More pointless union protests in front of Mickey Dees.

Lemme translate the Scotsman’s spokeswoman for you.  To give you the context; the unions are trying to organize fast food restaurant workers again, and having a slow going at it because the only compelling reason that anybody in Big Labor can come up with for unionizing fast food workers is We need the dues, man. So they had a bunch of protests in a bunch of places – or, as Politico rather laughably put it, “Fast food strike takes over 60 cities” – and that’s pretty much how it went.  Nobody’s really expecting any movement:

In the past, such strikes on a smaller scale have forced some fast-food chain stores to close temporarily. But McDonald’s isn’t expressing much concern about the impending event.

“It will be business as usual for us,” Casillas Ofelia[*], a spokeswoman, said in an email. “We respect our employees’ rights to voice their opinions. Employees who participate in these activities and return to work are welcomed back and scheduled to work their regular shifts as usual. … The story promoted by the individuals organizing these events does not provide an accurate picture of what it means to work at McDonald’s.”

Translation: if you want to ‘strike’ on your own time, whatever.  Miss your shift, lose your job.  And why are you calling Corp? Most of our stores are owner-operated.

Let me just note something for folks: unionizing the fast food restaurants will not result in $15/hour salaries for flipping burgers and running a cash register.  Based on my own extensive experience as a spatula serf, it’s not so much the wages, although that asked wage is absurdly too high in its expectations; it’s that no sane franchise owner wants to hire the average fast food employee under any conditions besides ‘at-will’ termination.  For that matter… based on my somewhat less extensive experience as a member of a supermarket union, wages will not go up for any fast food restaurant workers who do unionize.  They will probably in fact stagnate; wage freezes in exchange for mandatory dues collection is a somewhat old trick.

Which union bigwigs already know; but, hey, the point is to shake down merchants for discretionary cash anyway.

Moe Lane

*Her name is actually Ofelia Casillas, and she’s both a former journalist, and a former minion of Obama for America.  Ach, the irony of it all!

Full disclosure: I actually own a piddling amount of McDonald’s stock.