Back in 2010, you were alerted to the SEIU’s secret plans to unionize the fast food industry.

Though the purple behemoth’s three-year old plans were put on hold for a while, they’re back in a full-blown effort to target New York City’s fast food workers for unionization.

Fast-food workers at several restaurants in New York walked off the job on Thursday, firing the first salvo in what workplace experts say is the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States. The effort — backed by community and civil rights groups, religious leaders and a labor union — has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city. [Emphasis added.]

According to the SEIU’s 2009 internal documents, the SEIU plans include:

• Initiate a focused experiment in one or two metro areas to test the organizing theory and bring resources to bear on a limited geographical target.
• Choose metro areas with a favorable local political environment and workforce composition (Los Angeles and an east coast market)
• Target 7-10 of the largest chains to keep bargaining manageable and map out geographic clusters where field work can be concentrated.
• Build broad-based support for targeted workers via extensive community outreach and organizing and political work with prominent local elected officials
• While staying focused on the 7-120 chains, bring workers together across companies within geographic clusters to build a sense of movement and solidarity.
• Use a living wage as a vehicle to excite, build momentum, build worker lists/ID potential leaders and potentially support collective bargaining. We believe we will have enough traction with an ordinance to use as a legitimate tool for organizing and potentially as legislation to raise standards….

With high turnover in the industry, fast food workers are a difficult, yet lucrative, target for unions.

If unions are successful in unionizing fast food workers, particularly in non-right-to-work states that allow for mandatory dues payments, unions will not only collect union dues from these workers but, thanks to the high turnover, also be able to collect initiation fees every time a new worker is hired.

Although many of the fast food chains are franchises, the SEIU’s plan to unionize multiple restaurants in geographic clusters is a strategic move that unions have attempted a number of times in other industries, most notably in clusters of warehouses in New Jersey and California’s Inland Empire.

When a parasitic entity keeps killing its host (or Hostess), it is only natural that it must go after a new target.

With today’s union bosses killing company after company, the labor intensive fast food industry is uncharted territory that may be one of the last opportunities that unions have in the private sector.That is, until the food police and high union costs kill that industry as well.

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“Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth.”
Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

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