Op-Ed: A Suggestion for Terry Durack
James Barbeiro responds to the article “Serving suggestion: Could conscription ease the hospitality staffing crisis?” by Terry Durack
By James Barbeiro
The whole thing reads like a satirical article, it wasn't until the end that I realized that for real, it wasn't. I sort of wish it was. It would have left me with a better taste in my mouth.
I think the article lacks any positive analysis that holds owners and shareholders accountable for the atmosphere that they have created. One where workers bear the weight of an industry that demands far too much from them to appease an overly demanding abusive public sphere. Nor does it hold workers accountable to their responsibility to make things better.
It does seem though that workers recognize their needs aren't being met. Workers want free time, benefits, democracy in the workplace, and they want their jobs to have meaning beyond paying for their bosses' vacation homes and luxury vehicles.
If the owning class can't provide that within their framework of the restaurant industry then they will simply fail, and workers will pick up the pieces and create a new industry that feeds people- not for profit- but for the betterment of our health and wellness. (Ideally)
I think this article is harmful to a lot of people, the insinuation to sacrifice our kids to the industry? To send students who have left school Into an industry that will chew them up and spit them right back out. This "solution" takes the blame away from our educational institutions and our governments for leaving our youth un-inspired by the futures we've presented them. Kids aren't leaving school, we've left them behind. And I can't blame them for it, the future we've presented them is bleak.
According to Terry Durack, we should be asking our retired community members to pull themselves out of retirement to help supplement the lack of workers. I ask, “for what?” A few extra dollars in the hands of business owners who have already mis-managed the industry? We certainly aren't asking them to come back for good wages, or benefits, or a work life balance. But on top of this, I thought the whole point of working hard for the entirety of our short lives, and missing out on important events with our families was to be able to relax in our retirements. To catch up on lost time that we sacrificed at these lifeless family businesses. To enjoy the lives we worked so hard to build. But again thanks to the lack of social infrastructure and support for our elderly retired folks, they might not have a choice but to return to work, if they ever had the chance to leave work in the first place.
And then to proclaim that refugees and asylum seekers should be thought to serve us gives me the creeps and makes me think of the horrors being committed and the ones to come as we justify worse treatments for people who are simply seeking better lives than the ones we have ruined. When massive migrations of people come to our borders thanks to a climate crisis that the restaurant industry has a huge part to play in, I fear we will be treating them with this same kind of inhumanity, likely worse.
And all of this in the name of a big fat tip? Screw that. I'm happy to see workers refusing to "bend the knee" to crap jobs in a crap industry that pretends to be more important than it is.
I'm happy to see workers recognize that the way the industry has been run, by "industry professionals" is completely backwards and leaves us alienated from each other and our communities. The pretext that restaurants are public spaces that people can enjoy, was never true, and is increasingly clear as we see a lack of public spaces to exist during economic turmoil.
And then there's me and you. What are we supposed to do in the light of this continued attitude that workers have to sacrifice their lives for the economic benefits of restaurants?
Well, we could reject it, which seems to be happening to a certain degree.
We are certainly seeing something happening with Starbucks and Amazon unionizing.
We can certainly recognize our worth and demand better from our employers. We need to demand better for our future generations. We need to see sustainability be at the forefront, and we need to see that food guarantees are at the forefront of how the industry functions. With droughts, floods, fires and the increasing severity of climate change, restaurants will be the first to see supply chain issues, if they haven't already. Some might be the only ones able to access cheap ingredients, will they hoard them for paying customers? Or feed the community? Will chef's continue to cater to the rich, while they wither away in relative poverty, or will they stick true to their class roots and help feed the people? Who knows! The future right now is certainly uncertain and all we can do is hope to be organized enough to be ready when these questions need answers.
Hopefully people who think this opinion piece is great aren't the ones with the loudest answers to present.
Op-Ed: Thank The Wobblies For What?
Two IWW members argue that mainstream media misrepresents their union and completely misses the point on what the Wobblies contribute to the class struggle.
By Jean-Carl Elliot and Sylvain Pankhurst
Put bluntly, Malcolm Harris’s recent article for The Nation, “We Can Thank the Wobblies for the Biggest Labor Story of the Year" doesn’t really say much of substance about Wobblies (members of The Industrial Workers of the World, or “IWW” for short). That’s not unusual for mainstream coverage of the IWW and, in his defense, he did a better job than many, even citing “Labor Law for the Rank-and-Filer”: a short book that is influential among American IWW organizers. Nevertheless, by focusing on the public campaigns (Starbucks and Burgerville), the emphasis remains on the tip of the iceberg and misses what it is that separates the IWW from mainstream business unionism.
