Fast-food ‘strikes’ short on workers, long on unions

Today, union organizers and a handful of disgruntled fast-food employees are joining hands with fellow travelers in cities across the United States (and other countries) to protest large restaurant chains and demand a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Today’s demonstrations are misleadingly being called “strikes” by their organizers. In reality, they’re nothing more than Potemkin village protests led by national labor unions. It’s part of a larger corporate smear campaign against the fast-food industry, stage-managed from the top down.

The financial and organizational muscle behind these protests is the Service Employees International Union. According to filings with the Department of Labor, the national labor union has spent more than $15 million on the fast-food protests since January 2013.

Until recently, the majority of this funding was distributed directly to the so-called “worker centers” that are the face of the protests, most notably two groups called Fast Food Forward and Fight for $15. After these connections came under scrutiny during last year’s protests, however, the SEIU added another layer of darkness to obscure its ties to the movement: “Workers Organizing Committees.”

Purportedly independent of the SEIU, Workers Organizing Committees are essentially front-group entities that serve the union. They receive nearly all of their funding from SEIU national headquarters, then send it right back out to worker centers. For example, the Fast Food Workers Committee in New York reported zero members last year, took in $1.8 million from the SEIU (99 percent of its revenues), then sent $1.6 million out the back door to New York Communities for Change.

The SEIU’s control of the committees also extends to their leadership. The Fast Food Workers Committee in New York, for example, is led by Kendall Fells, who is listed on official SEIU filings as New York’s city coordinator. The Worker Organizing Committee of Chicago lists E.J. Serrano as its president. Serrano simultaneously serves as the vice president of SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana. The list goes on.

While SEIU is the muscle behind today’s protests, the brain (if you can call it that) is the public relations shop BerlinRosen. Founded by Democratic Party flacks Valerie Berlin and Joshua Rosen, BerlinRosen is the go-to PR firm for left-wing organizations, Democratic politicians — including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — and labor unions.

BerlinRosen’s involvement with these campaigns previously had been far less conspicuous than that of the SEIU. But recent annual union filings with the Labor Department reveal the level — and price — of its contributions. In fiscal year 2013, BerlinRosen received nearly $4 million from various unions. Since 2012, it has received more than $3.25 million from the SEIU and its local unions alone, including for the fast-food protests.

BerlinRosen isn’t being paid that money for press releases. The quarterbacking of all communications for these events helps explain the similarities of the carefully stage-managed protests. As the Daily Caller reported last year, nine fast-food employees on nine separate occasions complained of not being able to afford shoes for their children.

The media has begun catching on to the fact that these are union-orchestrated PR stunts, not grass-roots expression by disgruntled employees. Reporting on a recent protest, The Associated Press noted “it wasn’t clear how many participants were fast-food workers, rather than campaign organizers, supporters or members of [BerlinRosen].”

Such heavy media focus can also lead to the exploitation of the very people the SEIU claims it is helping. Speaking to the labor publication In These Times, one employee described his experience with union organizers at a corporate shareholder meeting last year: “I don’t like the fact that these people, the workers, are being used like pawns. Shuffle them in, shuffle them out, tell them what to say, what makes the best story for the media.”

Pawns indeed. Which gets to the larger issue: These protests aren’t about fast-food employees organically banding together for higher pay; they’re about the SEIU and its war against the food industry. So if you encounter one of these bogus protests while out for lunch today, ask for no union, hold the spin.

Richard Berman is the executive director of the Center for Union Facts, which operates WorkerCenters.com.