ON A GREEN SIDE STREET in Quezon City, a buzz of conversations emanates from the cheerful yellow cinder-block building that Finnish unionists helped build for the Philippine labor federation SENTRO. Downstairs Josua Mata and the elders are strategizing. Upstairs, activists in the RESPECT Fast Food Workers Alliance talk about their lives. Thirty-year-old Benedict Murillo is explaining to younger workers the concept of contractualization.
“You sign on for four months at a McDonald’s. When four months is up they move you to another. You never get to stay in one place. You never get to be a regular worker. That’s contractualization. It was seven years of four months here and five months there, and I didn’t even know anything was wrong until I heard RESPECT people shouting for their rights. Now I’m in the streets shouting too.”
Sister Nice Coronacion nods as Murillo speaks. She has worked in fast food too. So many young Filipinas do. Fast food is a big part of life in modern Manila. Middle-class people take their children to McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken to show others how well they’re doing. As for the poor, fast food feeds them in two ways. Young people work at McDonald’s or KFC or the Philippine fast-food chain Jollibees. Children and old people scavenge fast-food waste from Dumpsters so it can be recooked and sold as pagpag in slum restaurants. The poor are the original recyclers, Coronacion says. They reuse and repurpose everything.
That’s one reason why wage theft has become the galvanizing issue for low-wage workers in the Philippines. Manila fast-food managers call it “charity work,” says Em Atienza. Workers must put in hours for which they are not paid. It is the price of having a job, says Joshua Noquit. At his McDonald’s, “we work for six hours. Then we’re told to punch out. After punching out, we work for an hour more, but unpaid. That is wage theft.” Noquit says he didn’t even understand that until he met Coronacion and the members of RESPECT. “We all have the same experience in fast food,” he says. “Our wages are not paid on time. Every time we ask for our salary there is a dispute.”1
Wage theft goes hand in hand with contractualization, Atienza explains. “Contractualization” makes it difficult for workers to turn to the government for help, because labor laws protect only “full-time, permanent” employees. Most workers in fast food and at call centers (another big employer of Filipinos under thirty) are classified as “temporary” or “contract” labor. This is true even if they have worked for the same company for years. RESPECT and SENTRO are fighting hard for legislation to guarantee predictable schedules, and long-term security for all Filipino workers. “After a certain length of time on the job, the worker should be considered a permanent employee,” says Coronacion. Worker-activists are fighting for this worldwide.
Contract labor is a hallmark of the twenty-first-century global economy. An ever-diminishing percentage of workers are full-time employees, whether at a college, a hospital, a restaurant, a hotel, or a factory. Fight for $15 leader David Rolf estimates that half of US jobs created since 2008 are part-time. We all know, or are, freelancers, home workers, service providers, car service/ride-sharing drivers, adjunct professors pulling together brief contract jobs to make ends meet. Most don’t earn enough to pay their bills. In 2016, more than 127,000 people slept in New York City homeless shelters. Many were working people and their kids.2
The cheerful pictures painted by Amazon, Uber, and McDonald’s are lies. Precarious workers are not plucky free agents creatively making their way in the “gig economy.” They are victims of what should be considered a vast criminal conspiracy. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that in 2016 alone, US workers were robbed of $50 billion in wages. Meanwhile, wealthy companies around the world were systematically denying precarious workers their rightful earnings—in fast-food restaurants, factories, nursing homes, and farms.3
McDonald’s is infamous for the practice. Kwanza Brooks and Lukia Williams, now Fight for $15 activists, say that they have worked as managers in multiple McDonald’s where they were ordered to “adjust” time sheets to make it appear that employees had worked fewer hours than they did. “That is the worst,” says Brooks. “Because they did the work. They were there. They deserve to get paid for what they did. It’s a job. It’s not right.”4
McDonald’s managers are also pressured to rewrite time sheets to avoid paying overtime rates for work beyond an eight-hour day. Employees are forced to “literally clock out . . . because they are going into overtime,” Brooks says. Then they are ordered to continue working.
The two activists have seen other kinds of wage theft as well. For “a uniform or a name tag or a meal. They deduct and take it out of your pay,” says Williams. She sees those deductions as taking food out of children’s mouths. “Being a mother and seeing other mothers treated this way, it hurts me,” she says. “They can’t afford to pay their bills. I feel that McDonald’s is stealing from their workers. The corporation as a whole is so greedy.”5
Fast-food jobs also steal workers’ sense of self, says Coronacion, crushing them with stress and anxiety. She remembers slipping on sauce, staining her clothes, bruising her hip. But she wouldn’t let herself cry because she feared losing her job, or being reprimanded in front of customers. Running a cash register terrified her, because, “at the end of the day, if anyone was short ten pesos [less than a quarter], we had to pay it back. But when I paid it back, I had to walk home because I didn’t have money for the bus. It was a seven-kilometer walk. And I didn’t have a cell phone to call my mother.”
She felt liberated from bondage when she became “involved in the movement. I thought, if only I had known about this when I was suffering all that stuff, I would have been more assertive. Everything started from there. My whole life started again.”