The Fight for Fifteen at an Orlando McDonald's

By Eleni Schirmer, The New Yorker

16 February 21

For Cristian Cardona and his co-workers, the pandemic brought new meaning to a nationwide movement to raise the minimum wage.

few days after Mother’s Day in 2019, a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida, found itself out of scrambled eggs and receipt paper, wiped clean from the holiday rush. Fortunately, a store on the other side of town was well stocked, and the general manager asked a shift manager to pick up the supplies. The shift manager declined, and so, when the general manager asked, did a second and third. But a fourth shift manager, Cristian Cardona, sighed and agreed to the errand, believing, wrongly, that he was obliged to perform such requests. While Cardona was driving back to his store, a truck drove into the passenger side of his car. He was not seriously injured, but his car was totalled. Cardona returned to work, handed off the cartons of scrambled eggs, loaded the receipt paper into the register, and finished his shift. That night, he filed an incident report, intending it as a request for compensation for the cost of his car. Months passed without any action from his employer. So Cardona took out a loan of fifteen thousand dollars and bought a new car. “Now I can’t leave McDonald’s,” he told me, during one of our first conversations, “because if I leave, I won’t have much to pay the debt I got into because of them.” (Cardona said that, about a year later, McDonald’s compensated him.)

I met Cardona in March of 2020, by phone, while volunteering for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), an effort to support non-unionized workers seeking to organize their workplaces in the face of COVID-19-related threats to their safety. EWOC is spearheaded by the United Electrical Workers and the Democratic Socialists of America, and many of its organizers were active in Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign. As the campaign decelerated, those organizers sought to repurpose its infrastructure to support the key issues that had propelled Sanders’s run: workers’ rights and health-care protections. They roped together hundreds of volunteers, trained them to lead organizing conversations, and deployed them to connect with thousands of workers who had requested help organizing their workplaces for COVID-19 protections. Cardona was one of the workers who wrote to EWOC; I was one of the volunteers who responded.

Though Cardona had been interested in organizing for some time, COVID-19 increased his sense of urgency. The McDonald’s at which he works is around the corner from a hospital, and is frequently filled with its staff and patients. Cardona and his colleagues were nervous; they now saw their customers as potential health threats. For the first month of the pandemic, few McDonald’s employees were given masks, provided with sufficient hand sanitizer or soap, or trained on social-distancing guidelines, according to a survey of more than eight hundred McDonald’s workers conducted by the Service Employees International Union. McDonald’s told me that it followed all C.D.C. guidelines from the beginning of the pandemic and that, like many companies, it at first struggled to procure masks because global supply was short. “Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve taken serious action to provide for crew safety and well-being in all restaurants,” a spokesperson said. But Cardona understood that he and his colleagues would have to protect themselves. He told me, “I wanted to organize because I felt like I had nothing left to lose.”

Cardona, who is twenty-one, has been working at McDonald’s since 2017. He currently makes eleven dollars and thirty cents per hour. He lives with his parents and younger sister, in Orlando. His mother works as a cleaner for a bank. His father worked as a hotel-shuttle driver, but when the pandemic decimated tourist industries he lost his job; he has since found work doing construction and odd jobs. Cardona’s parents each make less than twelve dollars per hour. The family moved to Orlando from Colombia when Cardona was nine, to escape violence and gang activity. “We came here for the same reason a lot of people come here,” he told me. “Seeking something better.” But the American Dream hardly brought reprieve. Cardona wanted to attend college, but he couldn’t afford tuition, so he started working at McDonald’s after graduating high school. Today, many of his friends in Orlando stay in homeless camps and are food-insecure. “We have more houses than we have homeless people, but somehow we can’t give them homes,” Cardona said. “It just doesn’t have to be like that.” A patient kind of anger, well aimed but warm, uncoils in him when he talks about his observations of injustice.

