Fast food restaurant staff really poorly treated in Perpignan, France by the ‘Quick’ chain.

Another thing I did whilst visiting Perpignan was to photograph a demo outside a branch of the French MacDonalds, Quick.

A slideshow of that demo can be viewed here, you will get a more complete experience of the event by looking at this here click here for

The fast food restaurant staff at this branch of Quick had been poorly treated because of their involvement with the Union. I was shocked to hear how long term members of staff had been sacked solely because of Union membership. The general theme here amongst all the staff is that they were all terrified of losing their jobs, they were all local to the branch, loyal and non-transient ie. this was not a workforce composed of students working through the summer, transient or temporary workers etc.. rather the people I spoke to really wanted their jobs back, proud of their work at a busy city centre restaurant and dependent on their job as their only source of income supporting families in an expensive city. There was an overwhleming feeling of vulnerability in the group demonstrating I felt, they wanted the jobs back but many felt just their presence on a Union organised event would seal their fate. Many members of staff avoided the demo I was told, especially the young mothers who work at the restaurant who fellow workers said several times where particulalry vulnrable as they where basically exploited becuase of their dependency on the job.

This is just a brief look at this story, but I feel there is a real issue here, the vulnerability of fast food restaurant workers all over France. I’d be interested if anybody could suggest how they might be able to support the workers in the demo here and their campaign or if anybody has done any similiar work then to get in touch. The Union working on this campaign can be found here at www.cgt.fr

2 contemporary photographs, one found photograph

The two photographs above are of a plastic barrier in the River: there is something permanent about the plastic, its colours and the nature of plastic, the fact that it lasts for so long, it will be lost out in the river for a long long time like some sort of permanent driftwood. The other is of a car outside an Islamic community centre in Liverpool. The third photograph is extremely sad I think.