How a Hong Kong Artist Got Fired From McDonald’s

On a recent eight-hour shift at a McDonald’s in Hong Kong, Luke Ching, 52, wiped tables, cleared trays of half-eaten fries, emptied cups of soda and milk tea and lugged bulging trash bags to the dumpster.

For him, the main goal of the part-time work was not making ends meet. It was research for his main pursuit: using art to advocate for better treatment of people in menial jobs in a city with one of the widest income gaps in the world.

That project came to an abrupt end last month when he was fired after publicly calling on McDonald’s Hong Kong to reinstate paid meal breaks for employees at its local outlets. Undeterred, Mr. Ching is pushing ahead — even as the scope for broader political protest has shrunk in the city.

“Many people have accepted that they’re not allowed to speak critically about their workplace. But employees don’t exist just to drive profit,” Mr. Ching said in an interview. “We have the right to express ourselves in public.”

Over the past two decades, his campaigns have cut across the worlds of art and activism, gaining him a wide following of supporters as well as some online detractors, who call him attention-seeking and gimmicky.

The workplace has been both muse and canvas as he has agitated for everything from stools for museum guards to more consideration for the people who clean the subway.

Hong Kong’s minimum wage — about $5 an hour — barely covers basic living costs. There are no collective bargaining laws, and employers are not legally obligated to recognize labor unions, so relatively few do.

Unions, nevertheless, had long been politically active, regularly joining demonstrations to pressure the local government. Such protests became more common as people in Hong Kong resisted what they saw as efforts to erode the “high degree of autonomy” Chinese leaders had promised after Britain returned its former colony in 1997.

But a year of antigovernment protests, at times violent, led to a crackdown by Beijing in 2020 and the imposition of a national security law that has chilled dissent and led many activist unions to disband.

Some labor organizers in Hong Kong have been convicted of violating the law over their pro-democracy activism and sentenced to prison. Lee Cheuk Yan, a former lawmaker and labor champion, has been jailed since 2021 awaiting trial, and the government has offered a bounty for the arrest of another such activist, Christopher Mung, who now lives in the United Kingdom.

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, said that, on its own, labor activism is not likely to be seen by the Hong Kong government as a potential threat to national security, especially if it targets big companies rather than government bodies.

“The difficulty is that in Hong Kong, what you do and how it will be treated is not always as clear,” he said. “Therefore, people are becoming a lot more cautious about what they can and cannot say.”

Pressure continues to mount: The city on Wednesday proposed amendments that would empower the government to reject new unions on national security grounds.

Mr. Ching said that his activism has always focused on livelihood issues, and he does not think there’s anything wrong or risky about what he does.

Things got tense at times during the Covid pandemic, he said, when authorities were cracking down on anything that might attract a crowd. Police searched and questioned him, he said, as he stood in a subway station wearing a garbage bag over his cleaner’s uniform, with “Lowest pay. Highest risk. Least support” written in tape.

The company that runs the subway, MTR, later increased its hourly pay for contract cleaners.

Mr. Ching has a master’s degree in fine art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has participated in exhibitions and residencies around the world, including last year in New York, where he collected cans and other recyclable items as part of an effort to realize “the artist as a citizen.” Some of his work — video, photos and sculpture — is housed in the collections of museums including M+ in Hong Kong and the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, England. His project “Undercover Worker” was shortlisted for the Visible Award, a prize for socially engaged artwork, in 2019.

For about a decade, he taught art part-time at his alma mater and at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, including a popular “creative citizen” course, where his students trained to become security guards and reported on their experiences. (His inspiration for community activism, he said, dates back to 2007, when people chained themselves together to try to save a historic ferry pier from demolition.)

He set aside teaching last August and raised $25,700 in crowd-funded donations so that he could spend more time making art, working briefly at fast-food chains, a Chinese butcher shop and as a cleaner at Disneyland Hong Kong. Though he uses his real name, he said his managers usually were not aware of his activism and were more concerned with filling vacancies.

While working at McDonald’s, Mr. Ching, who is married with a teenage daughter, posted diarylike entries on Instagram and Facebook. To illustrate the repetitive toil during a typical shift, he tracked his step count and made images of himself picking up endless rows of half-emptied cups.

Mr. Ching said he was drawn to study McDonald’s because customers from all walks of life used it as a communal space, bringing to it a Hong Kong flair. At his former branch in the middle-class neighborhood of Tai Po, elderly regulars brought their own insulated mugs, newspapers and novels as they settled into their regular seats, refilling from the free hot water every so often.

Mr. Ching said that he also admired how, like him, the CEO of McDonald’s Hong Kong, Randy Lai, had spent several months working as a low-level employee. He brought up this experience in an open letter to her that was published in the Hong Kong broadsheet Ming Pao in January.

“You must know that without mealtime pay, countless colleagues return to work after a hasty meal or forgo their rest time,” he said.

He was fired within weeks. Representatives for the company, owned by a Chinese private equity firm, did not respond to requests from The New York Times for comment. A McDonald’s spokesperson told local media that Mr. Ching had leaked internal operational and commercial information, and that he had been advised against doing so. Mr. Ching denied those allegations, saying that he had merely shared his observations about his workplace.

Some observers say that as Mr. Ching’s ambitions have broadened, his work has become less focused. Wong Wai Yin, an artist in Hong Kong who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Mr. Ching, said at times it was difficult to understand his goals at McDonald’s — until he got fired.

“There were many ketchup packets and selfies,” Ms. Wong said.

Wan Pak Kin, an organizer at the Catering and Hotels Industries Employees General Union, said Mr. Ching’s tactics balanced out the more hard-line approach of traditional labor unions. “He knows how to find a middle ground between praise and criticism,” Mr. Wan said. “He examines relationships and bonding among colleagues. He becomes part of the community.”

This month, Mr. Ching, Mr. Wan and three other organizers representing labor and environmental groups said they would form a coalition called the Alliance for My McDonald’s. Wearing McDonald’s party hats at a news conference, the organizers said they hoped to push McDonald’s to pay attention to suggestions from both employees and the wider public.

Mr. Ching said he plans to spend more time on the front lines to campaign for small and meaningful changes and strengthen relationships among workers. “I want the revolution to be in our daily work,” he said.