The #restaurant #industry has long coordinated efforts to suppress labor costs through the #NRA, a multimillion-dollar #lobbying machine funded both by its restaurant members and by the fees #workers pay for required food-safety classes, according to a recent New York Times report.
The group has spent its #war chest on lobbying campaigns to preserve a subminimum #wage for tipped workers — who are disproportionately young, women, and people of color, and far more likely to live in #poverty than regular minimum wage workers — and to help block state and federal sick leave proposals and minimum wage increases.
But now, restaurant executives are on edge. #Union campaigns are suddenly penetrating their industry, which employs about 10 percent of the American #workforce and has one of the lowest #unionization rates of any sector. Over the past few years, baristas have #unionized nearly 280 Starbucks stores in the face of enormous odds, and dozens of other coffee #shops and restaurants have followed suit.
“The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, every newspaper reports on every union win… when an unfair labor practice charge is filed, when there are challenges to elections,” said Felice Ekelman, a principal at Jackson Lewis, one of the oldest and most infamous union avoidance law firms in the country. “When did this become first page #news?”
“And guess who’s reading it?” replied Laura Pierson-Scheinberg, one of Ekelman’s Jackson Lewis colleagues, as the two sat across from each other on the main stage of the summit. “My kids. Literally. I have an 18-year-old, my kids are into it.”
The two lawyers were discussing a new threat for the restaurant industry: the unexpected rise of union campaigns in workplaces that, for decades, have largely been immune from such organizing efforts.
“Before, I used to say… ‘[Unionization] isn’t a problem for you in the restaurant industry,’” said Pierson-Scheinberg. But now, she warned, “Kids do not care about paying union dues. Two percent of pay, are you kidding me? Their Netflix costs more. They think it’s a hell of a deal.”
The “kids,” she added, are #organizing #workplaces which would have previously seemed unreachable.
https://www.levernews.com/fear-and-loathing-among-the-union-busters/