Cardona spends his spare time devouring history books and articles, finding voices on social media that connect the present moment to historical struggles for justice. “I like to follow people who tell their stories about organizing around them,” he told me. He also is an avid gardener. To his parent’s initial dismay, he converted the family’s small back yard into a garden plot, where okra and black-eyed peas erupt from a mountain of wood chips. He hopes to grow enough food one day to feed his family—and, eventually, his whole community. “The idea of liberating my people, my community, my family is my dream,” he told me. “I want to get a big plot of land. I want to grow everything I need—food, medicine, everything. I don’t want to earn a wage job where I’m working for a store owner, making him money, while I’m getting paid pennies on the dollar.”

In November, more than six million Floridians approved a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour by 2026. Though this increase will benefit Cardona and his family, it is hardly enough for him to get his own place or to make headway toward his dream of a community garden. He sees the minimum-wage increase as an important step forward, but too small and long overdue. “We won’t get fifteen for another five years. We need that now,” he said. “When this fight started, in 2012, they were asking for fifteen dollars an hour then. It’s no longer enough. By the time we get fifteen, it’s going to be even less.”

Cardona is well liked and trusted by his co-workers. Some told me that he is one of a few crew members who can work any position at the restaurant well, from manning the grill to ringing up customers. After a year on the job, Cardona was promoted to swing manager, a ranking below general manager but above floor supervisor. Despite his promotion, he was troubled by his work environment, a story told by the burn scars on his arms, the heap he collapses into after his shift, the list of his co-workers who quit each week. “There’s very few people that are willing to put up with all that comes with working at McDonald’s. It’s pretty much the most desperate people,” he said. Mason Smoot, the Chief Restaurant Officer of McDonald’s, said the company was “disappointed” to hear of Cardona’s experiences, which “are not reflective of the positive and safe work environment McDonald’s and franchisees foster for restaurant crew. This is not what we want for anyone in McDonald’s restaurants and [we] are investigating these matters further.”

Cardona told me that he thinks he might have Stockholm syndrome because he hasn’t left yet. Then he thought a bit more and clarified why he has stayed: “I truly like a lot of the people I work with, and they all deserve better. Providing a quick service that feeds a thousand people a day is a valid job and essential, according to the state. No need to feel ashamed just because it’s McDonald’s.” He paused. “The people in charge are the ones that should feel ashamed. They take advantage of people in desperate situations.”

Cardona, like millions of employees, is constrained by debt. His employer, like hundreds of corporations, has been liberated by it, thanks to fiscal policies of the past decade. After the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates as a recovery measure. Corporations, including McDonald’s, filled their shopping carts to the brim with debt. Between 2010 and 2019, S. & P. 500 companies nearly tripled their corporate debt, according to a Forbes investigation; during that time, the debt held by McDonald's increased from $9.1 billion to $33.1 billion. (McDonald’s disputed the accuracy of these figures but did not offer alternative numbers.) With the money tap running freely, McDonald’s filled its shareholders’ cups. Between 2014 and 2019, McDonald’s bought back thirty-five billion dollars of its own stock, driving up prices, while its shareholders raked in at least fifty billion dollars. (McDonald’s suspended share buybacks in March, 2020.) In the wake of the Great Recession, the company’s corporate structure proved capable of not merely surviving recessions but capitalizing on them.

For McDonald’s employees, the global financial downturn brought renewed energy to struggles for workplace dignity. Invigorated by Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, and by mass protests in Wisconsin the same year, fast-food workers started organizing. Occupy Wall Street’s catchphrase, “We Are the 99%,” offered a pithy analysis of rising inequality, and fast-food workers added concrete demands: they wanted fifteen dollars per hour and a union. On November 29, 2012, an estimated two hundred fast-food workers in New York City walked off the job. Since then, fast-food workers across the nation have led walkouts, protests, and rallies, and their message has become a full-fledged movement: the Fight for Fifteen. This Tuesday, fast food workers in fifteen cities across the country will go on strike in conjunction with Black History Month to demand a fifteen-dollar-per-hour wage, as Congress considers including the measure as part of its COVID-19 rescue plan.

Already, at least nine states and several large cities have passed laws establishing a path to a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage. But the movement has always been about pressuring employers to treat their workers better; electing politicians to create wage laws was a secondary concern. As one of the world’s largest employers, McDonald’s has been a key target; changing practices there would set new standards not only for the fast-food industry but low-wage work as a whole.

