ryan garcia
Amanda Norris was fed up.
In October 2016, after nearly a year of working at the Philadelphia-area Harvest Seasonal Grill & Wine Bar, she began organizing a union campaign at the restaurant. Norris says she had “never seen so much economic injustice packed into one work scenario.” She wanted to change that.
But the effort ended just a few months later, in February 2017, failing after Harvest brought in an outside consultant to meet with workers.
In April, Norris was fired.
She’s unsure whether her union activities were a factor, but says the company’s explanation for her firing was vague. “Legally they needed to document a reason, and the only thing they supplied was misconduct,” Norris, thirty-six, tells The Progressive, adding that she doesn’t know what the restaurant meant by that. “I didn’t have a disciplinary history with them.”
At Harvest, Norris earned just $2.83 an hour. As a tipped worker, her wage could legally be lower than Pennsylvania’s regular minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. If such workers don’t make the regular minimum wage after tips, the employer is required to pay the difference. Even if that happens, tipped minimum-wage laws often relegate employees to poverty. The Economic Policy Institute, a leftwing think tank, found that tipped employees experience a poverty rate nearly twice that of other workers.
But the low pay received by many restaurant workers is no accident. Operating in the background of the industry is a powerful lobbying organization determined to keep wages low and benefits skimpy.
The National Restaurant Association is the world’s largest foodservice trade association, representing more than 500,000 restaurant businesses, including many major chains. Founded in 1919, the organization seeks to “represent and advocate for foodservice industry interests—taking on financial and regulatory obstacles before they hit our members’ bottom line.” The group is headquartered in Washington, D.C., but each state has a National Restaurant Association affiliate.
The low pay received by many restaurant workers is no accident. Operating in the background of the industry is a powerful lobbying organization determined to keep wages low and benefits skimpy.
The organization has long been at the forefront of opposing raises to the minimum wage, especially the tipped minimum wage. And its efforts have been largely successful. Just seven states require tipped workers to make the state’s full minimum wage before tips, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The rest set a minimum wage for tipped employees lower than the state’s regular minimum wage or follow the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 an hour.
Teófilo Reyes, research director at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United)—which advocates for restaurant workers—argues that the National Restaurant Association, often known as “the other NRA,” is extremely influential.
“Their impact is huge, not just in Congress but in every state legislature and in many city councils,” Reyes says.
Reyes’s group recently authored a report titled “Stop the Other NRA,” which warns that “with the arrival of the Trump Administration, the National Restaurant Association has gained new sway in Washington, D.C., to advance its agenda” and has “eagerly adopted elements of the Trump Administration’s platform to do so.”
Even during an Obama Administration that often opposed its interests, the NRA was a powerful force. In June 2013, the organization crowed that efforts to increase the minimum wage had been beaten back in fifteen states, and paid sick-leave laws were stymied in twelve states. And the Center for Responsive Politics, an election and lobbying watchdog group, has dubbed the NRA a “Heavy Hitter” in the past because of how much the group spends to influence policy.
And now, with the corporate-friendly Donald Trump in the White House—and conservative majorities in Congress, governors’ offices, and state legislatures—the NRA has friends in high places ready to push its agenda forward.
Part of what makes the National Restaurant Association so influential is its enormous financial power. On its 990 form for 2015, the organization reported more than $84 million in revenue, with its president and chief executive officer Dawn Sweeney taking home more than $3.4 million. In 2014, the Economic Policy Institute estimated one in six restaurant workers was living below the official poverty line.
With the NRA’s millions comes an aggressive lobbying apparatus. As of September, the NRA had lobbied on nineteen bills in 2017, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And in 2016, it spent almost $4 million on lobbying, with substantial additional outlays by NRA member corporations. This included $2.1 million by McDonald’s and $1.6 million by YUM! Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC.
The NRA’s influence campaign also extends to political donations. In the 2015-2016 election cycle, the group contributed more than $1.1 million to various candidates, leadership PACs, and party committees.
Overall, ROC United estimated that throughout the 2016 election cycle, the NRA and its largest corporate members spent $12 million.
