8 Reasons Why We're Boycotting Burgerville
1. Poverty wages
The average Burgerville worker makes approximately $900 a month after taxes, which is over $1,200 below the poverty line without even accounting for children or dependents.
2. Illegal Union Busting
  • There have been 34 ULP charges filed against Burgerville in just the last year and a half.
  • Burgerville fired a prominent union organizer ostensibly for eating bagel and continue to wield an unaccountable disciplinary process to scare workers into silence. 
    ​Other anti-union tactics include threats, shady firings, obstruction of information, favoritism, uneven enforcement of policy.
  • Burgerville hired Bullard Law—the #1 union buster in Oregon--for its anti-union campaign
3. viOLATIONS OF Occupation saftey and health Administration (osha) & Bureau of Labor AND iNDUSTRIES (boli) policies
4. PRECARITY
  • Burgerville workers face erratic schedules that make it difficult to juggle second and third jobs, arrange and pay for childcare, and raise their families. Despite the company’s claims of offering healthcare to all employees, few workers are actually on Burgerville’s health insurance plan, with many workers strategically scheduled just under the 30 hours a week average required to qualify.
  • The restaurants are full of greasy slip hazards, hot surfaces, and chemicals yet offer few to no floor mats and little training.
  • In some stores workers are faced with other health hazards, such as having to pick up used hypodermic needles with little to no training or extra safety equipment.
5. cORPORATE gREED
No matter how much they like to spin it, Burgerville can’t escape the fact that it’s is a massive, non-franchised fast food company run by an elite executive board. ​In fact, former CEO Jeff Harvey had connections to Chevron. 
6. worker power
We are building a sustainable organization of and for workers, to improve workers’ lives for years to come. Supporting our boycott means supporting the efforts of workers to take back their lives from bosses who only want to extract more and more value from them.

At the end of the day, workers are who make all the value in the world. The boss needs us more than we need the boss—it’s up to us to organize our power so we can win what we deserve.
7. immigrant power
Burgerville currently refuses to opt out of the use of E-Verify, a program that checks the immigration status of applicants, in their hiring process. This program, which is optional, has contributed to the creation of hostile environments for immigrants in the United States.
Learn more about the problems with E-Verify here.
8. Low-wage economy
There are over 4 million people employed in fast food jobs across the United States. These jobs are underpaid, exhausting, and precarious. A report from 2014 showed that most job growth since the 2008 recession came from low-wage industries like fast food.

The Burgerville Workers Union fits into a global movement of fast food workers organizing for better lives, from the inspiring efforts of Fight For $15, to the various campaigns organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). As larger sections of the population work these sorts of jobs, it only becomes more urgent to support organizing efforts.