handle only phone harassment cases of the heavy-breathing type. “If a policeman harasses you,” the hotline operator said, “you should slap him, or ask other women to slap him. We can’t help you.”