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.

Workers’ Memorial Day Reminds Us To Fight For Safe Workplaces

Each year on April 28th, labor unions celebrate Workers’ Memorial Day. The holiday was created in remembrance of the  hundreds of thousands of workers who are killed and injured in the workplace each year. In spite of this holiday and government bureaucracies like OSHA within the United States, the working class is still subject to deplorable working conditions that can ultimately send us to the hospital or even to the morgue. Delivery drivers have had one of the ten deadliest jobs in the US for two decades now and line cooks have become the most susceptible workers to death from coronavirus since the pandemic began. Despite the rapid growth and profitability of the food service and delivery industry, we see yet another example of how that wealth has been hoarded at the expense of workers' bodies and lives. 

Why is this?

To put it simply, laws don’t make bad things go away. After all, robbery and murder are illegal, yet they are daily occurances. Wage theft is illegal, yet it’s a multi-billion dollar industry. The same logic applies to health and safety laws. The penalties for subjecting workers to unsafe working conditions are typically fines. Sometimes fines can act as a deterrent, but only inasmuch as they would actually prevent the workplace from functioning. In reality, fines merely help put price tags on our bodies and lives. If the fines from severing a limb or ending a life are cheaper than improving the workplace, then the employer is probably going to risk the fine and keep business as usual. Ultimately, our power as workers doesn’t lie in our ability to call the regulators;it’s in our ability to make business as usual more costly for the employer. We make this happen through direct action on the job.

What does direct action look like?

Direct actions can take all sorts of forms, but generally speaking it usually entails workers disrupting workflow or solving workplace issues directly,  without the involvement of third parties like inspectors or representatives . A common direct action tactic is a walkout, where workers simply stop what they are doing and leave the workplace until management fixes the problem. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union at Ellen’s Stardust Diner in New York City used this tactic to address issues with the heat and carbon monoxide leaks at their workplace. They brought their demands to management and when the problem wasn’t solved, the workers walked off the job until it was safe to come back. Another example comes from a group of IWW baristas at Starbucks. The shop didn’t have air conditioning and it was getting hot. The workers asked the manager to buy a fan but he said it would be too expensive, so the workers walked off the job and left him there by himself to deal with the long lines of angry customers in the sweltering heat. When they returned, they had a fan which they had bought with their union dues, which had “Courtesy of the IWW '' written on it. The last thing the company wanted was for the union to appear more competent than they were, so Starbucks had fans brought in immediately and installed air conditioning as soon as possible. 

“Mourn the dead; fight like hell for the living!”

Mother Jones famously said “Mourn the dead; fight like hell for the living!” As the 2022 Workers’ Memorial Day approaches, let’s keep our martyrs in our hearts and minds, but let’s also remember that we possess the collective power to bring forth a new world from the shell of the old. Let’s put that power into action!

Historical Events and Holidays:

April 1      -    New York City Brewery Strike (1949)

April 2    -    30,000 Las Vegas workers strike at 50 hotels and casinos (1984)

April 6    -     IWW members picket at Chicago Liquors in Minnesota (2013)

April 14    -    Bussa’s Rebellion (1816)

April 21    -    Waiters strike in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia (1853)

April 21    -    Sip-In at Juluis’s Bar (1966)

April 22   -    “Occupy the Farm” begins (2012)

April 27   -    Great Mustache Strike (1907)

April 28   -    Workers’ Memorial Day 

April 29   -    Arby’s workers strike for pay, PPE (2020)

Are Starbucks Workers Really Getting ‘Organized’?

An Organizer’s Op-Ed of Sorts on the Recent Starbucks Unionizing 

I’m seeing a lot of excitement about the recent flurry of “unionizing” at Starbucks. I welcome this trend too and I hope that it spreads far within and beyond the giant coffee chain, but I can’t help also feeling a bit of skepticism about what this unionization actually entails and what it leaves to be desired.