Harris also repeats the most consistent sin of mainstream commentators, relegating the IWW to an historical object, rather than acknowledging it as an existing (and growing) organization. While his chronology is a bit different, and he thankfully admits to the existence of the IWW in this century, he still posits that the IWW’s value as inspiration, implicitly saying “We should thank the IWW for SEIU Starbucks organizing.” On the contrary, we should thank the IWW of the early 2000s for the IWW of today – the IWW that has learned from the mistakes Harris holds up as a model.
For example, Harris lauds the activist element of the Starbucks Workers Union in targeting “the brand itself,” in a public relations-focused dimension of the campaign. This approach resulted in numerous firings, and ultimately played a part in the IWW removing “Going Public” as a module in its Organizer Training 101. In other words, the lesson that was drawn from the experience is actually the opposite of what the article suggests. What gave the Starbucks Workers Union its power, led to relatively sustained organizing in some cases, and what separates it from heavily media-driven unionization efforts was building relationships on the ground and winning changes with direct action.
Direct action, as a term and as a concept, is conspicuously absent from The Nation’s version of the IWW. While it acknowledges that the IWW has made use of “wildcat” actions and sabotage, it doesn’t stop to dwell on what exactly these were, or of their significance. It quite explicitly posits actions of this type as a sign of weakness – a last-ditch effort that workers resort to out of desperation in the absence of legal protections or contract language. In fact, the opposite is true!
What makes the IWW revolutionary is that it sets direct action and direct democracy as the defaults in organizing. One famous story that The Nation neglects to mention involves a group of IWW baristas who walked off the job during a shift when the temperature got too hot. They left their supervisor alone to deal with the heat and the impatient customers. They came back with a fan which had “Courtesy of the IWW” written on it, plugged it in and got back to work. Management installed fans immediately and arranged for an AC unit to be installed. There are dozens more stories like this, where concessions were won through workers exercising their power to disrupt the workplace.
In an IWW campaign, actions of this type don’t culminate in formal recognition and signing a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Even in instances where a collective agreement might be signed, it is not an end unto itself. Rather than pointing toward “partners becoming partners” with management, the IWW strategy is prefigurative, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” In less highfalutin terms, wobbly organizing teaches workers the skills of running things for ourselves. Rather than seeing workers’ empowerment as stopping at negotiating conditions with Starbucks, Amazon, or whichever petty small-business tyrants, it is about transforming the ways we relate to each other, and realizing our collective power to transform the conditions of our lives.
CBAs are as often a barrier to collective power as an asset. As time passes from the initial union drive, their purpose tends to increasingly be preservation of the legal status of the bargaining unit. And what tends to result is that “the union” becomes synonymous for the staff and paid people at the top who administer the contract. Workers will come and go, and their membership in the union only lasts as long as their employment at that particular shop. Everything from grievance handling to contract negotiations becomes the turf of an entrenched leadership, and workers pay dues to keep a “subscription” to their services. When an issue arises, workers are compelled to “work now, grieve later.” Instead of being dealt with by unionized workers collectively, shop floor problems are handed over for legal wrangling to people who may have never set foot in the workplace. This is exacerbated by the fact CBAs almost always (and always in Canada) contain a “no strike clause” which prohibits collective action during the life of the agreement. In some cases, workers, including IWW “dual card” members, have actually organized and taken action in defiance of the terms of CBAs.
The IWW model of solidarity unionism teaches workers the tools to execute actions on the job, in a concerted fashion with their coworkers. It shows how small actions can demonstrate the power of solidarity in order to recruit more workers to a campaign. When a worker leaves, they remain an IWW member, and can take these skills with them to future workplaces (and teach them to other workers).
One campaign that came up a bit more recently than the IWW Starbucks Organizing was an effort at dual carding with CUPW in Edmonton Canada. The campaign lasted about a decade, but many of the tactics built on the Starbucks organizing including dozens of “march on the boss” actions that had over 100 people participating at times. The campaign eventually subsided but not without forcing management to hire 200 more staff at a time when they were actually considering downsizing and layoffs.
The IWW preserved the legacy of these wins through writing articles and pamphlets and incorporating the lessons learned into its organizer trainings. Each year, the union trains hundreds of members in the basic tools of solidarity unionism that have been learned from Starbucks Workers Union and the campaigns that followed. With each training comes new organizers, with new organizers come new campaigns, with each campaign come new lessons, and with each new lesson comes revisions to the training. In other words, the legacy from the IWW Starbucks Workers Union is not just more union cards being signed; it’s more and improved organizers. The legacy isn’t more CBAs; it’s more organizing where workers ourselves wield power.