In 2019, the company agreed to stop lobbying against legislation to increase the minimum wage. But McDonald’s workers allege that it also responded to the movement with retaliation. Hundreds of workers reported having returned from Fight for Fifteen protests, actions, and meetings to find their hours reduced, their pay cut, their schedules changed; others found themselves demoted, some even discharged. Employees reported being harassed, spied on, and interrogated because of their activity with Fight for Fifteen—actions that would constitute violations of federal labor law. (McDonald’s said that it does not tolerate retaliation.) Between 2012 and 2014, McDonald’s workers filed two hundred and ninety-one charges of violations of employees’ rights with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that workers faced illegal employer retaliation for their workplace organizing. In response, McDonald’s claimed that franchises, rather than the corporation, were the responsible parties. In 2019, after years of legal delays, the Donald Trump appointees on the N.L.R.B. ruled in favor of the company’s claim that the vast majority of McDonald’s workers are not employed by McDonald’s. (The company said that the N.L.R.B. case does not allege that McDonald’s U.S.A., the corporate entity, acted in violation of labor laws, and that the settlement ended with all allegations fully remedied.)

In 2018, Cardona said, Fight for Fifteen organizers came to his store and put posters about workers’ rights in the bathrooms; for a week afterward, he and other store managers had to report to top management every hour, confirming that organizers had not returned. Crew members were not allowed into the lobby on breaks, in case an organizer might approach them with a probing question, such as “How is work going?” “It was almost like we were on lockdown for a whole week,” Cardona told me. During that time, he reached out, via Twitter, to Orlando’s Fight for Fifteen organizers, offering to sneak them back into the store during his manager shifts. But he was unable to make contact, and at his store the issue of workers’ treatment and pay remained fallow for months. That is, until COVID-19 arrived.

In the spring of 2019, a few months before Cardona took out thousands of dollars in loans for a new car, the C.E.O. of McDonald’s bragged to the company’s shareholders about the year’s strong performance. “McDonald’s business continues to generate significant cash flow, allowing us to reinvest in the business for future growth,” the C.E.O. wrote in a letter to shareholders. Eleven months later, the pandemic threatened to puncture corporate borrowers’ soaring confidence. But no such perforation occurred. Instead, in late March, the Federal Reserve intervened in the corporate-debt market, taking a rare step of lending money to nonfinancial corporations, and, for the first time in its history, directly buying corporate debt. Suddenly, many corporations, regardless of their financial stability prior to COVID-19, were given a lifeline. Thanks in large part to the Fed’s intervention, McDonald’s secured six and a half billion dollars in debt financing, more than six million from the Fed itself. As Americans watched their loved ones, housing, and paychecks slip away, McDonald’s found itself on startlingly solid ground.

Meanwhile, Cardona knew that it was only a matter of time until someone at his store got sick. In mid-March, top McDonald’s executives got on a phone call with President Trump and other fast-food industry leaders—“all the big ones,” in Trump’s words. The leaders sought assurance that fast food would be designated as an essential service during coronavirus lockdowns, allowing their stores to stay open. The President, a known fast-food enthusiast, willingly agreed. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin affirmed the industry’s necessity, as did an emergency physician at Northwell Health, New York State’s largest health-care provider and private employer, who told Business Insider, “Remember, we have thousands of healthcare workers who are working long shifts, aren’t going to have time to cook or prepare food and may be relying on restaurants to keep them going during this time.” Pieces of a new common sense were clicking into place: fast food is essential because it feeds the essential workers who are keeping the nation alive.

But the essentialness of fast-food employees? On this, McDonald’s was more ambivalent. Five per cent of McDonald’s stores, including Cardona’s, are corporate and offer paid sick leave to their employees. At the other ninety-five per cent, sick leave is subject to local regulations or to the whims of their franchise employer. (The company said that many franchises offer paid sick leave, but gave no specific numbers.) Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which went into effect on April 1, 2020, franchises were required to provide paid sick leave to employees, but that requirement expired on December 31st. With all concerns—the flu, a stomach bug, even coronavirus exposure without a positive test result—most employees choose between coming to work sick or forgoing their pay.