I’m going to offer a summarized critique of the run-of-the-mill “business unionism” that I see Starbucks Workers United practicing, provide a bit of historical context for the organizing that the press is leaving out, and lay out a brief argument for a better, more effective model of organizing that will be useful not only to workers at Starbucks, but at any workplace in any industry, right now.

Before I explain my skepticism, I’ll say this: I’m rooting for the Starbucks workers. But - while I don’t want to assume too much about how the organizing at Starbucks is being done, what I’ve seen so far fits into a pattern of “unionizing” that’s very familiar and has a lot of problems. 

It’s helpful to understand the unfortunate truth that there’s often a very big difference between “unionizing” a workplace and truly “organizing” workers, which is what really shifts the balance of power on the job in favor of the workers so that they can address their grievances effectively. “Unionizing” and “organizing” as concepts are not necessarily at odds, but the difference can be profound and have vastly different outcomes.

Unionizing is often a numbers game: the formula is essentially to get 30% of the workers to sign cards authorizing an external organization to bargain on their behalf, make a pitiful public appeal to the moral decency of the powerful, and POOF!, you have a “union”. But what history and my own experience demonstrate time and again is that this tired formula not only de-emphasizes (if not deliberately prevents) workers’ actual involvement in the process, but it puts union bureaucrats in the driver’s seat of the organizing campaign and sets it on a trajectory that’s much more predictable and deferential to the employer. But that’s not all. 

Usually the campaign is crushed, because it was playing by the rules that were written by and for the employers in the first place (see also: virtually all labor law). Then sometimes they “succeed” (meaning, they won an election), but the problem persists: the workers have little or no training on how to conduct their own organizing effectively and have learned to rely on their very docile (despite occasional big talk) union brass and a legal system better described as a cruel joke for workers. The employer may play along and throw peanuts at the workers, but their power over workplace conditions remains essentially uncontested. Often, promises are unkept and conditions backslide. Oh, in the process, maybe you helped some “pro-labor” politician who spoke at your rally get a few more votes. It’s “unionism” on the terms of the employers and the law, and it’s a path rife with costly shortcuts when it comes to truly building workers’ power. 

Organizing looks very different. It understands that the workers hold the key to their own better future, and it focuses on worker-to-worker relationship building—fostering the bonds of solidarity that allow workers to discover this “key” and then use it. It means starting with what matters most to the workers and organizing around that, instead of projecting issues and solutions onto them. It means offering education and training that empowers and emboldens workers without insulting their innate intelligence. It means mobilizing supporters without them acting in the stead of the workers. And by damned, it means discovering and flexing that muscle of collective power on the job, where workers are most powerful. It’s “unionism” on the workers’ terms, and it doesn’t matter if the employer, the press or anyone else decides it’s a “union” or not. You can call this phenomenon a “union”, or you can call it “banana” for all I care. The content—workers acting like a union—is what’s important. 

With this understanding, “organizing” is essentially about building relationships with workers, while “unionizing” is about building a relationship with the employer. If a union’s purported aim is to advance the interests of workers, then why would it spend so much energy on the latter? 

If it wasn’t already clear - I’m not anti-union. Quite the opposite. What’s important here is how we define and practice unionism, and I take exception to the prevailing definition and practice of it today. I often say that “union” is a verb more than it is a noun. If in a “union” you don’t see workers themselves in the driver seat, together, taking action on the job where they have the most power, developing their own sense of agency to change their conditions, and practicing meaningful solidarity with workers in adjacent nodes in the supply chain and beyond when called upon to do so… then it’s hard for me to think of it as much more than an expensive dog and pony show put on by highly paid “Labor Relations” professionals. That’s a lot less compelling isn’t it? 

