I-95 Service Plaza Workers Win Case Against McDonald's

 

Owner George Michell ordered to return workers to their jobs and provide compensation

 

On December 30, an administrative law judge of the National Labor Relations Board found that a local McDonald’s used pandemic layoffs as a “scheme” to rid itself of four workers fighting for better conditions and a union across Connecticut’s interstate service plazas. The ruling comes almost a full year after a lengthy trial seeking restitution for Mario Franco, Rosa Franco (unrelated), Pilar Mestanza, and Milagros Vasquez, who were never recalled to their jobs at the Northbound Darien plaza on I-95 after the pandemic’s March 2020 shutdown.

 

In her 47-page decision, Administrative Law Judge Donna N. Dawson systematically repudiated the “almost complete unreliability” of McDonald’s witnesses at the January trial, detailing evidence of management’s animus toward unionization and monitoring of workers, at times with the email support of McDonald’s corporate PR and government relations teams. In conclusion, Judge Lawson ordered the McDonald’s owner, Michell Enterprises, to reinstate the workers within 14 days and compensate them for back wages and other losses (calculations are pending).

 

“This decision lays bare the way that McDonald’s and other fast food outlets have used the pandemic as cover to attack fair pay, basic benefits, and workers’ protected right to form a union,” said Rochelle Palache, Vice President of 32BJ SEIU, which filed the NLRB charges and represented the workers’ at trial alongside the government. “We are proud and thrilled that Mario, Rosa, Pilar and Milagros now join other McDonald’s workers who have won restitution in the service plaza campaign, and we enter the New Year determined to win better conditions and a union for them and all their coworkers, as a part of the national campaign for $15 and a Union.”

 

In 2021, two other sets of McDonald’s service plaza workers in Connecticut also won restitution. An October settlement with Michell Enterprises, owned by local McDonald’s magnate George Michell, cumulatively awarded Itamar Contreras, Andrea Hernandez and Besly Paul over $30,000 in back pay, and another in March with Golden Hawk LLC, owned by Roger Facey, gave thousands more to Yadira Martinez and Azucena Santiago.

More recently, Santiago was also honored at the People’s World Amistad Awards and received proclamations from the New Haven Board of Alders, the Connecticut General Assembly and the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal. These individual victories are compounded by the hundreds of thousands of dollars in higher wages and back pay that McDonald’s workers on I-95 have won since the start of the campaign.

 

Though Michell’s McDonalds may yet appeal, the ruling closes out the year on a satisfying note for Mario Franco, who worked at the Darien service plaza McDonald’s for over twenty years. “After all the struggles we’ve gone through, I’m so glad that the justice we’ve always desired is finally starting to arrive, and I believe together we can make this New Year the one where we win new union membership for all.”