Understaffed and Overworked: The Workers Behind Aotearoa’s Most Popular Fast-Food Chain

Words by Maia Ingoe (she/her)

McDonald’s is universally recognisable. Most of us have been to the Courtenay Place restaurant on a Saturday night when it's packed with people retreating from town for a quick, late-night feed. We all know the branding and the menu, and, chances are, we know someone who’s worked there.

Behind the big red ‘M’ and salty smells of fast food are the employees that assemble the burgers, scoop the fries, and make the coffee. Most of the time, the crew are young: still at school, or have just left.

“For me, it was tied very closely with the whole sort of, coming into your own,” Ava, an ex-employee, told me. She started working at McDonald's as a fresh-faced high school leaver. At a store outside of major cities, Ava worked her way through the McDonald’s career ladder from a crew member to crew trainer, to hiring and shift manager.

“As a job, it was like my lifeline,” she says. Ava was living in a new city after returning to Aotearoa when she was hired at McDonald's, which she says led her to be swept up into the intense working culture at the fast-food restaurant. She embraced working 60 to 70 hour weeks, she found a social group, and although she now questions the intense working environment, for the first three years she “loved it”.

Ava was promoted to management positions at the same time as four other young employees, and the restaurant harboured a competitive work culture to squeeze the most out of their workers. “The 60, 70 hour weeks were a point of pride. It was a competition between all the managers, especially the young managers who were all kind of my age to see who could do the longest workweek.”

There are 167 McDonald's restaurants in Aotearoa, with one million visitors every week. Around 10,000 people are employed across the country—a combination of full time, part-time, and casual staff. 

Staff at McDonald's are paid ten cents above minimum wage, topped up with another dollar for crew training. Once trained in a management position, employees can’t be paid less than a manager’s wage, but they have an obligation to work with Maccas for the next year.

Ruby was 16 when she was hired. “One of the first things [my manager told me was] don’t stress out Ruby. This is McDonald's. Nobody expects that much of you.” 

At the first restaurant Ruby worked at, an overbearing manager made the environment more intense. “He actually made my job way, way worse. I was literally scared to come to work, because I wouldn't want to be told off.” There was an expectation to always be doing something, even if it was wiping down a counter that had already been cleaned five times. 

Ruby laughs heartily, recalling a story of her co-worker who was frantically looking for something to do as the manager passed and ended up petting the sauce packets. In other ways, the management situation shows itself to be more concerning: “He used to literally watch the cameras from home and it would scare me,” she said.

Now at university, Ruby works one steady shift a week for the restaurant—any more, and her student allowance is reduced because of personal income limitations. She doesn’t mind it: The job doesn’t require much brainpower and working mornings in the Courtenay Place restaurant is more relaxed than expected.

Courtenay Place transforms late at night on a Friday. Crowds of people pass through the street outside McDonald's. At the door, a makeshift table and screen, and the now nationally-recognisable yellow-striped Covid-19 signage, advertising mandatory vaccination for entry and QR code scanning. Behind the screen, wearing an apron and mask, a person stands scanning vaccine passes one by one.

“Friday overnights is when you get college students, drunk adults, the sugar high kids, it’s definitely a lot more stressful. Especially because we're not allowed to swap the people that are scanning the door on Saturday, like at all.” Jamie, a full-time crew member at McDonald's, tells me. Jamie spends the majority of those late nights standing at the restaurant door, scanning vaccine passes. “That one night kills me for the rest of the day,” they say.

The McDonald’s website advertises a ‘happy family’ image of a McDonald's crew team. The career page reads: “So whether you like putting a smile on people’s dial, building custom-made burgers, or making a mean cappuccino, we have a role that will work for you!”

Jamie says it’s sugarcoated: “Yeah, we smile, because otherwise we get told off, which is fine, it’s customer service. But a lot of the time you’ll get shitty customers.”

In the late-night party environment of downtown Wellington, many people use McDonald's just as a toilet stop on the way to town, or the last stop on the comedown of a drunken high. Jamie tells me of a customer denied entry on a Friday night because they couldn’t present a vaccine pass. The man continued to piss in the doorway, making eye contact with one of the staff.

The pressure of customer service was difficult in many ways before the vaccine system was introduced, Jamie explains. Being a front-facing worker for a fast-food restaurant comes with its share of abuse and difficulty from customers. “Sometimes you want to go home and just curl up in a ball.”