It takes time to build up a solid committee of workers who can take successful action on the job, win better conditions and defend their gains, who are prepared to weather the storm when the employer inevitably pushes back, and who truly share and take ownership over the work of organizing. Building workers’ power through organizing is not a numbers game (although clearly the more workers involved, the merrier); there are no shortcuts, and no ballot victory or formal bargaining agreement will replace the far superior power of the organized workers.

Interestingly, there is actually historical precedent for this kind of genuine organizing at Starbucks. While the press is sounding the trumpets for the “first unionized Starbucks” locations in history, you may be surprised to learn that the recent organizing led by Starbucks United is not the first organizing effort at Starbucks. Like, at all. In fact, it was the grassroots Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that made the first major organizing foray into the coffee chain starting around 2004. The IWW’s Starbucks campaign lasted for several years and involved hundreds of workers, and it was arguably the IWW’s most visible and successful organizing endeavor during that time. The workers’ creative, ambitious, and often successful direct actions made tangible improvements in workplace conditions and transformed those involved from despondent subjects of corporate tyranny into dignified workplace militants. Their actions also generated considerable buzz in the press, as did the nefarious union-busting tactics employed by then-CEO Howard Schultz (sound familiar?). But perhaps because none of those workers attempted the formalized union election process (which was actually a strategic decision on the part of the workers), even sympathetic media today somehow do not consider this union activity “unionizing” and they make zero mention of it today. 

That particular wave of IWW organizing at Starbucks eventually waned. Victories were achieved, mistakes were made, and many of its participants eventually transitioned into other industries. The campaign’s successes, as well as its blunders, proved to be valuable lessons that the IWW absorbed into its training curricula and its organizing methodology. The campaign also dispelled any illusions the IWW had about working within the “labor relations” system.

But the more important piece here is that the experiences the workers shared and the lessons they learned during those years have followed them, and they continue to provide them with a rich source of confidence and wisdom as they confront new injustices in the workplace and beyond. They’ve taken the union with them and it will likely be with them for life. The task of the labor movement today should be to find better ways of sustaining what these workers started, especially as unprecedented numbers of new Starbucks workers step onto the stage of history to assert their dignity. 

So, it remains to be seen how things will play out in this recent unionizing wave at Starbucks. I’m hoping for the best outcome for the workers and I’ll gladly do what I can to support them in improving their conditions if called on to do so. But this is a timely opportunity to address some lingering concerns I have with unions in the mainstream today, and to advocate for a better unionism that workers can actually get excited about and use today.

To learn more about organizing and how you can also do it, visit www.iww.org. 

——

Mike H is a longtime organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World union and is a co-author of Wobblyism: Toward a Revolutionary Unionism for Today. Big woop. He couldn’t be bothered with Twitter but he does respond to good faith inquiries at shelloftheold@gmail.com. Holler.

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)

Throwdown At The Drive-Thru!

JustEat Drivers Take The Fight To McDonald’s

JustEat Workers in Sheffield, England have been striking at McDonald’s since December. I interviewed Ed, who has been on the ground, helping workers organize.

What are the JustEat workers agitated about?

The strikers work for a French gig economy company called Stuart, which provides the deliveries for JustEat. In 2021 Stuart cut the per-job base rate of pay by 24%. Before, you would get £4.50 per delivery as a minimum, going up to £7.50 after 2.5 miles. Now, you get £3.40. That, alongside relentless over-hiring that’s totally out of proportion to demand, has wrecked Stuart as a platform where you can earn a good living. A couple of years ago, if you put in the hours, you could make a grand a week on this platform. Now people are working 10-15 hours just to make £100 in a day. And remember: these workers have to cover all their own vehicle and insurance costs!

How long has the strike been going on?

