Working for McDonald’s in Europe. The Unequal Struggle

Citation

Lockyer, C. (2001), "Working for McDonald’s in Europe. The Unequal Struggle", Employee Relations, Vol. 23 No. 6, pp. 643-646. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2001.23.6.643.2

Tony Royle’s text joins a growing list of texts examining both McDonald’s and the McDonalization thesis, and as such is inevitably judged in terms of its addition to our understanding of the phenomenon. Recent texts include: Alfino, M. et al. (Eds), McDonaldization Revisited (Praeger, 1998); Smart, B. (Ed.), Resisting McDonaldization (Sage, 1999); Love, J.F., McDonald’s: Behind the Arches (Bantam, 1995); Watson, J.L (Ed.), Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in South East Asia (Stanford University Press, 1997) and, for those seeking a spiritual analysis, Drane, J., The McDonaldisation of the Church (Dalton, Longman & Todd, 2000). Curiously or symbolically, at the time of writing this review, only the last text was being sold at a discount.

The book sets out to examine five broad questions. First, “how has McDonald’s actually managed its employee relations in a number of different European countries?”. Second, “How and to what extent has McDonald’s been able to operate an essentially US and non‐union approach to employee relations in the face of well‐organised trade unions and highly regulated industrial relations systems of Europe?”. Third, “How effective are the varying national European systems in protecting employment rights?”. Fourth, “What do the findings tell us about the way in which multinational corporations adapt to or operate independently of the societal frameworks in which they operate?” Finally, “What implications do the findings have for the future of European industrial relations and, on a wider level, for the future of the collectivist and liberal economic agendas?” The book ranges widely in its arguments and discussion, but is strongest in terms of its description rather than an analysis of McDonald’s employment practices and franchising operations. The book is less complete as to the extent to which these trends are typical of the multinational service sector.

Chapters two to five represent the descriptive core of the text. Chapters two and three outline the development of McDonald’s and the control of the franchise structures. Chapters four and five, possibly the most interesting in the book cover the nature of work, the characteristics of the workforce in the European operations and the differing policies towards trade unions. Chapters six to eight are less successful in their attempt to examine the significance of the legal regulation of employment on McDonald’s employment practices. Chapter six considers works councils, chapter seven the legal regulation of collective bargaining, and chapter eight examines the impact of the European Works Council directive. Chapters one and ten are less complete in their attempt to locate the employment policies in a wider contemporary debate in terms of the confrontation between the “New Right” and the “New Left”; “we examine the contest between one ‘heavyweight”’ multinational, the American McDonald’s Corporation, and the trade unions and national systems of industrial relations in over twelve European countries. However, it is questionable whether this is a fair contest or an equal struggle” (p. 3).

The book represents more than six years of gathering information by interview and by observation, and as such is a valuable collection of personal accounts of working for McDonald’s. These provide a rich source in contextualising low skilled and routinised service work. Secondly the book, especially chapter four, has value as a source of material on the employment policies of McDonald’s across Europe. However, it is unfortunate that the opportunity was not taken to update all of the official statistics prior to publication.

The book is less successful in its attempts to analyse these employment practices and to explain the differences between countries. An alternative route could have compared the trends in employment practices with those in other multinational service organisations, or in terms of a critique of human resource management – as has been adopted by another text in the Routledge studies in Employment Relations (Hoque, K., Human Resource Management in the Hotel Industry).

Working for McDonald’s in Europe raises questions as to the patterns of employment policies in the fast food sector, the differences in employment conditions and security across Europe. It highlights the concern as to the need to protect those most vulnerable to labour abuses (p. 211) both in the developed and developing world. However, more rigorous analyses of the patterns of employment in the service sector would have strengthened this text.