Hamburgler in Paris
How far would McDonald's go to bust a union?
Brian Hull (translations by Mélina Bernhardt)

If you can overlook all the banners, flyers and stickers plastered onto the walls of the McDonald’s at the crossroads of Strasbourg and Saint Denis in Paris, France, there’s a seemingly ordinary restaurant underneath it all — seemingly, being the key word. Ever since its employees successfully carried out the longest strike in McDonald’s history in 2002, the location has become a veritable thorn in the side of the world’s largest fast food corporation. If such a thing as the “Happy Meal” still exists, I assure you, you won’t be finding it here.

Had harmonious relations prevailed between the Strasbourg/Saint Denis employees and its new management following the 2002 strike, perhaps the store’s history would have quietly faded into obscurity. But instead, a clash of outlandish proportions has erupted, eclipsing the previous strike’s record for longevity and raising some unsavory questions about labor relations and Ronald McDonald.

However unsavory the strike is, Rose-Marie, a media relations receptionist at McDonald’s-France, seems baffled by my interest in writing about the topic. Rose-Marie, who refuses to reveal her last name, while simultaneously denying me access to any official spokesperson for McDonald’s-France, trivializes the story’s importance.

“It’s just one restaurant in a country with a lot of McDonald’s restaurants,” she assures me. In fact, France does have “a lot” of McDonald’s. At the end of 2001, there were 913 restaurants in 660 different communities, employing 37,500 people. And a labor movement spreading to all of them would mean a lot of trouble for McDonald’s.

If the case of Strasbourg/Saint Denis was relevant only for this “one restaurant,” then perhaps McDonald’s would discuss it openly. But after three months of calls getting me no further than their reception desk, it’s safe to say that openness with regards to the strike isn’t their priority.

For McDonald’s it’s an open and shut case: The Strasbourg/Saint Denis employees acted beyond their legal means on private property. Echoing McDonald’s spokesperson Etienne Aussedat, Rose-Marie says that when the franchisee of Strasbourg/Saint Denis was shut out of his own restaurant, the employees had gone too far.

The strikers, who had changed the locks on the restaurant’s doors, say it was to put an end to a mysterious pattern of disappearing stock. They say the pattern threatened to sink the restaurant and that in the end, the responsibility would have been on their shoulders. Nabil Kehila, Assistant Manager of the restaurant and an eight-year employee, is one of those strikers. Seated in the swivel chairs of the once-restaurant, now turned strike headquarters, Kehila rolls recollections off his tongue in rapid-fire succession. And the 25 year old of North African origins doesn’t hesitate to add that it’s going to take a while to tell the whole story.

Mystery of the Missing Fries

The debacle started in October of 2002, when an employee named Armand Gandji was fired and accused of embezzling funds. Partially protesting this action and partially seeking better working conditions, Kehila, Gandji and three other employees organized a strike and were swiftly accused themselves of embezzlement. Four months later, they listened as a judge delivered a verdict acknowledging their demands and declaring them all innocent of the franchisee’s charges.

In February of 2003 a headline in Paris read “115 Days of Strike for a Total Victory.” Rémi Smolik, the franchisee who had accused Gandji, stepped down, and the strikers were ecstatic. At the invitation of a union comprised of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell employees in Florida, Kehila and a fellow striker even toured the U.S., telling their story and briefly blockading a McDonald’s in Chicago. Upon returning, the employees were introduced to Hamid Triyeh, a new supervisor, later-turned franchisee, chosen to resuscitate the embattled restaurant.

“We were truly content,” Kehila recollects. “This is the kind of thing that doesn’t happen at McDonald’s. It’s true that we had suffered a lot but our cause had been won.”

Or so they thought.

From the beginning, Hamid Triyeh came in complimenting the staff on their handling of the former franchisee and assuring them he was “one of their kind” and was with them “through thick and thin.” For a restaurant predominantly staffed by employees of Arabic and African origin, Triyeh, himself of North African origin, seemed to capitalize on their common roots.

Despite the sweet talking, the veterans of the first strike were on the alert for anything out of the ordinary. Early on, Triyeh’s hiring of a number of employees for previously unknown positions definitely raised the eyebrows of the store’s managerial staff. A friend of Triyeh’s, Kaïs Laamari was hired on as Supervising Market Director, a curious position for a supervisor of merely two restaurants. When Triyeh hired his brother, Abdel Triyeh, to be the Technical Director, the new position seemed particularly baffling to Kehila.

“Where are we here?” Kehila asks. “Are we in a factory using machines or what? What kind of technical expertise is needed inside this restaurant?”

