The McDonald’s sign beckoned as Rosa Franco and Mario Franco stood at the food court in the Darien service plaza on Interstate 95, ready to start their work shifts. They each hugged two union organizers before heading behind the counter.
Rosa and Mario, who are not related, have worked at McDonald’s a long time, including as shift supervisors — 15 years for her, 25 for him — but Monday night was not just another stint on the job.
This was their triumphant return after a Dec. 30 order by a federal administrative law judge who ruled the McDonald’s franchise owner, Michell Enterprises, had violated labor laws by failing to rehire them and two others after the coronavirus shutdown in March, 2020 — because of their union organizing activity.
Two years out of jobs they wanted back.
Two years in which they started near the bottom of the American Dream ladder and fell further, making ends meet with irregular cleaning and laborer jobs, borrowing from friends, relying on family members with work and eating into what little savings they had.
Now they return with an order for back pay, more than $100,000 in total for Franco, Franco and the two others in the case at the Darien northbound I-95 McD’s.
Rosa Franco laughed out loud describing the long, painful wait for justice. “That’s life,” she explained with the voice of someone who has seen tough times as an immigrant from Mexico with three children, now ages 16 to 22.
‘This victory…is for everybody’
“Buenas noches! Buenas noches!” she chimed as she crossed into the restaurant a step ahead of Mario, four minutes early at 7:56 p.m., herself with a blue medical mask, him donning a black cloth version. Behind the COVID-protective glass, back in the kitchen where Mario works, he and an older woman in white latex gloves embraced.
The return for Rosa Franco and Mario Franco — and Milagros Vasquez an hour earlier, and Pilar Mestanza, whose first shift is Thursday — was part of a long organizing effort launched in the summer of 2018 by SEIU 32BJ, the multi-state building services union. If it succeeds, they will make history as the first McDonald’s workers in the United States to form a recognized union.
Mestanza and Vasquez told me through a interpreter, spokesman Franklin Soults of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, that they were anxious about returning to a job where management might not welcome them. “I don’t feel good,” Mestanza said.
“I’m nervous, it’s frightening to go back, maybe they don’t want me,” Vasquez said just before her five-hour shift began at 7 p.m. Monday, as she described being out of work while her mother, a cancer patient, was stuck for months in Stamford after visiting from Peru at the start of the pandemic.
No such trepidation for Franco and Franco. They have been the most outspoken McDonald’s workers in rallies, petitions and appearances in the media.
My column of December 2019, featuring them and a few others, was cited heavily in the 47-page order by federal Administrative Law Judge Donna Dawson and in the three-week trial last winter. The nine days of testimony showed media accounts emailed to Michell managers — who claimed they didn’t see the emails.
For Franco and Franco, the return was a hoped for return to normalcy, perhaps a bookend to a brutal two pandemic years — but also part of a mission. That’s why there’s no question they would return if given the chance.
“Many workers stay inside waiting for us. Because this victory is not just for us, it’s for everybody,” Rosa Franco said.
“Everybody waiting for us,” said Mario Franco, who also immigrated from Mexico.
It’s all the sweeter a victory because, in a separate series of hearings and complaints, 32BJ SEIU appears to have won the right for all the McDonald’s workers at the service plazas to receive higher wages. The service plazas, run under a master contract, are on state property and so most of the McDonald’s franchise owners have agreed to settlements in which they pay “standard wages.”
That means the workers should be paid between $16.90 and $17.55 an hour, a number that rises with the minimum wage, which is $13 an hour and heading to $15 in mid-2023. In all, the union said it has recovered more than $1 million in back wages for the service plaza workers.
‘Evasive, equivocal, inconsistent testimony’
Mario Franco said he went a year and a half unable to find work in Connecticut. Employers would check his name and find he was active in the union effort, he said. The discrimination, he said, came about “just because we tried to get better treatment for ourselves and our co-workers.”
The case of the four workers, all Stamford residents, began with a complaint by 32BJ SEIU to the National Labor Relations Board, which agreed with the contention and tried to settle with Michell before gong to trial. The issue was, in part, whether Michell managers knew about the workers’ union activities, and acted on that knowledge.
“Respondent argues that it recalled many employees who also engaged in protected activity, which is true. However, as shown, no other employee’s level of Union and other protected activity reached the levels of the four discriminatees,” Judge Dawson wrote, referring to non-union-related complaints lodged by at least one of the four workers that also may have led to retribution.
Dawson wrote that she said she found a key Michell manager’s “evasive, equivocal, inconsistent testimony unbelievable.”
Michell Enterprises insisted union discrimination had nothing to do with its reason for not rehiring the four in the case. The company, based in Windsor Locks, owns about 20 McDonald’s locations in Connecticut and surrounding states, three at I-95 plazas.
Michell did not return a call seeking comment and a lawyer for the company said Tuesday he was not authorized to comment.
For the workers and the union, it’s a step, but just a step, toward the ultimate, first-of-its-kind victory of a collective bargaining unit at a U.S. McDonald’s. It started in 2018 after unionized building cleaners at the plazas reported what they called ill-treatment of restaurant workers, said Neil Diaz, Connecticut state district leader for the union.
“Organizing is extremely hard when people are threatened,” Diaz told me, describing efforts to unionize food workers at all 23 service plazas on I-95, I-395 and the Merritt/Wilbur Cross Parkway. “We’re on the right track.”
The judge’s ruling came as a surprise to Rosa Franco. “The owner has money,” she said, “and we have nothing.”
dhaar@hearstmediact.com