Why workers in one French McDonald's are fighting for the restaurant's future

The fast food chain was once seen as a cultural menace to French tradition – but staff at one threatened McDonald’s claim it plays a vital social role

Lately the Marseille restaurant’s windows have been plastered over with pro-union banners and signs saying, ‘We want to work’ (Getty)

The nearly 20-year-old images have entered French folklore: peasants, farmers and ex-hippies dismantling a rural McDonald’s, panel by panel, in what became a symbol of France’s resistance to American fast food.

Today that ageing newsreel is being played in sharp reverse. A group of workers and their union leaders in Marseille are fighting tooth-and-nail to save a McDonald’s from closing in a working class, largely immigrant neighbourhood. A so-called Festival of Dignity protest was recently organised by the McDonald’s employees in an effort to save their roughly 70 jobs.

Even though McDonald’s was once seen as a cultural menace to a glorious French tradition, the workers say this particular McDonald’s, in its quarter-century of existence, has played a vital role as a social integrator in one of France’s most troubled districts – providing employment and shielding local youth from pervasive drug dealing, getting them out of jail and helping them stay out.

“Look, we’re not thugs here,” says Kamel Guemari, the restaurant’s assistant manager, who was hired at age 16 and is now 37. “We’re working. And we’re setting an example for the others. We’re playing a social role.”

The plan for this McDonald’s? Sell it to a Muslim halal food operator who aims to provide Middle Eastern food. The employees, many themselves Muslim and north African, are outraged.

“This is an insult. We’re fighting for lai​cité here,” says Salim Grabsi, a local schoolteacher and former employee, referring to France’s official credo of secularism. “The republic is one and indivisible.”

The object of their improbable affection is a squat low-rise box in the Saint-Barthélémy neighbourhood, in the city’s far north, miles from the pastel-hued port. It is marooned by highway construction on a projected bypass, at the edge of a choked traffic circle.

Lately the store’s windows have been plastered over with pro-union banners and signs saying, “We want to work”.

Although the French invented a word, “malbouffe”, or “bad feed”, to negatively capture the fast-food experience, saving the McDonald’s here has become a cause. Last week, Marseille’s mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin, announced his support for the employees.

“It seems to me that a company as big as McDonald’s, which received financial help during the construction of the bypass, can make an effort in an our northern neighbourhoods to stay in business and preserve jobs,” he says.

On Monday, the employees were in court to argue that their restaurant and five other Marseille McDonald’s should not be sold because of the potential risk to jobs and benefits from new owners. The other restaurants would continue under the golden arches, just owned by a new franchisee.

A decision in the case is expected on Friday.

The neighbours of the Saint-Barthélémy McDonald’s – boxy, off-white, six-storey cement housing projects with difficult reputations – are hardly more picturesque than the fast-food restaurant.

Outside the project buildings, nervous drug dealer scouts keep a watchful eye for strangers, even as they salute the militant unionists at the restaurant. A shootout with kalashnikovs in broad daylight this spring, outside an elementary school and filmed by a resident, is a fresh memory.

Inside the McDonald’s, families consume Happy Meals.

The two worlds are not mutually exclusive and that is the whole point, the workers say.

The Saint-Barthélémy McDonald’s is not like others, they earnestly argue – particularly not like those in America. Since its ceremonious opening by France’s labour minister in 1992, the restaurant has served as a “social shock absorber” for the neighbourhood, says Grabsi, the teacher who worked there in younger days.

The McDonald’s is Saint-Barthélémy’s second largest employer, after a supermarket chain, and a start in the world of employment for largely Muslim youth; often victims of employment discrimination. Judges have been known to reduce jail sentences for those promised jobs there. Some have even been sent to work wearing ankle bracelets to track their whereabouts.

“When there’s a problem with delinquents, we find them a job here,” says Grabsi, speaking of his students.

People come for a first job and stay for years, building careers and families in an area with few other opportunities besides drug dealing. Fabrice Elbaz, the operations manager, has been there 25 years.

Abdel Saidi, 33, worked at the restaurant for three years. “I had no experience, no diploma,” says Saidi, now a bus driver for Marseille public transit. “The ‘McDo’ really helped me. It was my first job. My mother was so proud.”

Guemari, who is leading the push to keep the McDonald’s open, recalls sleeping on benches at the port and the train station before coming to work in his early days at the restaurant.

“Look, I come from the poorest neighbourhood of all,” he says. “This was a chance for me to be hired by McDonald’s.”

Nordine Aklil, 28, has worked at the McDonald’s for three years. “I’m coming out of the lower depths, drugs and all that,” he says. “I did three years of prison.”

His family “spoke to the judge” about a job at the restaurant, he says, and “thanks to that I left prison a year early”. He added: “I was able to reinsert myself into society. They gave me a chance.”

Antoine Moreno, 31, also did time for selling drugs. “To be frank with you,” he says, “I was earning good money.”

Then, “I started to work here,” he continues. “I got a family. I’ve been here seven years. I’ve abandoned my old life, thanks to this place.”

McDonald’s corporate headquarters in France would not comment on the restaurant. A spokesperson provided an email from the local franchise operator, Jean-Pierre Brochiero.

“As for the restaurant in Saint-Barthélémy, the best option to continue to support 70 restaurant managers and crew is to sell this restaurant to an outside buyer,” Brochiero says.

Ralph Lindauer, the lawyer for the McDonald’s employees, acknowledged that the Saint-Barthélémy restaurant had suffered “undeniable losses”, even before the highway work.

But he says the restaurant’s big “structural role in Marseille’s north” should not be ignored. “There’s a lot at stake here for Saint-Barthélémy,” Lindauer says. “Everybody knows the reputation of these neighbourhoods.”

The restaurant “is a social and economic model which doesn’t correspond to the McDonald’s model of elsewhere – short contracts, minimal pay, no union representation,” the lawyer says. “Here, it’s the opposite: personnel with lots of seniority, and even some benefits.”

No McDonald’s executive has met with the employees here, nor have they met the new owner.

“We’re shocked by this,” Grabsi says. “We’re not here just to sell hamburgers. They’re just not recognising what kind of people we have here.”

© New York Times