But, as strange as the new positions seemed, it was a pattern of consistently disappearing produce that really began to worry the staff. Kehila, who had personally directed stocking the restaurant, a position familiarizing him with the store’s sales numbers, says purchases of produce are made in accordance with the store’s daily sales figures.

“We used to order five to six tons per week of produce and merchandise. How can you explain to me why after Hamid and Kaïs took the helm, that they ordered nine tons of produce weekly?”

The huge jump in purchases sufficiently baffled veterans of the store like Kehila and Assisant Manager Tino Fortunat, but the fact that the restaurant was finding itself consistently short on stocks was beyond their comprehension. Even after these huge shipments arrived, in a matter of days the restaurant was emptied of stock.

At this point, Kehila decided it was time to personally retake authority over inventory, and refigure all the calculations. The results were bizarre. Boxes of pickles that usually lasted for three days would disappear in one. Filet of Fish, an item the store had never had a shortage of, would come up short for two weeks. A shortage of fries was particularly strange.

“It’s really impossible to have a shortage of fries because we order huge quantities, in containers with 45 boxes each time. But they were gone!”

Kehila says that when he took Triyeh aside to describe the bizarre scenario that was unfolding, Triyeh was surprisingly unconcerned. Kehila was told that “things would be taken care of.”

“This is a franchise owner who has invested money into his business, who has employees warning him that his product is disappearing. And he responds ‘Don’t worry’? That’s really bizarre.”

As rue Saint-Denis happens to be the equivalent to Paris’ “red-light district,” it was the prostitutes of the area that began witnessing the removal of stock. Several of them have firmly attested to the strikers that they regularly saw people leaving through the store’s emergency exits at 2 and 3 in the morning loaded down with boxes.

Triyeh, as the franchisee of two locations, had access to produce through his other store. And since shipments of produce arriving at the restaurant allegedly arrived without transfer vouchers and proper documentation, the strikers stipulate that the source of the produce was Triyeh’s other location. It’s a scenario whose logic if carried out, leads to the strange conclusion that Triyeh was stealing from himself.

For suggesting this, Kehila says that some people have labeled the strikers paranoid or downright crazy. He isn’t surprised by their skepticism.

“If someone had told me the same story and it was me that hadn’t been there, I would also wonder why a boss would steal from himself,” Kehila says. “But one has to live it to see something like this happen.”

On the surface, a franchisee stealing from himself definitely seems bizarre. But regarding the scenario from the broader context of the McDonald’s corporation’s bottom line reveals an entirely different perspective. After all, these loyal union members bristling with pride after a successful strike could obviously pose a significant challenge to business as usual. The strike had resulted in a protocol being signed to improve worker’s conditions, raise salaries, and provide a ‘13th month’ (a typical French tradition which provides a bonus month of pay). Expanding these improvements throughout its many restaurants is something McDonald’s would understandably want to avoid.

The Power of a Strong Union

“ Going back two years ago, this started with the unions,” Kehila says. “When we wanted to hold union elections, the CGT (General Worker’s Confederation) barged into the company headquarters, and McDonald’s blew a fuse. They didn’t want it to happen. The unions are at the heart of this story.”

CGT, the original French union, has roots dating back to 1895, and an illustrious history of challenging corporations. As their ideas and tactics spread throughout the world, the terms ‘sabotage’ and ‘syndicalism’ became part of the revolutionary worker’s vocabulary. It was CGT’s organization of a blockage of McDonald’s warehouse L/R Services for several nights that eventually brought McDonald’s reluctant leadership to the strikers’ negotiating table.

CGT representative Karl Ghazi says that his union doesn’t have a bone to pick with McDonald’s in particular. “The points of contention we have here are the same ones we have with all bosses,” Ghazi says. “They aren’t used to accepting unions that challenge their authority and demand accountability.”

“We had been making trips to McDonald’s corporate offices to explain our concerns before the strike,” Kehila says. “We weren’t interested in getting into a conflict when we could fix things first. But no one wanted to listen to us.”

The notion that McDonald’s has a strong aversion to organized labor is certainly nothing new. Ray Kroc, the mastermind behind McDonald’s rise to fast food supremacy, was known to voice his fervent disdain for labor unions. And similar attempts to strike against the corporation in North America have frequently resulted in entire staffs being dismissed, restaurant closures and new ones sprouting up in their place.

Union-Busting Stoops to an Old Low?

Kehila believes Triyeh’s actions have by no means been mere accident. His readings on the subject of fast food labor relations have familiarized him with the role of the ‘cleaner.’ While brought in under the pretext of management, the cleaner’s aim is to do everything in his power to sink a restaurant and re-open one where labor relations are more favorable. And in this location, where deep-rooted union affiliation is an embarrassment to the corporate office, retaliation isn’t unimaginable.

