On May 17, 2021, a group of IHOP workers along with supporters marched into the restaurant to collect their paychecks. This was about two weeks after their walk-out went viral on TikTok.
On May 1, nineteen workers at an IHOP in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, walked out in the middle of a shift. The new franchisee had been paying employees late—and in some cases, not at all. Employees were getting frantic.
The general manager had resorted to paying her staff out-of-pocket, but that worked only for so long. She wasn’t getting paid, either.
“Working at more local, small business–type restaurants, there’s no HR. It’s so incredibly blatant that the priority of the folks who own these restaurants is profit margin.”
“Since day one, they started missing payroll,” says Alma Becerril, who had worked at the restaurant as a general manager for fifteen years. “A lot of people didn’t get paid. Sometimes I had to wait two paychecks to get my payments.” When staff walked out mid-shift, Becerril’s daughter, Vanessa, who also worked at that location, recorded and uploaded a video of the walkout to TikTok with a description of the wage theft her coworkers had endured. The recording went viral.
“We started getting all kinds of calls about the video,” says Juan Miranda, the organizing director of Siembra NC, an immigrant solidarity network based in Durham. The company, Miranda says, had “kept people they knew could not legally work, told [the manager] to pay them cash, and then eventually just told them they would not pay.”
With so much to lose, undocumented workers rarely confront their employers publicly. “They fear retaliation, or some are just used to it,” Miranda says. On May 17, with Siembra’s support, the IHOP workers won $20,000 in back pay from the company.
Across the country, food service workers are mobilizing for better wages and conditions, taking part in job actions, and, in some cases, launching campaigns for union recognition and the protections that come with it. I spoke with more than a dozen current and former restaurant workers who had either stayed in the industry throughout the pandemic and resisted low wages and unsafe conditions, or quit, refusing them altogether.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and research from worker organizations—including the restaurant advocacy group One Fair Wage and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United—supports the stories so many workers tell about the hospitality industry: Wages are low, abuse is endemic, and people are fed up.
For H. Wade, who preferred not to use her full name out of concern for professional repercussions, the pandemic spelled the end of her career in food service, but the events that precipitated her resignation took place years earlier.
Service industry workers in Austin, Texas, gathered on March 8, 2021, to protest Governor Greg Abbott’s lifting of all COVID-19 restrictions.
While working at a Brooklyn restaurant called Peaches HotHouse in 2018, Wade says, she was sexually harassed by a coworker who made lewd jokes about her and speculated about her sex life. Wade, a supervisor at the time, described the encounter in her notes for the day, then scheduled a meeting with the owners. Wade says she did not have the power to discipline employees on her own. Her coworker had made “homophobic and transphobic” comments in the past.
But when she spoke with the owners, she says, they dismissed the incident, calling her coworker a “free spirit.”
In a follow-up email to the owners, Wade wrote: “He might be a free spirit, but I try to be as measured and clear with my thoughts and words as I possibly can be. . . . There is shame and fear and embarrassment and anger, and most of all frustration that there has even been the slightest question that he should continue to work for this company.”
Months later, when Wade learned that the New York City Commission on Human Rights was tasked with reviewing this kind of workplace complaint, she filed one, detailing the harassment and her bosses’ response. “I felt like it’s no small task to sit in front of your two male employers and recount the sexual comments made by another male employee,” she wrote. “I was depressed and anxious and incredibly unhappy at work because of it, but I needed the money.”
Sexual harassment and assault are common in the food service industry. According to a recent report by One Fair Wage and the University of California, Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center, 17 percent of all women working in the industry have been sexually assaulted while at work and 71 percent reported that they had experienced some form of sexual harassment.
Whether or not they reported the behavior, 98 percent of women surveyed said that they had faced retaliation, often in the form of shorter and slower shifts and extra responsibilities on the job.
Airline food workers march for their rights at the Dallas Airline Catering rally on August 13, 2019.
Across the board, more tipped workers reported harassment than their nontipped counterparts; workers earning the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour experienced the harassment even more acutely. Despite its ubiquity, few protections exist to address harassment, especially in small restaurants.
“Working at more local, small-business–type restaurants, there’s no HR,” Wade says. “It’s so incredibly blatant that the priority of the folks who own these restaurants is profit margin. And nothing else really matters, not even how their employees are getting along, or treating each other.”
When New York City shut down indoor dining establishments in March 2020, Wade vowed not to return to her job. She found solidarity, though, in a new organizing group that many furloughed workers had joined—the Restaurant Organizing Project, or ROP. The group, which is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, was founded by restaurant workers in the wake of sudden layoffs at the beginning of the pandemic, and has remained a hub for organizing since. (Full disclosure: The author of this article was briefly a member of ROP in 2020.)
Members of the project hold workshops, discussions, and trainings for restaurant workers. The Dish: A Workers’ Rag, ROP’s blog and monthly publication, features reporting and analysis by workers in the industry. The organization has spawned local chapters, too: In Chicago and Austin, ROP affiliates have rallied for stronger health protections for workers and unemployment benefits. The project’s success reflects a growing interest in labor organizing during the pandemic.