The strike started in Sheffield on 6 December, the day the pay cut was rolled out into Sheffield. Sheffield is the best-organized city in terms of food couriers. Since 2019, local socialists, led by the group I am part of, Workers’ Liberty, have been assisting drivers in building up a branch of the IWGB trade union. That is a relatively new union that has done a lot of work organizing migrant and “spuriously-self-employed” workers in the UK. When the strike began there were about 80 members of the IWGB in Sheffield. There are more now. The pay cut was rolled out city by city. It came to Sheffield last because drivers here threatened to kick off when the pay cut was first announced in autumn. After some rowdy Zoom calls, Stuart put off the roll-out by 8 weeks. As the pay cut was rolled out to other cities, there were sporadic strikes in various places. But without union organization or a link to the broader labour and socialist movements, these strikes fizzled out pretty quickly. What drivers tend to do when they get pissed off about an issue is organize a big, spectacular one-day shut-down. Everyone just turns the app off. That seems impressive. It can cause big losses to the company for a single day. But it is expensive for drivers and it is hard to police. After all, you can’t put a picket line in between a driver and their phone. What we did in Sheffield was start picketing particular restaurants. That meant that the pickets could receive strike pay, and other workers could simply decline jobs from the target restaurants and work elsewhere. This allowed us to keep the strike going. This argument, about the superiority of targeted strikes with picket lines over one-day switch-offs, is a recurring theme of this strike.

Say more about the organization

I was part of a group of socialists in Sheffield that saw what the IWGB was doing in Nottingham (i.e. organizing strikes among Deliveroo workers) in 2019 and we decided to go out on West Street and chat with delivery drivers about what they would like to change. Some drivers, mostly Yemeni guys, but people from other backgrounds too, got together and formed a union, the South Yorkshire Couriers’ Network. They formed this as an independent grouping with no membership fees, but one by one, they were persuaded to join the IWGB union, and then affiliated their local group to the union. The IWGB is not without its problems and it is not an alternative to the mainstream trade union movement. It is a part of the mainstream trade union movement, albeit a particularly dynamic and fast-moving part, with all the good and bad that this implies. Up until the Sheffield events most of the food courier organization in the IWGB was weighted more towards white grad students doing deliveries on bicycles in between lectures. The Sheffield branch has always been made up of migrant workers in cars, who often face substantially greater exploitation and problems, from a variety of different angles. Sheffield also soon became the strongest branch of the IWGB. It had a good effect on the union: it challenged the IWGB in some ways. The IWGB has done overall a pretty good job in terms of helping foster these workers’ organizing efforts.

Up until now, this organization has mainly been involved in casework, and a couple of strikes against Deliveroo, over pay cuts and unfair terminations – these have been unsuccessful – and various fights against local villains, like the City Council (for handing out unfair parking fines when couriers stopped in loading bays to pick up food), or certain restaurants (for being rude to drivers or denying them use of the toilets, for example). We’ve won all our local fights but lost all our national ones – until now. We are pretty confident that we can win this fight.

Why did they decide to target McDonald’s?

McDonald’s processes a high volume of delivery orders. They are JustEat’s single biggest client and therefore Stuart’s single biggest client. The high volume of orders coming out of each restaurant means that even if a few drivers cross a picket line, the overall disruption and loss will be very high, incentivising restaurant managers to switch off their JustEat tablet in order to avoid waste, re-makes, complaints, and snarling up the kitchen. But striking against McDonald’s involves a lot of sacrifices from drivers. After 35 days or so of hitting McDonald’s every single night for 3-5 hours, that’s a lot of lost income for both the company and for the drivers. In order to keep the strike going on a more sustainable basis, we took a decision to move to hitting Greggs, which is the second or third largest client. We are able to cause substantial disruption even though the overall order volume is lower, meaning that the strike hurts Greggs worse than it hurts drivers. In addition to the daily strike on Greggs in Sheffield, we have started doing “Sunday specials” where we go to a drive-thru and hold a rowdy protest with a convoy of cars.

The drivers hold meetings every single week, which their elected local leaders, some volunteers, and any drivers who want to (union members or not) can attend to debate the way forward. Only drivers can vote, regardless of union status. That is really crucial. The more openness and transparency in the decision-making, the more solidarity and courage the workers can muster. These meetings monitor the strike week by week. In Sheffield, which is central for the whole national strike, we often debate national developments too. This means that when we judge the moment right, we can switch the targets at fairly short notice.