Between March 20th and March 31st last year, hundreds of McDonald’s and other fast-food employees led one-day strikes across the country—in Raleigh, Durham, Los Angeles, Tampa, St. Louis, Memphis— protesting a lack of gloves, masks, hazard pay, and sick leave. On April 1st, McDonald’s agreed to provide personal protective equipment, such as masks and hand sanitizer, to its employees. (The company said that it began taking action in March.) But, for many workers, the efforts were too late and not enough. Matters came to a head at Cardona’s store that month, when McDonald’s rolled out Thank You Meals. For two weeks, any health-care worker, firefighter, or cop with a craving for an Egg McMuffin or Chicken McNuggets could enter the drive-through for a meal on the house. Joe Erlinger, the president of McDonald’s U.S.A., boasted of the company’s efforts to recognize the nation’s heroes. “I couldn’t be more proud of how our company, franchisees and supplier partners have come together to give back to those who are working tirelessly for our country,” he said in a statement. “That is truly our McDonald’s system at its best.”

But, for Cardona and his co-workers, it was the McDonald’s system at its most McDonald’s: squeezing the most out of its employees while compensating them as little as possible and scripting them to smile. As soon as the Thank You Meals were announced, orders flooded Cardona’s store. The crew was insufficiently staffed. “In reality, we needed, like, five or six people,” Cardona told me. “We only had three.” The Thank You Meals had multiple components—a drink, fries, a note, a sandwich—making them time-consuming to assemble. An order with several Thank You Meals could take five minutes to put together—three minutes longer than it was supposed to. The crew was sweating to keep up. “When we’re understaffed, we’re doing multiple people’s job at the same time. But we’re not getting paid like three people’s paychecks,” Cardona said. (McDonald’s disputed this, saying that Cardona’s shifts were fully staffed at that time.)

Temperatures surged, figuratively and literally. The store’s grills, toasters, and fryers were running at maximum capacity. Summer was rolling into Florida, and Cardona said the overworked A.C. would sometimes break down. (The company said there was no problem with the air-conditioning system.) A constant failure to keep up with orders “messes with your sanity,” Cardona said. “Like, how do you keep doing that for eight hours? Doing the job of multiple people, and not being on or fast enough for every order?” Customers, too, were at their limits—service was slow, orders not right. In response, management declared that future customer complaints would result in crew suspensions. Now, Cardona told me, “there’s also a fear that, if we’re not fast enough, customers are going to get angry and we’re going to get suspended. People depend on these paychecks. If they get suspended, they could lose their homes.”

After one particularly gruelling shift during the Thank You Meals period, an employee of twenty-three years, whom I’ll call Charisse, wondered what she would feed her family that evening; food had been scarce the past few weeks. Cardona rang her up for a double fish filet—her employee meal for the shift—and a double Quarter Pounder for her son, but didn’t charge her for the second sandwich. McDonald’s was giving out hundreds of dollars of free food to other essential workers—would they really deny a $4.79 meal to one of their own? It turns out, yes. The next day, the general manager pulled Charisse and Cardona aside and told each of them that they could be fired for stealing food. She decided to grant them clemency, but, Cardona suspected, mostly to avoid having to let go of two of the shop’s best employees during such back-breaking days. A few weeks earlier, a new manager had left after his second day on the job. (McDonald’s called this account “inaccurate” and said that, at corporate stores, employees are entitled to free meals when they are working and half-price meals when they are not.)

While McDonald’s gave away thousands of meals to recognize the lifesaving efforts of “frontline heroes,” its own employees were working twice as hard, in dangerous conditions, and felt they had minimal recognition or rewards. The nine managers at Cardona’s store got a one-time bonus; Cardona remembers receiving about a hundred dollars before taxes. (McDonald’s said that several crew members at the store were offered bonuses again in June.) The store’s general manager printed signs with pictures of Ronald McDonald and a message, in cursive font, that read “You are the McHappy to our customers. ‘We appreciate you!!’ ” and taped them around the store. At one point, the general manager ordered a stack of pizzas from Papa John’s for the crew. “I appreciate the thought, but that’s not going to pay our bills,” Cardona told me. “We could buy our own damn pizza if we got paid an extra dollar.” One of Cardona’s colleagues put it more bluntly: “If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die. But, if you’re gonna live, you still gotta pay your rent.”

