Jobs in the fast food industry are often a young person’s first taste of working life – from slinging burgers after school to delivering pizzas on the weekend. The hours are flexible, and while the pay is usually minimal, the social side of it can be fun.
But full- or part-time, young workers spoken to for The Wireless agree – theirs is a tough job. Physically and mentally, there’s a lot to deal with: overwhelming heat in kitchens; demanding, sometimes abusive customers; standing all day, and the monotony of doing the same thing, shift after shift.
It’s all go, and while the industry prides itself on creating career opportunities, moving through the ranks isn’t for everyone.
Of people spoken to both on and off the record about their experiences in fast food work, responses were almost equally divided between enjoying the work, and despising it. None were particularly interested in careers within the fast food industry.
McDonald’s employs over 9000 people in New Zealand, the majority aged under 25. Photo: CORPSE REVIVER/ Wikicommons
THE ONLY OPTION
Taarira Kiro-Paewhenua, 23, worked in the Whangerei Burger King for two-and-a-half years, spending the whole time in the kitchen making the burgers; in the end she found the job “sickening”.
The job was her only option at the time and she didn’t want to go on a benefit, she says.
Supporting herself in her own flat, she lived on the minimum wage of $13.50 an hour, usually working 40 hours to cover her rent, bills and food, leaving only $20 a week to spend on socialising. She says the friends she made at work were the only reason she didn’t quit sooner.
The heat in the kitchen was often unbearable, but it was the low wages and monotony that finally got to her.
“From the time that I started to the time that I finished, I was always in the kitchen. I always asked to do drive through or front counter, cleaning up or doing the lobby but I never got put in those places … It got sickening.”
BUILDING BONDS
Auckland Unitec student Te Ngaronoa Mahanga, 25, has been working part-time at a Burger King in Auckland for just over two years, and enjoying it. The communications student puts his skills from his course to the test by trying to create good relationships with his customers and managers.
“I always try to build rapport with all the different customers; I find they keep coming back,” he says. “We like the familiarity of knowing who’s who and building bonds.
“Our management are really good, very polite and humble and engaged with the staff. In the past I’ve had managers who have had a power trip and they don’t engage or appreciate the work the hard workers do. Our new managers take time to say you are working hard … it makes all the difference.”
However, he does not want a career with the chain: “I wouldn’t stay there, it’s too demanding for a small portion of money.”
Burger King has 2550 employees, many of whom are young people entering the workforce for the first time. The company’s human resources general manager Sarah Caunter says the experience and skills learnt on the job, such as teamwork, customer service, time management and people skills, can be “invaluable” for first-time employees.
Similarly, McDonald’s spokesman Simon Kenny says the chain employs over 9000 people in New Zealand, the majority aged under 25. He says McDonald’s invests heavily in training new employees, who are able to gain NZQA-accredited training, enabling them to progress within the company, or move into other jobs with their skills.
CAMPAIGN FOR A ‘LIVING WAGE’
But while fast-food jobs can work well for students or others who need flexibility around their hours, and are not solely reliant on working for income, for others, needing fulltime work, Unite Union say there’s plenty of room for improvement.
The union is currently battling zero-hour contracts in the fast-food sector, where employees are not guaranteed a set number of hours work a week: one week, they could be full-time with 40 hours, and the next, seven.
Unite is also campaigning to get the minimum wage raised from $13.75 to a “living wage” of $15 an hour, as not everyone gets full-time hours in low-wage work.
“People are underemployed,” says Unite organiser Joe Carolan.
“When they designed the minimum wage, it was with the expectation that you’d have 40 hours’ work a week, but a lot of people are scraping through on 32 hours. If you lose five hours’ work, that means all your disposable income is gone.”
ALLEGATIONS OVER PAY
Unite is also backing Aucklander Sean Bailey, 20, who has been battling his former employer, McDonald’s, over the last year.
As a Unite union delegate for his store, he noticed his contract stated workers were entitled to a half-hour unpaid break, which he says some people were working through and were not being reimbursed for.
Bailey checked through his store’s wage timesheets (he says he had permission to do so from his manager at the time), and alleges that over four months, the 50 employees at his store had not been paid for their breaks, which he estimated was worth $2400.
From there he contacted another Auckland store, found they had a similar problem and decided to do an estimate for all 161 McDonald’s stores in New Zealand over the last five years, when it became law that workers get a half-hour unpaid meal break for every shift of more than four hours.
His estimates came up with approximately $8 million owed in the last five years; Unite is currently campaigning to get more information about the issue.
