In October 2019, my coworker at the small neighborhood restaurant where we work had a bad accident while on the job. He fell down a staircase, banging his head and breaking his ankle and wrist.
My coworker, like me, does not have health insurance coverage through work. Nearly 90 percent of restaurant workers do not. We can’t work from home, or even off our feet. We don’t make salaries, or a set wage, which impacts what benefits we can qualify for.
We need to think outside the box by situating ourselves among the people who support the fight for a living wage and universal health care, and bringing that spirit to our workplaces to develop new, more inclusive worker organizations.
Everyone at my job was spooked by the injury and the vulnerability the accident demonstrated. What we didn’t know then was that we were less than six months away from a pandemic.
A million individual catastrophes—much like my friend’s in 2019—help explain why, for restaurant workers, the pandemic is about more than a poorly handled virus. The pandemic has prompted a long overdue collective reckoning about restaurant work, bringing thousands of individual grievances into a discussion that is currently unfolding in mainstream news, social media, and workplaces. Now, as the ground changes under our feet, it’s time to organize for a better restaurant industry.
Food service is the least unionized industry in the country, as it’s notoriously difficult to organize. Nevertheless, in the past year, the sadness and anger over preventable deaths due to the pandemic have spurred a proliferation of restaurant worker groups, organizations, and publications to push for unionization. We have not yet achieved our goals, but we never claimed that it would take only one year.
Restaurants are part of a larger social struggle, and transforming them can happen as part of a revitalized labor movement that creates new organizers and pushes the envelope of what a workers’ movement looks like.
I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, along with many others who work in food service. Together, we launched the Restaurant Organizing Project in April 2020. We hold biweekly national trainings and discussions, and have organized days of action with UNITE HERE! and other groups to demand an extension of the $600 federal unemployment benefits, with protests in a dozen cities.
We have built city-based campaigns to demand restaurant workers be eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, along with other workers deemed “essential.” We provide emergency assistance to workers who are organizing and facing retaliation. We help give workers tools for organizing, and operate a newsletter for and by restaurant workers. We assess together what works and what doesn’t. Our goals seem distant now, but we had to start somewhere.
For our project to grow and thrive, we need to make a convincing case that things can be different. Many restaurant workers, like workers in other industries today, want to be organized. But when we reach out to established unions, they are, understandably, reluctant to represent us, given how small our workplaces are and how hard they are to organize.
We need to think outside the box by situating ourselves among the people who support the fight for a living wage and universal health care, and bringing that spirit to our workplaces to develop new, more inclusive worker organizations. This requires more food service workers becoming shop floor organizers, and it will mean the development of the broader labor left.
As restaurant workers, we are antagonized by strangers about mask usage, engaged in constant back-and-forths about whether the threat of the virus is still real, all while relying on those same customers for their patronage. We’re now often responsible for more work, with fewer people on a shift. The experience impacts morale and organizing capacity. Yet, we have reason to believe that there is a generational opportunity to mobilize around these workplace issues.
Everyone now knows about the so-called labor shortage in the industry; when the pandemic hit, many workers took the opportunity to finally leave food service. Why give your labor to an industry that treats you with callous disregard?
I am proud of every one of the workers who left; they deserve better. But those of us who stayed deserve better too.