In the United States today, there are workers and then there are workers. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, the myth of the white male breadwinner loomed large as Donald Trump bellowed about his plan to save coal-mining jobs while offering neither rhetoric nor policy that would recognize the hardships of the more than eight hundred thousand people employed by McDonald’s in the United States. Essential care-giving labor—feeding, teaching, nursing, healing, minding, washing, soothing—has long been submerged in illusory notions of what work is and who does it. Although not one of us can survive a day without reaping the benefits of care work—the tending necessary to maintain life—actually doing this work for wages provides little to no formal economic benefit. The pay is low, the benefits meagre, and the social respect almost nonexistent.

In an overworked society, fast food has become the national kitchen. On any given day, fast food feeds more than a third of the country. When working people are, almost by definition, short on time, quick access to cheap calories constitutes, in effect, a pay raise. During the Great Recession, as many cut back on full-service dining, fast-food consumption increased especially among working single parents. Today, fast-food sales are steadily rising, even as the pandemic has crumpled the restaurant industry at large. By the end of 2020, tens of thousands of restaurants in the U.S. had permanently closed, but McDonald’s boasted of its sixth consecutive year of sales growth. Yet fast-food workers—two-thirds of whom are women, and nearly half of whom are people of color—struggle to get by. A study by the University of California, Berkeley, from 2015, found that more than half of the 3.7 million people who work in fast food rely on public benefits to survive. Today McDonald’s is one of the five biggest employers whose full-time employees survive on food stamps and Medicaid programs.

Work’s mythic foreground—its factories and firms—relies on its shrouded backdrop: a place to sleep, clean clothes, food to eat. That we both depend on care work and disavow its value creates a contradiction, what the feminist theorist Nancy Fraser calls a crisis of care. But a crisis is not the same thing as a disaster. A disaster, its etymology tells us, means a bad star, a fate which crashes into us, leaving craters of hopelessness behind. A crisis, in contrast, is a moment that demands judgment, a fork in the road that provokes difficult decisions. A disaster renders us helpless; a crisis empowers us with choices. An utter crisis, COVID-19 has forced the world to reckon with the forces that sustain us, the essential labor that keeps us alive. But a crisis is merely the moment which demands hard choices; it does not guarantee that wise actions will follow.

In the meantime, conditions remain poor. Last summer, McDonald’s workers across the country organized another round of strikes, in protest of their employer’s insufficient response to COVID-19. When multiple workers in Oakland tested positive, thirty-three of the store’s employees went on strike for nearly three weeks, demonstrating against the owners’ failure to protect employees. Around that time, Cardona told me that four employees at his store had tested positive, though only one of the cases was disclosed to all employees. He said the store had never been closed for cleaning, though, once, a general manager strolled through the store with a spray bottle, wiping surfaces. (McDonald’s refuted this claim, saying the company’s protocols insured that, after a case was reported at the location, it was immediately closed for an overnight cleaning.) Cardona also recounted that one of his colleagues had come to work ill—vomiting, diarrhea. Cardona told him to go home and rest; his co-worker refused. “A lot of times, people chose their paycheck over their health,” Cardona said. “They don’t want to go homeless. They don’t want to go hungry. Maybe they have someone they need to take care of.”

My organizing calls with Cardona—suspended across thousands of miles, rooted in different cities—are neither halting COVID-19 nor raising workers’ pay. More often than not, I simply listen as he explains to me what it is like to get by as a low-ranking manager at a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida, in the midst of a global pandemic. Once, early in our conversations, I asked him to tell me what he needs most from me. He laughed gently. “The feeling of having our voices and stories heard is already powerful for us,” he said. I frowned. Would not a concrete organizing plan or a corporate research campaign or connections with local organizers be more materially beneficial? It took me weeks to realize that Cardona wanted what his employer and his elected leaders had denied him: to be valued, considered irreplaceably precious. After all, he and his colleagues knew they were essential; it was the world who needed convincing. In a disaster, we demand heroes to protect us. But this is not a disaster. It is a crisis. Choices to value the labor we depend upon, not simply praise it, will secure our fate.