“There is a high degree of interest in organizing among restaurant workers nationally,” says Alisa Gallo, director of organizing and development for the hospitality workers union UNITE HERE!. Some of this has been driven by the pandemic: A survey of more than 2,500 essential workers, published by the Roosevelt Institute, showed a positive correlation between COVID-19 risk and willingness to take collective action on the job.
Cooks, baristas, coffee roasters, and servers have launched numerous union campaigns since early 2020. In a historic victory, workers at Colectivo Coffee, a Midwestern chain, received legal recognition from the National Labor Relations Board on August 24, becoming the largest unionized coffee chain in the country. After a protracted fight, workers at Tartine, a famous San Francisco bakery, won union recognition this year, too. In Minneapolis, employees at Tattersall Distilling voted overwhelmingly to join UNITE HERE! Local 17. On August 23, Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, announced a rare bid to unionize: if they are successful, they will make history. None of Starbucks’s 8,000 locations are represented by a union.
While the pressures of the pandemic set off the wave of restaurant organizing, persistently poor conditions in the industry have sustained it. When temperatures passed 100 degrees in Portland, Oregon, this June, workers at Voodoo Doughnut went on strike, demanding a remedy for the suffocating heat (according to the protesting workers, air conditioning in the restaurant was barely keeping the back-of-house below 95 degrees).
The next month, staff at Aviary Cafe in Springfield, Missouri, walked off the job, demanding a wage of $20 per hour and health insurance. “We were being overworked like slaves,” Ericka Loredo, a chef at the cafe, told the Springfield News-Leader. Loredo, who frequently worked fourteen-hour days, said she was clocking a total of sixty-five hours a week. And on June 28, with the support of the worker center Arise Chicago, workers at Portillo’s, a restaurant chain in Chicago, went on strike seeking a wage hike.
But while many nonunion employees have, inspiringly, organized for improved working conditions, progress in the industry has been uneven and individual workers are not, in many ways, more empowered than they were before the pandemic.
“It doesn’t really seem like folks are less expendable [at work],” says Brianna Patterson, who works at a cafe in Tacoma, Washington, and helped found a mutual aid network of restaurant workers in the area last fall. In addition to an increase in workplace sexual harassment during the pandemic, reports of deepening hostility from customers, especially regarding mask mandates, are common.
Without the protections of a union, companies are quick to crack down on collective action: The workers who went on strike at Voodoo Doughnut and Aviary Cafe were summarily fired, in retaliation, they say, for their activism. And despite the flurry of organizing, the food service industry remains almost entirely unorganized—only 1.2 percent of workers in the industry were union members in 2020, slightly less than the year before.
Workers at Tattersall Distilling in Minneapolis, organizing to join UNITE HERE! Local 17, in the summer of 2021.
Meanwhile, workers have collectively quit with such frequency this summer that images of empty fast-food restaurants and collective resignation letters have become a meme. (In one instance, workers at a Burger King in Lincoln, Nebraska, walked off the job on July 10, leaving a message on an outdoor sign that went viral: “We all quit. Sorry for the inconvenience.”)
Since the beginning of the year, the restaurant industry has seen a massive exodus of workers, even as dining establishments reopen. Data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that after January 2021, job openings in the accommodation and food service industries tripled; by June, the government agency estimated that more than 1.5 million jobs remained unfilled.
“That timeframe makes sense to me,” says Brandon Chinn, a career cook who left his most recent job in the industry last year. “There’s been a very obvious and noticeable movement across social media, of people walking out of jobs that are underpaying them, and, you know, where they’re being mistreated.”
Gallo, of UNITE HERE!, says that trend isn’t borne out for workers who had held union jobs before the pandemic. “It’s a different scenario for unionized workers than nonunion, because unionized workers know that they have something worth going back to,” she says.
In the months after the pandemic struck, a staggering 98 percent of UNITE HERE! members lost their jobs. To protect those workers, the union has fought for “right of recall” guarantees in cities and states across the country. In April 2021, California signed one such bill into law, requiring employers in the hospitality industry to guarantee jobs back for workers who had occupied positions there before the pandemic.
And while UNITE HERE! has seen impressive gains in larger food service workplaces—most notably in airports, hotels, and casinos—no union has channeled resources into the many small businesses that populate the industry. “Those smaller, independent owners are a challenge,” Gallo says, “in part because the economics of those smaller operations are different than a larger company.”
Like other businesses, small restaurant owners frequently enlist anti-union consultants to fight union campaigns. And rather than recognize a union, some small restaurants simply close up shop, erasing would-be union jobs and draining union resources.
“One of the things that’s frustrated me,” Chinn says, “is the perverse almost celebration of the small business, when small businesses offer fewer protections, fewer benefits, and less money.”
While many say they will not return to work in hospitality, the expiration of COVID-era supplemental unemployment insurance may force some former employees back into the industry.
“If I had no other options, I guess I would go back—but I wouldn’t be happy about it,” Wade says. “I don’t find joy in restaurants anymore.”