But the fight was just beginning for Bailey. In September, he took the issue to Parliament's Transport and Industrial Relations Select Committee, where he should have had the right to speak freely with no threat of retribution. However, McDonald’s reacted by sending Bailey a warning letter stating that speaking at the hearing in uniform “may give rise to breaches of your obligations to your employer”.
They also claimed he printed out the time sheets and pay records without permission. Bailey was then dismissed.
McDonald’s declined to comment on this to The Wireless, saying doing so would breach Bailey’s privacy.
NOT ALL BAD
While Bailey had a rough time with McDonald’s, Unite’s Carolan says it’s not all bad, and people shouldn’t think of all fast food workers as victims: some are doing quite well.
“If you work at KFC nowadays you have got a lot more protection of your hours, you get a better pay scale, you get bonuses like overtime … some people are on $20 an hour then get overtime, so that’s $30 an hour.”
He says KFC restaurants are the most highly unionised fast-food restaurant in New Zealand, with between 60 and 70 percent of workers in the union, enjoying benefits like life insurance, Christmas bonuses and regular gift vouchers through the year.
Student Katherine Bruce is a Unite union delegate who works at KFC Nelson while home for the holidays, and at the Wellington branch while studying at Victoria University.
KFC worker and Unite union delegate Katherine Bruce Photo: STACEY KNOTT/The Wireless
As a part-time worker, Bruce has enjoyed working there, but there were trying times.
The Nelson KFC has had bad press over the past year, with a Facebook page dedicated to it called ‘KFC Nelson worst service ever in NZ’.
Bruce says the reason they had a bad rap was due to the restrictions KFC owner Restaurant Brands would put on the hours managers could allocate. Bruce says things are better now, but at the time it was “frustrating”.
“We worked really hard. It’s just a shame that sometimes head office restricts hours which means that sometimes we can’t get the amount of staff we need on, which is really hard and we struggle … It’s gotten a lot better but last year it was really bad.”
Despite this, she says she enjoys the fast pace of the work, her workmates and the flexible hours that work around her study.
Reanne de Ruiter, 20, worked at New Zealand chain Hell Pizza in Auckland for a year, eventually leaving in May this year. Prior to that, she worked at McDonald’s in Wellington for nine months.
De Ruiter says while she’s happy to be out of the fast food industry, both roles were good learning experiences, teaching her how to work under pressure and good food-handling practices.
However, she was never offered more than the minimum wage at both roles.
“It’s pretty intense working there for minimum wage,” she says. “That was always really annoying – you know you are getting slammed but not make heaps of money off it.”
“I definitely gained a lot of confidence especially at McDonald’s, after dealing with a variety of people coming in yelling and harassing you, trying to get free food off you… You have to keep calm and deal with it. I’ve never had to do that before.”
ECONOMY ‘EXTREMELY TIGHT’
While the chains will generally have set agreements and contracts, Hell Pizza general manager Ben Cummings says that it is up to the owner of each franchised Hell Pizza to determine their pay and hour conditions.
“Generally every business in New Zealand now struggles with wage costs – it’s an extremely tight economy so there’s not a lot of room there,” he says.
“We wish we did have more flexibility in what we can pay staff – five to 10 years ago that used to be the case – but franchisees do find it increasingly difficult to pay significantly above minimum wage and still make a good living for themselves.…
“In saying that we are still renowned for paying better than most of the other companies in our industry.”
Employees often progress through Hell Pizza, and the company sometimes helps young people to become franchise owners, he says.
But not everyone can be the boss, and society is reliant on the work of the low-waged worker – fast food workers included.
A “demotivator” that did the rounds on the internet was of a photo of some fast food fries with the words: “Potential. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.”
Perhaps tasteless, but true: not everyone gets to be an astronaut, and not everyone wants to be. But, no matter the job, everyone wants to feel valued and be respected.
“Someone needs to clean the toilets in society – this is valuable work. If people didn’t clean toilets then the world would be covered in shit,” says Carolan.
“Similarly, if people want to eat, if it wasn’t for people working in restaurants, there would be no food ready for you eat, and service food is a part of that.
“I think it’s a struggle for the dignity for all workers to be respected and valued. I don’t think of them (fast food workers) as victims or their jobs as disposable because without them or the work they do, quite a lot of people wouldn’t get fed.”
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Burger King, McDonald’s and Restaurant Brands (KFC) were all invited to contribute to this story, through video interviews or answering questions via email or phone. All declined to allow The Wireless to interview their employees at work.
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