How has McDonald’s responded?

Publicly, nothing. Behind the scenes we have seen lots of quite senior McDonald’s leaders turning up to cities where we have been hitting them, in some cases holding tripartite meetings with local management and Stuart and JustEat management. So this has hurt all three companies. They really don’t like what we are doing.

How have McDonald’s workers responded?

Overall, they have been very positive. Obviously we are always encouraging them to unionize. I don’t want to say any more about how that has been going, because McDonald’s management responds very proactively to any perceived threat of worker organization. But it’s good. Shift managers have generally been very good about shutting down the tablet for us, when they haven’t been forbidden from doing so by more senior managers. There have been one or two managers who have tried to go to war with our pickets, presumably to prove their loyalty to Ronald McDonald. That normally has involved calling the cops. On a couple of occasions they have simply closed down the whole store and sent all the customers home! But the cops have never given us any hassle, and Ronald will never reward store managers who fight for him.

How has JustEat responded?

They haven’t, publicly, other than to issue a stock response to all requests from journalists for comment: that they are having ongoing discussions with Stuart about the situation. I should think they are, alright! On occasion JustEat have seemed to imply that they have consulted with riders as well. This is not the case. Stuart have a stock crisis-management response: they hold a “round table” where they hand-pick drivers whom they consider very loyal to the firm, often longstanding drivers or captains, and hold a private meeting with them in order to find some second-rate concession that they can throw out in order to quell the strike. In a few instances they have held these and put the boost up, where they have been dealing with isolated groups of drivers who aren’t hooked up to the union. The round-tables they held with Sheffield and Blackpool drivers in January though, produced national results. In part that’s because genuine local leaders simply crashed the meetings. Stuart fixed the insurance document upload system, a persistent bug in which had been suspending a few drivers whenever they uploaded their updated insurance documents; and they restored a perk they’d stripped away a few years ago, which is payment for time spent waiting for an order in a restaurant. Previously that was from 20 minutes, at £4.50 for every 20 minutes spent waiting; now it’s after 15 minutes but they’ve not announced the rate yet. No way would they have given us that without the strike. Stuart went quiet after they made those concessions, and for a couple of weeks, only Sheffield was still doing a daily strike. Stuart probably thought that had killed the movement. But now there are strikes in Sheffield, Chesterfield, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Dewsbury and more towns are stirring too. So they’ll have to drop the strong-and-silent act.

There was a petition signed by local businesses in support. Have they been supporting in other ways?

No

What are the next steps?

What we say frequently is that if you want to cost Stuart enough to win, there is no way you can make the numbers add up in your town alone. The key to success is spreading the strike. And that is what we are doing. I personally have been traveling across the north of England, visiting groups of riders in different towns every few days. Some IWGB union staffers and driver-leaders have been doing likewise. We are also building a network of UberEats drivers who are just desperate to take action. When we spread the strike to ten, twenty towns, beat Stuart, and build up durable leadership teams of drivers in all those places, then we will plan a real war against Uber, and beat them too.

Don’t Ask For A Seat, Take It!

“The Great Resignation” has been inescapable. If you scrolled through social media at all in 2021, you probably saw headline after headline about short staffed companies, pictures of signs on the windows of businesses begging for patience and forgiveness for their slow service, and of course our favorite: posters blaming “government handouts” for the staffing issues of restaurants who were simultaneously collecting tens of thousands of dollars in government handouts through the PPP loan program. 

