Keep on Cookin’

By Sean Case

Lessons from a Snuffed-Out Union Campaign

In April 2023, my coworkers and I formed the first union at an independent Seattle restaurant in 40 years. The beloved 30-plus-year-old hole-in-the wall diner where we worked was about to be reborn in a brand new location. We wanted to ensure the new restaurant didn’t replicate the mistakes of the old. In November, our union was decertified by a margin of one vote. I’d like to offer some reflections on our effort – the challenges, the missteps, and possible paths forward for organizing the restaurant industry.

Industry Challenges

Restaurant work is hard. Long hours on your feet, repetitive motions, extreme temperatures, harmful chemicals, an often grueling pace, and low pay. Restaurant workers have plenty to complain about, but little energy to do anything about it.

People don’t tend to stay in one place for long – they’ll spend 6 months to 2 years at one restaurant, then move on. Many restaurant workers are apathetic and have low expectations of their work. This is reflected by a common public narrative about the industry – that these are stop-over jobs, something to do while figuring out a real line of work.

Winning our union was the easy part. Keeping it proved much harder.

Restaurants tend to also be atomized workplaces, both internally and externally. Front-of-house and back-of-house employees in many restaurants are pitted against each other due to unfair and often unclear tip pools. While restaurant chains and groups are common, many restaurants are standalone shops with limited and dwindling cash flows. Workers at “mom-and-pop” shops may share similar experiences, but they lack a common target for their woes.

Unique Challenges at Glo’s

Glo’s Café in Seattle, where I worked for 7 years, was somewhat unique in this landscape. It lacked the fast turnover rates that plague the industry at large. I had coworkers who had been there for 10 or more years. We liked it well enough to stick around, which was one of the reasons we were able to organize a union campaign at all.

But that unique opportunity also presented unique challenges. The bosses had a near-constant presence, often working alongside us for long stretches. They paid themselves very little and worked themselves quite hard (and never stopped talking about it). They made themselves into sympathetic characters.

For many of us on the organizing committee, that sympathy dried up quickly. While we were able to win voluntary recognition from ownership, they quickly showed their true nature. Shortly after opening the new restaurant, a coworker of mine (and an active organizing committee member) was fired on dubious grounds. Unfortunately, the organizing committee failed to recover and respond effectively, waiting for the slow, passive process of an NLRB suit to play out rather than fighting back.

Meanwhile, the bosses ingratiated themselves with new hires, who now constituted a little over half of the staff. They were showing one face to their long-time employees (those of us who organized the union), and another to the new ones. This began a process of polarization and emotional manipulation that wound up narrowly in the bosses’ favor.

Another unique wrinkle that proved difficult to overcome was the presence of people close to the bosses on staff – specifically one boss’s best friend of over 20 years and the other’s romantic partner of nearly as long. These coworkers were never going to be won over by the union and were allowed to act with impunity while the rest of us walked on eggshells.

Mistakes Made

We rested too comfortably on the fact that we had already won voluntary recognition. Winning our union was the easy part. Keeping it proved much harder. When a decertification petition popped up in September, we were caught off guard.

The decertification vote was a winnable battle, which makes our loss by one vote all the more painful. The organizing committee’s inability to recover from our comrade’s firing is a key factor. Rather than mounting a full-throated defense and bringing as much attention to it as possible, we succumbed to fear and timidity. That timidity pervaded the rest of our campaign in various forms. We let the bosses get away with it, and it emboldened them.

We came up short in our ability to consistently engage most of our new coworkers in discussions about the union, both at work and outside of work.

We were able to get around 80 percent of the staff to sign union cards and fill out a bargaining survey within the first couple of months of the restaurant opening and even recruited a couple of new coworkers into the organizing committee. But we came up short in our ability to consistently engage most of our new coworkers in discussions about the union, both at work and (more importantly) outside of work.

When we first won our union in April, there was a wave of public support. Longtime regulars, other restaurant workers, and the people of Seattle in general were excited by what we had done and wanted to dine at Glo’s because it was now a union restaurant. In my view, one of our biggest missteps was not tapping into that support when we needed it. We could have publicized our coworker’s firing and called it out for what it was – retaliation; we could have organized informational pickets to inform our customers and the broader community about our contract demands; we could have used that support to help pressure ownership to begin bargaining.

There was a prevailing feeling among the organizing committee that we shouldn’t rock the boat.

But there was a prevailing feeling among the organizing committee that we shouldn’t rock the boat or bring negative attention to the business, that the restaurant needed time to get on its feet and couldn’t weather anything too dramatic. There’s some truth to that sentiment, but I believe we could have walked a line of putting public pressure on ownership while not damaging the business financially, drawing positive attention to our demands, and encouraging customers to show their support for us while dining at the restaurant.

Such action may have polarized the workplace. But the workplace became polarized anyway, just not on our terms. Rather than ownership being put on the back foot, we were. We wound up running a defensive campaign while a small group of employees loyal to ownership colluded with the bosses to smear us, lie to new employees about what our union was fighting for, and eventually move to oust our union. It was a demoralizing and traumatizing experience. Union busting is indeed disgusting.

Paths Forward for Organizing the Restaurant Industry

I’m proud of what my coworkers and I were able to accomplish. We still proved the restaurant industry can be organized. The headline here shouldn’t be that organizing a restaurant is too hard. The headline is that the bosses had to lie and cheat to win, and they still barely beat us. Restaurant workers make up around 10 percent of the US workforce, and it’s important that socialists and labor organizers find ways to deal with the unique challenges of organizing such a varied industry.

There are multiple ways for restaurant organizing campaigns to be successful. We unionized our restaurant because we saw an opening to do so, but such a campaign isn’t necessarily viable everywhere. Small unions like Restaurant Workers United can cut their teeth organizing small shops and can work with DSA’s Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to wage union campaigns at restaurant groups and small chains. Larger unions like UNITE HERE may be able to run successful campaigns at big chain restaurants.

One-off shops may prove more difficult to unionize, but that doesn’t mean workers there can’t get organized. If workers can come together across shops around common demands – secure scheduling, proper safety equipment and training, paid time off, tip transparency – they can begin to organize for change regardless of where they work and whether or not they stay there long-term. An association model of restaurant organizing has real potential to politicize workers and motivate them to demand change beyond their individual workplaces.

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Key Demands for Restaurant Organizing:

End the sub-minimum wage

Most states still allow tipped workers to be paid dismally low wages. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13/hour.

Tips: transparency, equity, and abolition

• Many restaurant workers have no clarity on how their tips are calculated, and misappropriation of tips by management is a common form of wage theft. Workers deserve transparency and equity in their tip-outs, with the eventual goal of abolishing tipped labor altogether in favor of living wages.

Secure scheduling

• It’s common for restaurant workers to have no idea what their schedule is until only a day or so before the workweek starts. Workers should be able to plan their lives; we deserve at least 2 weeks’ notice of scheduling.

Break enforcement

• Restaurant workers are routinely denied breaks. This is both unsafe and illegal, but there’s very little accountability.

Paid time off and sick time

• Restaurant workers are often pressured to work while sick. We deserve at least 2 weeks of paid time off per year and 7 days of paid sick time. That paid time off should include an average tip-out, paid at the boss’s expense.

Immigration justice

• Restaurants in the US are disproportionately staffed by undocumented people. They shouldn’t have to live in fear that their boss will rat them out to the authorities if they rock the boat. No ICE in our restaurants!