A top union leader intimately involved in the Fight For 15 campaign testified publicly today as part of a Brazilian senate hearing.
Fight for 15 / Via Twitter: @fightfor15
Scott Courtney has spent the better part of the past three years working, mainly behind closed doors, on what has become one of the highest profile labor campaigns in recent memory.
As a strategist and organizer with the Service Employees International Union, Courtney's work is by nature meant to take place behind the scenes. Organizers aren't the story, they explain time and again — workers are.
But on Thursday, at a senate hearing in Brazil called for by a coalition of trade unions, Courtney testified publicly for the first time against McDonald's, the fast food behemoth he has devoted so much time and energy to battling. As one of the masterminds of the Fight for 15 campaign to raise pay for low wage workers, Courtney may be as authoritative as any non-employee can be about how the company is seen by the people flipping its burgers and running its cash registers.
And today, in the Brazilian senate, he called the brand's business model a version of "cannibal capitalism," a business model "based on eating their own."
Fight for 15 / Via Twitter: @fightfor15
Workers, officials, and labor leaders from more than 20 countries attended the Brazilian Federal Senate hearing Thursday morning, many of them flown there by the Service Employees International Union. The union is moving to internationalize its approach to McDonald's, which is struggling to grow sales in the United States but is performing better in many overseas markets, including Latin America.
At the hearing, Brazilian members of Congress Carlos Zarattini and Mendes Thame called for a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry – the country's highest-level probe – to investigate financial practices and working conditions at McDonald's. Brazilian Labor Prosecutor Leonardo Mendoca also announced the formation of a task force to investigate allegations of labor law violations.
"I am ecstatic about the outcomes. We more than accomplished everything we hoped for," Courtney told BuzzFeed News. "At the end of the hearing, the Senator who convened the hearing asked if we would be willing to attend a meeting convened with McDonald's to discuss their global issues with the unions. We would happily meet them, wherever, whenever."
In addition to prompting this new level of scrutiny, the event was a spectacle designed to call media attention to McDonald's global practices, as part of the SEIU's ongoing pressure campaign.
Arcos Dorados, the McDonald's franchisee in Brazil and across Latin America, defended the company's treatment of workers. "Every month we offer more than 2,000 young Brazilians a chance to start their first job, with training, medical coverage, and opportunities for teamwork," the company said in a statement, "just as we have for more than 1.5 million Brazilians since we opened our first restaurant."
McDonald's employees in Brazil are unionized, Arcos Dorados said, "and receive pay and benefits in accordance with collective agreements reached by the 80 unions that represent them in the country."
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