The companies who run our food system are always the culprit whenever there’s an outbreak of food borne illnesses like salmonella, hepatitis or norovirus. We all have stories of working alongside a coworker with pink eye or some other contagious maladie. Due to a lack of living wages and paid sick leave, the restaurant industry has been known for helping create a phenomenon known as “presenteeism” (the opposite of “absenteeism”) in which there is typically an alarming number of workers on the job who shouldn't be, especially workers who should be home sick or at a hospital. So it comes as no surprise then that these same captains of industry fail to acknowledge the fact that the COVID pandemic has been giving workers no other option than to not come to work, especially the nearly 1,000,000 among us who are now deceased.

Aside from one infamous Fox News interview, the business press predictably did little to nothing to give the perspectives of workers, so we took to social media to have our voices heard. We shared our experiences about getting sick, losing coworkers and loved ones, and dealing with maskless customers. We discuss topics that never see the light of day in the mainstream press such as the  life-altering disabilities workers have been experiencing as a result of contracting the coronavirus. We also cheered for the high turnover rates in our industries, watching gleefully as our current and former employers lost their collective shit while trying to keep their operations running. 

Not only have workers been walking off on an individual basis, but we saw several instances of workers quitting en masse. The windows which once displayed signs saying “Nobody wants to work!” were redecorated with new signs proclaiming “We all quit!” Members of labor unions went on strike, withholding their labor until their employers negotiated with their demands. Individually, collectively, permanently and temporarily, the withdrawal of labor has been a hot discussion topic among the working class.

The withdrawal of labor, if exercised properly in a concerted manner, is one of the most powerful weapons we have as workers. Staying on the job can be a weapon as well, but like any sort of job action, it has to happen on our own terms. As mentioned earlier, bosses want us on the job even when we are sick, tired, and even dying. But there are examples of workers staying on the job when the bosses didn’t want them there who seized company property for their own purposes. 

I’m writing this in Detroit, Michigan in the United States of America. One of our most infamous labor events was the 1936 Flint Sit Down Strike in which auto workers occupied a General Motors plant for 3 months so that they could ultimately win the first union contract in the auto industry. Another powerful yet relatively unknown strike (even in the Motor City!), was the Woolworth’s Sit Down Strike of 1937 in which waitresses and retail workers occupied the nation’s largest retailer until their union was recognized and their demands were met. All in all about 150 women participated in this event and it is said that due to the size and scope of the company at the time, the strike would be comparable to having a strike at McDonald’s, The Gap and Walmart at the same time today. Unfortunately it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that we don’t hear about the Woolworth occupation with the same reverence as other actions, largely because- even in some labor circles- our jobs aren’t viewed as “real jobs” and our unions aren’t viewed as “real unions''. 

But nonetheless, restaurants have been the sites of front line struggle for all sorts of social issues. In 1960, once again at a Woolworth’s, black students in Greensboro, North Carolina defied segregationist laws by sitting at the lunch counter and refusing to leave when they were denied service. This wasn’t the first lunch counter sit-in, but it was one of the most pivotal in the US, resulting in the desegregation of lunch counters nationwide. 

Throughout the month of February, Restaurant Worker News will continue to report events as they happen, but we want to pay special attention to the heroes and martyrs who came before us who stayed where they were and refused to leave, who stood their ground, and who shook the systems of power and domination to their core. They didn’t ask for a seat at the table, they took it. As historian Howard Zinn famously said, “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but “who is sitting in.”

February events that shocked the restaurant industry:

February 26, 1906: “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclaire is published (link)

February 27, 1937:   Woolworth Sit-Down Strike begins in Detroit, MI (link)

February 1, 1960:    Lunch Counter Sit-In in Greensboro, NC (link)

February 13, 1960:   Lunch Counter Sit-In in Nashville, TN (link)

February 29, 1960:  Lunch Counter Sit-In in Tampa, FL (link)

February 22, 1980:  Burger King Workers in Detroit, MI win first fast food union election (link)

February 12, 2005:  IWW Strike at Pizza Time in Olympia, WA (link)

February 22, 2019:  Employees walk off the job at three Sonic locations in Ohio (link)