Besides opposing efforts to raise wages, the NRA has used its financial and lobbying prowess to fight an Obama Administration overtime rule that would have resulted in an extra $1.2 billion for workers in 2017 had it taken effect. (The Trump Administration has refused to implement the rule.)
The group has also fought paid sick-leave requirements—often pushing laws that preempt local government protections—and has tried to prevent regulations on marketing junk food to kids. It even opposed a recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board to lower the legal blood alcohol limit while driving from 0.08 blood alcohol content to 0.05.
And while the NRA used to support comprehensive immigration reform, it now echoes the Trump Administration in calling for greater border security. The group has also been critical of the Affordable Care Act, supporting the House Republicans’ bill to repeal the law and expressing “general support” for the Senate’s failed attempt to pass a version of the American Health Care Act.
Reyes insists the organization advocates for policies that hurt the vulnerable.
“They say a lot of things that are positive regarding opportunities for workers, but in practice everything they do seems to work against that,” he says.
The National Restaurant Association did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite its clout, the NRA is not well known. Pete Meyers, coordinator of the Tompkins County Workers’ Center in Ithaca, New York, says the NRA “is in the background of national and statewide public policy for restaurant workers, but it really doesn’t enter into the equation of the workers we work with.”
Reyes believes the NRA keeps a low profile to more effectively advance its agenda. “They’re not really supposed to be in the limelight,” he says.
But following negative experiences in the industry, some restaurant workers are making the connection between their employment conditions and the NRA’s policy stances.
After working at Harvest Seasonal Grill & Wine Bar, a member of the state affiliate Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association, Norris began researching the NRA. She didn’t like what she found. “They have literally pushed the limits and created a whole niche in exploitation,” she says.
Norris believes a lack of regulations allows restaurants to take advantage of workers. She says Harvest made employees pay for a new apron if they got theirs dirty, would deduct credit card processing fees from employees’ tips, and did not offer paid sick leave.
“People worked sick,” Norris says. “It was disgusting. We handled food.” Harvest did not respond to a request for comment.
According to ROC United, 81.5 percent of restaurant workers lack paid sick leave, which “facilitates public health outbreaks and is of grave health concern for customers.” Meanwhile, the group notes that the National Restaurant Association receives money from some local governments, including at least one county health department, to certify workers in safe food-handling practices—even while opposing paid sick-leave requirements that would reduce the number of employees who handle food while sick. Reyes calls such ties “a definite conflict of interest.”
Along with a lack of paid sick leave, many restaurant workers also struggle with access to health insurance. Anndrea Poage, forty-two, who worked at an Olive Garden Italian Restaurant—a national chain of parent company Darden Restaurants—says Darden tried to keep workers as part-time employees to prevent paying for workplace-provided health insurance. Darden is a corporate member of the NRA.
Poage calls her job at a Florida Olive Garden “by far the least paying serving job I’ve ever had,” saying she made $5.24 an hour and received one week of vacation per year.
Rich Jeffers, senior director of communications at Darden, says the company provides a “pathway for thousands of individuals across the country to advance from entry-level jobs into management roles,” adding that Darden “enjoys the lowest annual turnover rates for hourly team members in the industry.” He claims the company’s hourly employees average nearly $15 an hour through wages and tips.
But Poage says the $15-an-hour statistic overlooks that workers can be sent home after just a few hours, minimizing the amount of money they make.
Overall, Poage is concerned with the lack of oversight in the restaurant business. “There’s no other industry like it,” she says. “You’d think there would be someone watching over how it is run.”
Andrew Haldeman, forty, a restaurant worker in Ithaca, New York, agrees. Haldeman says he’s filed multiple complaints with the Department of Labor over his treatment in restaurants, including allegations of wage violations. He tells The Progressive, “I feel like it’s a world that has kind of been left untouched by checks and balances.”
Given the already difficult conditions many restaurant workers face, what impact will Trump’s presidency have on the roughly 15 million people in the United States employed by the industry?
One clue may be found in Trump’s original pick for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder. The former chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants was an active member of the NRA, which praised Puzder’s nomination, saying his “background in the restaurant industry will help foster an environment for job creation.”
But at CKE, Puzder had what The Washington Post called a “terrible” labor record. He consistently opposed raising the minimum wage, making employers provide health insurance, and increasing overtime pay for employees.
