Should the 1,100 Canadian Tim Hortons’ franchisees unionize themselves?

Considering the Ontario Labour Relations Board’s ruling (The Ontario Labour Relations Board Opens The Door To Franchisee Unionization In The Canada Bread Certification Case), you’d think it’s worth looking at.

Do you think the Tim Hortons franchisees have understood that they’ll likely be paying 3G Capital for the privilege of exiting their stores?

• ie. that the franchisor, currently, can unilaterally drive a franchisee’s equity into the negative and hide the fact from the market and other with confidentiality agreements.

Do you think the franchisees perceive themselves to be at war?

You were taught to hate yourself

But can you hate just yourself?

What about the more vulnerable in your family.

Your spouse and kids.

You have the right to squander their lives by not resisting?

This goes for franchisees as well.

Have field franchisees & their leaders been persecuted by franchise supremacists?

Franchising and the American Dream grew in the same soil.

Some say lynching is deep within in the American psyche. And it’s alive and well today (Karen Klein).

Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Words by  Abel Meeropol

You don’t need a rope and tree to lynch someone. Lynching happened after slavery was abolished, when control was less direct but still needed by the dominant political, social, and economic class across the country.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., April 16, 1963

The case for repealing disclosure laws

Any law exists because those most able to compete for it goes to the political process and wins.

This is how the Ontario franchsie law went in 2000. I was there.

Everyone’s interests were served very well, except the powerless: mom-and-pop franchise investors.

Sure a few attorneys were made multi-millionaires (continue to blackball, block and betray sincere advocates), the franchise bar has reached record numbers (God love those disclosure document revisions!) while the 2nd-worst-chumps, the false protagonists (the franchisors) got  a short-term sales bump but their reputation continues to nose dive.

On any legitimate public policy level, the Arthur Wishart Act is a complete and total failure.

But as a way to launder mom-and-pop life savings via dim-witted franchisors?

Priceless to the true champions of tyranny (the franchise bar legal elite).

Are there franchisor collaborators in your midst?

Absolutely.

And they’re probably the highest volume, most profitable franchisees.

Talking about “the” franchisees or “our” group is a dangerous over-generalization when franchisees start planning a prison break. Franchisees are either ok, stumbling by or hemorrhaging cash: usually in 1/3 measures. The very best systems are 40:40:20.

The motivations of each individual franchisee depends on their relative ranking within each tradename system. Their personal weaknesses are the franchisor’s control mechanisms.

Beware the “managers” clothed in franchisee wool: his or wife’s family money will betray real franchisees all the time.

Highest volume franchisees almost always act as if they were franchisors. And in my experience, they’re the highest volume because of favours given. But the greatest obstacle is between their ears: They perceive themselves in a favoured spot (ie. top dog on the steaming heap) and will not relinquish this ego position. They cling to informal influence by failing to lead, follow or get the hell out of the way. Their only job is to sabotage any productive discussion, let alone realistic planning.

See Franchisee associations: House versus field negroes. Every group needs an outsider to point out the wolves in sheep’s clothing.  This is my paid services to serious, honest field negro franchisees. I help individuals franchisees work out situations in franchising in the most cost-effective, anonymous and safest manner possible. I will always return any phone call, whether or not I am being paid.

Want a great hint as to who is likely to go Judas-on-your-ass?

They will acknowledge the need for reform but urge a “middle path”.

They will tell their “peers” that they can never become franchisors themselves, notwithstanding the histories of Dave Thomas, Ron Joyce,  and Ted Gorski. They need to be the smartest guy in the room, even if it means dumbing everyone else down. Too smart for me?: keep him outside.

Be fooled by the quislings if you want:

One franchisee makes a majority in the proper franchisee-led, consultant-coached/trained and specialized lawyer-negotiated independence plan. A co-operative not a slaughterhouse.

Ever heard of a hostile, but confidential, takeover of a predatory franchise system by current and former franchisees?

No?

Good luck with your plan then…

Lap/watch dogs and the role of equity in franchisee groups

Evolve or die.

If I had a million dollars I would invest it in the franchise industry but not in a conventional sense.

Three types of groups:

1. Advisory Councils: There to give the illusion of participation and to reward collaborators. Lipstick on a pig.
2. Independent Franchisee Association, IndFA: one-vote, one-franchisee, subscription-funded, mostly short-term and knee-jerk reaction. Doomed to fail because membership penetration rate seldom above 15% nationally (aborts maturing of indigenous franchisee leaders). Great pre-trial cannon fodder for the class action franchise bar (only publicly traded targets). Only a tiny fraction of valid claims ever emerge from half-formed programs retarded by a constant burn-out of continuously begging franchisee cannon fodder leaders despite the initial Year 1 dues leveraging to 3 to 4 times for every franchisee. Fundraising ballbusting forces IndFAs into class action lawyer’s arms. A interim form of franchisee ghettoization for amateur organization men: strictly chop-down-the-orchard-for-firewood thinking. Underfunded at $1,000 a store.
3. Attorneyless Franchisee Networks: pay-as-you-go “common members” (min. $2,000 per year) plus “preferred equity holders” (ie. current franchisees, in and out of system, angel investors). Investing (pre-set ROI, timeframes) available to 100% current members one year after initial formation. Realistic budget for national: $500,000 over two years. Plant-an-orchard mentality where franchisee leadership development can continue long enough for self-governance to incubate. True franchisee control with consultants and lawyers as sub-contractors. Overcomes credence good cheating (legal and industry) by creating a market for second opinions. Power has shifted to less than 5% of franchisee involvement because of the internet and increasing levels of franchisor paranoia.

Franchisee collaborators or house negroes  should (but won’t) pay attention as they have the most (marginally) to lose.

Sleep lost by yours truly?

Zero.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

Franchisees who think they can have freedom and securty without working together, are deluded.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

And a new favourite: They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.

— George Orwell

Is confidence in all franchising past the Tipping Point?

The CEO and president of the International Franchise Association, IFA announces his retirement.

And then their board of directors announces that it’s looking for his successor?

• Hello…does anyone talk to each other on the premiere franchisor-dominated trade association any more? Nobody cared on the board of directors enough to do anything until Matt Shay went public?

Don over at Blue MauMau makes a great point in his Importance of succession planning.

It is a healthy sign when a board of directors is strong enough to carry out one of its most fundamental jobs, making sure there is a leadership successor.

In the hidden world of the board room, it is a rare outward sign of possible cronyism or a weak board when it has not carried out this function. A vacuum of leadership in a trade association can be disconcerting to its membership. It can be an incredible opportunity for competitors.

The IFA announced yesterday that it has hired an executive search firm—probably with “urgent”, “critical” and “HELP!” stamped all over the job description packet—to find a suitable candidate to replace its outgoing CEO, Matt Shay. He has given his month notice, April 16.

I added my two cents worth in Excellent point on Leadership continuity.

I suggest every half-baked, local not-for profit plans for their leaders’ recruitment, training and inevitable replacement. Leadership planning is the core competency of any boy scout troop let alone the “brain trust” of everything that goes bump in the night in franchising worldwide.

It seems the IFA Board is in crisis. A crisis, I suggest, that has been triggered by almost no new sales or re-sales in a recession (contrary to past cycles). They denied it first, got angry at scapegoats, bargained with Uncle Tom social medias, sulk/in a funk and then will be dragged unwillingly into accepting a new, higher-quality business model (see death stages).

D’oh!!

The elite’s catching on: their dinosaur practices has pushed the industry past the Tipping Point with investors’ confidence.

And they realize they are powerless because the internet’s reputation mechanism lacks an off switch.

John Q. Public investor is waking up (becoming conscious) to the fact that modern franchising is Unsafe at any Brand.

• This is very good news for franchisees wanting to co-operate with each other and good faith franchisors.

Not so much for the opposite: house negro franchisees and predator franchisors.

Field negro Franchisees are peeing in society’s gene pool

Everybody should know their place and keep to their own.

Attitudes toward people can live well after any junk-science theories are discredited.

Eugenics is the study and practice of selective breeding applied to humans, with the aim of improving the species. In a historical and broader sense, eugenics can also be a study of “improving human genetic qualities…

Widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century, it has largely fallen into disrepute after having become associated with Nazi Germany. Since the postwar period, both the public and the scientific communities have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of “undesired” population groups.

However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about what exactly constitutes the meaning of eugenics and what its ethical and moral status is in the modern era.

These moral issues remain and continue to be repeated by elites that wish to cling to power at any cost.

Elites treat all non-humans are as if they were children

SIR–I do not join in the belief that the African is our equal in brain or in heart; I do not think that the average negro cares for his liberty as much as an Englishman, or even as a serf-born Russian; and I believe that if we can, in any fair way, possess ourselves of his services, we have an equal right to utilize them to our advantage as the State has to drill and coerce a recruit who in a moment of intoxication has accepted the Queen’s shilling, or as a shopkeeper to order about a boy whose parents had bound him over to an apprenticeship. I say an equal right, because if soldiers were abased and degraded by their profession, or if the duties of an apprentice tended to make him a worthless member of society, it would be an iniquitous exercise of tyranny to take advantage of the position of these persons to their manifest injury. But when the soldier is taught self-respect, and is made into a nobler man than he could have become if left in his village, and if the apprentice is trained into a useful member of an industrious class, there can be no just complaint of tyranny. These persons are simply treated as children by their masters, and compelled to do what they dislike for their future good and for that of society at large.

— Negroes and the Slave Trade, London Times, Dec 26 Dec, 1857 Source

Sir Francis Galton FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), cousin of Sir Douglas Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.