As work conditions at the unionized franchise continued to decline the suspicion that Triyeh was a cleaner became very pronounced for the store’s employees. So pronounced, in fact, that it led employees to call for an emergency meeting and to file a ‘droit d’alert’ (state of alert) in preparation for a potential new strike. The legal procedure engages the services of an independent expert to analyze the situation of a business. Through the process, the expert is given open access to all of the business’ accounts. As it turned out, the state of alert brought financial incongruities into the light of day and would prove to be a strong card for the strikers to play as imminent legal wrangling began.

One of the more revealing statistics surfacing during the investigation, concerns contracts that Triyeh and Kaïs Laamari negotiated for the restaurant’s services. According to Karl Ghazi, company records reveal Triyeh paying six times more for security and three times more for cleaning than his predecessor.

Kehila says that produce wasn’t just disappearing, it was rotting. Refrigerators and freezers, in perfect working order, were regularly sabotaged, dialed into ridiculous extremes of cold or heat.

“Products were disappearing and it was unbearable in the store. A sewer like smell rose from the basement and was totally out of control.”

A swift reduction in the store’s staff from 55 employees to 25, found the store’s crews overtaxed and run down. And the firing of Assistant Director, eleven-year employee and card carrying CGT member Tino Fortunat, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Under these conditions of duress, a strike was called for on March 11, 2003. The workers numerous demands include a respect for union rights, a wage increase of 10 percent, full payment for the days on strike, and new hires to stop the declining work conditions.

Challenges Ahead

Now nine months into the new strike, adversity has been the strikers’ constant companion. Often volatile negotiations have tested their patience. Both Kehila and Karl Ghazi have confirmed an outburst that occurred during an October negotiation. Also in attendance were Triyeh, Laamari, a work inspector, the manager, and a female CGT delegate named Raja, amongst others.

The meeting, proceeding in a typically tedious fashion, found the strikers attempting to find some common ground. As they explained some points of agreement with McDonald’s, Kehila recalls that Laamari became inexplicably agitated and began insulting Raja. According to Kehila, the scenario ended with Laamari hurling a cigarette lighter at her and gesturing as if his chair was next. Both Laamari and Triyeh reportedly marched out of the meeting abruptly.

“Insults were flying from every side,” Kehila recalls. “The lawyer took refuge under the table. The representative of France McDonald’s didn’t know what to do with himself anymore. It’s the same scenario we’ve been up against except that as each day goes by the violence from their side escalates more and more.”

Financial challenges have been formidable and not limited only to the strikers. Two workers who took part in the 2002 strike, Hanang Chaouti and Karima Sikidi, decided to bow out of this strike for financial reasons. Under French law, if an employee doesn’t strike, they are entitled to their usual pay as long as the strike persists.

However, even though both Chaouti and Sikidi sent certified letters to Hamid confirming their non-participation in the strike, their paychecks didn’t arrive for 8 months. In October, the two finally took the matter to court and a judge awarded them the overdue back pay in addition to damages sustained.

“During the first three months we were holding out with our savings,” Kehila recalls. “Because we knew when we started witnessing bizarre things that we should start saving in case one day we had to go on strike. But we weren’t aware that it was going to be nine months and still going.”

To hold out the strikers have relied primarily on t-shirt sales. The shirt’s designs utilize McDonald’s ubiquitous M logo with the words ‘McMerde’ (McShit) or ‘McPrécarité’ (McPrecarious) echoing their own sense of instability in the company. They also have a solidarity box on site at the Strasbourg/Saint Denis location, in which workers take donations. In May, when demonstrations against the war in Iraq flooded the streets of Paris, the workers found a lot of sympathy for their cause in the passersby.

The seemingly never ending case, which despite occurring only in “one restaurant” in France, obviously has larger ramifications. Before the Iraq war, as contemptuous terms like “freedom fries” filtered down from Washington D.C. into the American populace, people sensitive to labor relations between the two countries weren’t particularly surprised at the sudden outburst of France-bashing.

After all, France wasn’t just another European country, amongst many, protesting the war in Iraq. It’s the home of unyielding farmers like José Bové who, in protesting bovine growth hormones, have raised the ire of the American beef industry, and the home of the CGT, a labor union whose strength threatens at any time to shut down the nation’s railways. A verdict delivered in favor of the Strasbourg/Saint Denis strikers could force one of the world’s largest corporations to rethink its treatment of organized labor. And I, despite being just one journalist writing about “one restaurant” feel like my questions for them deserve to be answered. But alas, as my phone remains silent, I guess I’ll have my “freedom fries” with a grain of salt and wait this one out.