We talk on a weekday afternoon, fresh out from a morning shift. Their exhaustion from the day shows. As a crew trainer, Jamie is tasked with training new staff alongside working the café, restaurant, and kiosk. Although morning shifts are quiet compared to nights, there are still busy rushes. Jamie paints a picture of a hectic environment during lunch rushes in the small restaurant: “You're yelling at someone who's on the other side, not really yelling, but shouting, because it's quite loud with everything going off all the time. Then you're asking them to drop some like crispy chicken patties. And then you're on the other side trying to pick up the beef patties and try to put them on the grill. It can be quite tense.”

Ruby enjoys the slower pace for most of the day—she describes it as a mental break from university study. At the first Wellington restaurant she was rostered at, problems of near-constant understaffing showed. “Even when I worked a three-hour shift there, I felt so exhausted because they get so many customers and you're constantly doing stuff on your feet,” she says.

“The real issue at the moment has been understaffing and overwork,” Xavier Walsh told me. The 19-year-old Auckland University student joined Unite Union on their first day at McDonald's two and half years ago and is now the Under 35 Stand Up youth network representative and the co-president. Unite Union represents McDonald's and other fast-food employees throughout Aotearoa. They have between 1300 and 1500 members nationwide, with most of those from bigger centres, but any standards negotiated roll over to all 10,000 employees. The onset of Omicron has turned up the pressure for all hospitality workers, and McDonald's is no exception. “It’s a really draining job at the best of time[s],” Xavier tells me, with that pressure continuing outside of the job, eating into studies, social life, and mental health.

McDonald's has been running an employment campaign for the past year in an attempt to address shortages made more obvious by the pandemic: Posters in shop windows show smiling employees, quotes saying McDonald's doesn’t just build burgers but careers too. According to Xavier, things won’t change until people are valued. “It’s recogni[s]ing that this is hard work, and we should be compensated for that through the living wage, $22.75 [...] we should be getting free meals, not just half-price meals, we should be ensuring that we get looked after.”

Aotearoa’s minimum wage increases by $1.20 as of 1 April, but Xavier says “it’s not enough”, falling short of the $2.75 increase needed to meet living wage. Unite Union are in the position to negotiate fair pay agreements: a system designed by the government to facilitate minimum terms and conditions within an industry. The hospitality industry is crucial here, says Xavier, because it’s recognised as being one of exploitation and breaches of minimum standards.

For Ava, everything changed in 2019. She suffered a knee injury and was suddenly unable to work long hours on the floor. “Then I wasn't useful to them anymore. And they just flipped like a switch.” 

When her doctors ruled out working full nine-hour shifts on the restaurant floor, Ava’s hours were reduced to four days a week and shifts were split between five hours on the floor, and three hours in the back office, completing bookwork. In a busy restaurant environment, this didn’t last long, and Ava says management consistently asked her to come back out to the floor throughout her shift, with no sympathy for her painful injury.

The reductions in hours resulted in her being unable to run shifts. For a short time she was rostered as a ‘support manager’, and then her hiring manager position was given to another staff member. Ava felt like she had no control over her job. “It really sent me into a spiral because my whole sense of identity had been really tied to McDonald's,” she said. 

“I'm a 20-year-old girl sitting in this office in front of my boss, begging, in pain […] for less hours. And he's like, okay, cool. Well, fuck you then,” she recalls.

Looking back on her role as a manager, Ava says she feels “complicit” in creating the toxic working culture. “I used to be like, if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean. I used to tell people we're not paying you to stand still.”

It’s been six months since Ava left McDonald's, and she says it was the best decision she could make for her wellbeing. “My job now treats me like a human that is just trusted to do the job that I was hired for. And they treat me like a human. I'm allowed to take bathroom breaks and I’m allowed to go get a drink of water if I need one. Whereas at McDonald's, you can't do that.”

Ruby plans to quit McDonald's as soon as she’s able to at the end of the university year. “I think we get a pretty bad rep considering we’re earning 10 cents above minimum wage, and we're working harder than someone who probably earns about 10 times more than us and owns the restaurant,” she says, laughing with a positive air. The job is easy to handle at part-time and she says no when asked to pick up shifts. For many employees, it’s not a long-term commitment.

Jamie accepts the job as what it is, and is looking towards the management certificate, which is well-regarded in the hospitality industry. “It’s just a job at the end of the day. It’s a means to an end.”