“What [Puzder] represented was some of the strongest contradictions of the Trump Administration—claiming to support jobs but at the same time working to undermine any livable wage opportunities,” Reyes says.
Puzder’s nomination fell through in the face of mass opposition. But Seth Goldstein, senior business representative at Local 153, Office and Professional Employees International Union, says the NRA has nonetheless gained power in the Trump era. With Trump’s administrative power and his ability to issue executive orders, “workers are very vulnerable to groups like the National Restaurant Association,” he says. “I think that progressives have to work hard to try to stop this nightmare situation where workers are undefended.”
“I think that progressives have to work hard to try to stop this nightmare situation where workers are undefended.”
Goldstein notes that Trump has nominated two conservative lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, giving the body a viewpoint more in line with the NRA’s. And besides backing away from Obama’s overtime rule, Trump’s Labor Department has rescinded a rule that Goldstein says would have made it easier for a group of workers to sue a corporation.
“The DOL has become anti-labor,” he argues. “It protects employers.”
The NRA seems to have seen this coming. After Trump’s electoral win, the group proclaimed on its Issues and Advocacy page that Trump will likely “push for his proposed tax cuts and regulatory reform for the business sector” and that the NRA “may see relief in some of the burdensome requirements imposed on businesses and employees alike in the health care space, as well as in labor regulations (looking at you, Overtime Rule).”
Previously, when the NRA believed that Hillary Clinton would win, it lamented: “The restaurant industry will continue to see challenges in the labor space, including the likelihood of renewed efforts to raise the federal minimum wage.”
With Trump’s election and a Republican-controlled Congress, those worries have vanished.
Along with success at the federal level, the NRA’s fortunes are rising at the state level, where Democrats control just 42 percent of seats in state legislatures and fifteen governors’ offices.
In Maine, voters approved a ballot measure raising the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 and phasing out the lower tipped minimum wage. But the Maine Restaurant Association, helped along by some restaurant workers who believed higher wages would reduce their tips, aggressively lobbied to reinstate the lower tipped wage. In June, Republican Governor Paul LePage signed a bill repealing the tipped minimum wage section of the ballot measure, allowing employers to pay tipped workers half the regular minimum wage.
And after St. Louis passed a law upping its minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2018, the Missouri Restaurant Association and other business groups sued the city. While the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the law, the legislature pushed through a bill repealing the wage increase.
Still, the emerging resistance to Trump’s presidency could offer some hope of defeating the NRA’s agenda. More of the electorate understands that government, corporations, and industry groups are often no friend of theirs. And movements such as the Fight for $15, which has won significant victories across the country, have demonstrated that progressives can prevail against large special interests.
To Reyes, the way to beat the NRA is by publicizing which politicians are beholden to the organization and continuing to show the public the policies the NRA supports.
“We’re trying to bring them out into the limelight as much as possible, to publicize what it is that they’re actually doing, the views that they actually hold,” he says. “Because if there’s enough attention drawn to them, it won’t be as easy for politicians to work on their behalf.”
The National Restaurant Association’s Lobbying Agenda
Here are a few of the measures the NRA has supported in 2017:
- The American Health Care Act of 2017, a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would result in twenty-three million more uninsured people by 2026. The legislation passed in the House of Representatives.
- The Small Business Health Fairness Act, which would allow for the creation of nationwide “association health plans” that critics say could weaken consumer protections. The legislation passed the House in March.
- H.J. Res. 83, a resolution that prohibits the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from “issuing employers citations for failing to record injuries or illnesses beyond the six-month statute of limitations set out in the [law].” Trump signed the bill into law on April 3.
- The Working Families Flexibility Act of 2017, which would let employers, not employees, determine when earned comp time can be used. The bill passed in the House in May. The NRA previously supported the bill in 2013.
- The ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017, which would prohibit civil suits against those who fail to provide the necessary access to public accommodations for the disabled unless owners receive a written notice of deficiencies and fail to act. Hundreds of advocacy organizations have come out against the bill.
Evan Popp, a student at Ithaca College, is a former editorial intern at The Progressive.