It’s About Time More Restaurants Let Their Workers Unionize

Fast food workers in Minnesota are on the verge of forming a union, one of the few historical instances of labor organization in the traditionally low-paying field.

The 200 Jimmy John’s employees work for a ten-store franchise of the national Jimmy John’s chain. After a successful organizing effort by the Industrial Workers of the World, a once-proud union with over 100,000 members at the turn of the 20^th century but today has roughly 1,600 members among its ranks, the employees narrowly lost an election to form a union. But after revelations emerged of coercion, misinformation, and intimidation on the part of the franchise owner, Mike Mulligan, the National Labor Relations Board nullified the election.

The employees protested unfair conditions, like repercussions for calling in sick, no guarantee of work hour, and a laissez-faire attitude by management that sent workers home prematurely if business was slow. Wages hover just above the $7.25 federal minimum.

The decision gives the employees fresh clout, forcing Mr. Mulligan to accept a settlement that recognizes the workers’ right to organize in a non-hostile environment, with bulletins posted by management admitting improper handling of the previous elections. And contrary to the belief unions are self-serving, the IWW is foregoing a new unionization drive, instead encouraging the employers to adopt a 10-point program that gives workers common sense assurances like: sick days, guaranteed work hours, reasonable raises, and shop committees to represent employees during disagreements with management. But if Jimmy John’s balks, the workers promise to pursue new elections, this time with NLRB officials on hand to monitor the meetings.

Fast-food workers, and restaurant workers in general, are a particularly neglected cohort of the labor force. A 2010 report by the non-profit Restaurant Opportunities Centers United found that 90 percent of workers are not offered health insurance, 38 percent work off the clock, and nearly 70 percent are forced to go to work sick. Very few receive full-time status, and the average annual income for a restaurant employee is just shy of $13,000, compared to the average national salary of $45,371. The industry employs 12.7 percent of workers, and accounts for 4 percent of total US gross domestic product.  

Perhaps good news for labor leaders, the industry is disproportionately young. In 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statisticsdetermined 21 percent of all workers in the field were between the ages of 16 and 19, six times above the national average. Already large unions are appealing to the vim and vigor of the youth; the AFL-CIO held its inaugural Young Workers Summit in Washington DC last year. However, restaurants have mostly scared off organizers. UNITE HERE includes 90,000 food service workers, but all of them work for dining establishments within airports, stadiums, cafeterias, and hotels, schools, and other institutions.

Less than seven percent of the private workforce in the U.S. belongs to a union. But carry over that rate of union membership to the restaurant industry, and suddenly there are nearly one million more workers on union rolls. How’s that for incentive?

The frequent refrain is that unions drive up wages, hurting an industry that has a low profit margin. Industry-wide studies on how much training new employees costs a restaurant aren’t available, but anecdotally, managers have given me estimates of $500-$2000 in losses for every week a new staff member is trained. Those figures include wasted food due to new employee error, compensated checks for customers whose experiences were poor, and disruption to the general flow of the restaurant. A more stable work team drives labor costs down—and unions can help.

“Higher wages incentivizes workers. And depending on how streamlined the restaurant is, the overhead dedicated to training new talent can add up,” says Blake Schumpert, Executive Chef of Redwood restaurant in Bethesda, Md. He has run kitchens that weren’t organized by labor groups, but earlier in Schumpert’s career he worked at an unionized restaurant at the Essex House hotel in Manhattan. “I support unions at a restaurant, with reservation. I think they’re ultimately helpful,” though he cautions the protectionism that labor groups offer can hurt productivity for owners.

Speaking from experience as a restaurant worker, much of the bad relations that exist between staff and management are a result of poorly understood rules and expectations. Managers are under the gun to perform, working long hours to satisfy sales projections, leaving them little time or patience to properly interact with waged-workers. That’s not the fault of any one person, but the result of a highly stressful work environment that tolerates untoward behavior more than other job sites. (Just imagine using kitchen-speak at a marketing firm meeting).

Brent Bayline, who is the general manager of one Le Pain Quotidien, an international Belgian chain, understands the need for mediators, but worries unions take away the effectiveness of management. “The perceived challenge as a manager is that you lose control of the restaurant, and I’m not really speaking financially,” he says. “In corporate-run restaurants today, the human resource department creates an environment where due diligence is afforded to the worker.” It makes having a labor group involved unnecessary, says Bayline.

Unions aren’t the agitators they’re made out to be; ideally they adjudicate disagreements between staff and employers before they snowball into major affairs. Mr. Mulligan, the franchise owner whose workers elected to form a union, describes the IWW as a “socialist-anarchist organization” that “proudly preaches the overthrow of capitalism.” That reputation of labor groups as militant-savants is unfair; as employers have matured, unions have changed tactics too. There’s no need for villainy, just a better mechanism for letting workers and their employers see eye-to-eye.

Mikhail Zinshteyn is a staff writer for Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at mzinshteyn@googlemail.com.

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