Restaurant Worker News Anniversary Edition
March is Women’s History Month. In an industry whose workforce is more than 50% women, there are going to be lots of issues and topics to post about and discuss, both in terms of the repression women have faced in the restaurant industry and in how they have and continue to fight back! March 31st is International Transgender Day of Visibility, so we will be making sure to celebrate the contributions and sacrifices that trans workers have made for the labor movement.
March Marks the Three Year Anniversary of Restaurant Worker News
March is also important to Restaurant Worker News because on the 19th, we will celebrate the 3 year anniversary of this project:
On February 22, 2019, three Sonic restaurants in Ohio had to close abruptly due to walkouts by their staff. According to local reporting, workers were agitated around incoming policies from the company’s new management, especially around base wage reductions. The only signs that any workers had been on site were the handwritten ones that they had left on the front doors and drive through lanes saying that they weren’t coming back.
The conversation around this event lasted about as long as the walkout itself, but for a few days there was a flurry of excitement. After all, it’s not every day that workers harness their disruptive power to simultaneously shut down three restaurants at once! But the stores reopened shortly after and people quickly forgot that the incident had even happened.
I began working in the restaurant industry in 1997. Since then, I’d seen or heard about all sorts of skirmishes similar to what happened at Sonic on that day. But, like I saw with Sonic, in most cases there's a short flurry of excitement, the staff turns over, and then the status quo is restored. Like many restaurant workers, I wasn’t happy with the status quo. I figured if we kept better records of these incidents and used each one as an opportunity for discussion and reflection, maybe we can start doing better and begin to figure out ways to better harness our collective power.
And so Restaurant Worker News was launched on March 19, 2019. It certainly wasn’t the first page to talk about struggle in the foodservice and hospitality industry and it certainly won’t be the last. But our content reaches millions of people each month and our various platforms have helped amplify the voices and lessons from workers around the globe. At the time I’m writing this, we are seeing workers in the industry moving towards organization, building unions and waging concerted actions against their employers.
So it seems like workers are finding better ways to fight back and build power, but different strategies still present themselves with different problems. As workers at Starbucks continues to flood the National Labor Relations Board with election filings, not only is the company taking advantage of the clogged bottle neck and slow administration, but so are the establishment political organizations, mainly the Democratic Party and non-profits. Will the movement allow itself to be sucked into electoral strategies or will it escalate on the shop floor? We'll keep you posted! Stay tuned…
Historical Events:
March 23, 1900: Seattle Waitresses Union founded (link)
March 5, 1937: Woolworth Strike ends (link)
March 12, 1951: General Strike in Barcelona (link)
March 4, 1960: Lunch Counter Sit-In at Weingarten’s Supermarket in Houston, TX (link)
March 30, 1976: General Strike in Palestine (link)
March 16, 1979: Strike at Ireland’s first two McDonald’s restaurants (link)
March 31, 1979: Police attack at Peg’s Place bar in San Francisco, CA (link)
March 11, 2021: Teamsters Strike at 7Up in Redford, MI (link)