A Chipotle employee eats inside a SF restaurant in 2020. | David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A recent worker protest at a NYC Chipotle was part of a longer effort by the Service Employees International Union and others to unionize fast-food workers
This story was originally published on Civil Eats.
On a cool, sunny morning in early October, a small group of Chipotle workers gathered in the deeply shadowed entrance to the Queens Center Mall in New York City. They sipped takeout coffee and nervously discussed the day’s strategy with an organizer from 32BJ Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a labor union representing 175,000 service employees that has been attempting to organize fast-food workers for the last few years.
Their plan was simple: They’d start their protest here around 10 a.m. and, hopefully, more of their colleagues would be on the way after they finished classes or took care of other non-work-related duties. The group planned to protest the wages they lost for the nine days of work they missed in early September when Hurricane Ida flooded the basement level food court where Chipotle shares space with Chick-fil-A, Panda Express, McDonald’s, and other exemplars of 21st-century mall cuisine.
There’s no “shortage of people who can do the jobs, it’s that the jobs are terrible.”
Chipotle “waited a whole week to tell us” the store would remain closed, says Caren Guzman, a veteran crew member and recent community college graduate. “Then they said they wouldn’t pay us [for the days unworked].” The company did not respond to requests for comment on this story, but Guzman says the closure cost her $600 in lost wages — more than half her portion of rent on an apartment that she shares with her mother. The store’s 20 other crew members, most of whom earn New York City’s $15 hourly minimum wage, were similarly strapped.
Wage theft, unsafe work environments, last-minute shift changes, and firings for no clear reason are just some of the unethical, if not illegal, indignities fast-food workers say they endure in the U.S. The situation has only gotten worse since the COVID epidemic began, and that fact has lead to mass walkouts across the country as well as widespread labor shortages in the foodservice industry.
There’s no “shortage of people who can do the jobs, it’s that the jobs are terrible,” said Suzanne Adely, co-director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. Fast-food workers were being exposed to COVID; “They also realized that they’re not just being left unprotected — that their health didn’t matter to their employers — but that they were getting shit wages for their work.”
The fact that protests are occurring even in New York City — which has enacted hard-won, union-boosted worker protection legislation including Just Cause and Fair Workweek laws — and even at a chain like Chipotle, which promises to serve customers “food with integrity,” underscores the uphill work of union organizers. The strike at the Queens store was just one in a string of actions in the past two years in response to transgressions at New York area Chipotles — and it was part of a larger, longer, more concerted effort from union organizers to force fast-food chains to do better by their workers. This transient and vulnerable labor pool has historically proved tricky to organize; unions such as 32BJ hope they can convince them that better wages and less stressed lives are on the horizon, if only they make their voices heard.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23071647/626521176.jpg "Eight people locking arms outdoors, each wearing a red t-shirt that reads “Fight for $15 and a Union.”")
Striking McDonald’s employees at a 2016 protest in Los Angeles.
The Roots of Fast-Food Organizing
Attempts to organize fast-food workers date back to the early ’80s and a little-known union contract that was won by workers at an eatery in Detroit’s Greyhound bus station, says Alex Han, a longtime labor organizer who’s now a Bargaining for the Common Good fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.
There have certainly been other efforts since. 32BJ has been active in this arena for the past nine years and is part of a larger national push to organize the sector. To date, however, a union contract recently established at the small West Coast chain Burgerville is a rarity. Current bids owe a lot to a broader, non-union “Fight for $15” campaign that launched in Chicago in 2012 among restaurant and retail workers, Han says. With that campaign following an enormous teachers strike, movement engendered movement as one set of workers inspired others. Solidarity was also forged as lines blurred between various types of low-wage service employment.
“People go from a job at McDonald’s to a job at H&M to driving for Uber,” says Han. This sort of transience highlights one reason that organizing fast-food workers is so tricky. Conventional wisdom holds that these jobs are transitional, not career-centric, for teens and other young people destined for more “professional” futures. But that’s a reality, if not a mindset, that Han says shifted after the 2008 financial crisis; fast food workers now may be supporting families, working multiple jobs to make ends meet, and/or taking college classes that require flexible schedules.
Transience in the workforce is one reason why organizing fast-food workers is tricky.
Additionally, Han says, “Whenever you have a workforce that is disproportionately female, people of color, immigrants, young people, you’re always going to have a bigger challenge organizing them.” These workers can be hamstrung by fear, a lack of legal knowledge, and disbelief in their power to change their situation, causing many to remain silent about their plight.
Union organizers use a variety of methods to show employees the benefits of coming together to demand better working conditions, with an eye toward helping them take ownership of the process. They might make contact by “salting”: when a trained organizer gets a job at a fast-food restaurant and begins “mapping the workplace” identifying leaders who employees gravitate toward and listen to, according to Luis Feliz Leon, a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes.
“The organizer who is salting then builds a committee of worker leaders on the basis of having mapped the workplace to identify how workers organize themselves into social networks or workplace structures,” says Feliz Leon.
Tactics can be more basic, such as giving an organizer’s contact information to employees after closing time and letting them know that “we exist and we’re here for you,” says one Chipotle employee at the Queens Center Mall who requested anonymity. The worker said they began chatting with a 32BJ organizer two years ago.
When a store’s conditions escalate from merely lousy — no air conditioning in summer or heat in winter, no pandemic hazard pay, or a failure to pay legally mandated premiums of $75 for shift schedules changed within 24 hours — to dangerous or fiscally ruinous, now-trusted organizers are on call to offer advice on potential actions and explain basic worker rights.
“Not many people know what their rights are at work, in part because you have webs of state and federal and local law ... But also, every right is only as valid as the strength we have to enforce it. There’s no regulatory body to enforce all the laws we already have on the books,” Han says.
32BJ sees Chipotle as a prime target for organizing because its stores are company-owned — as opposed to franchises like McDonald’s — which makes it directly responsible for the working conditions of its approximately 97,000 employees, says Manny Pastreich, 32BJ’s secretary and treasurer. Chipotle has also allegedly broken New York’s worker protection laws: A 32BJ and National Consumers League report found evidence of sexual harassment, Fair Workweek violations, and retaliation against workers taking paid sick leave.
In 2020, 32BJ helped employees at a Manhattan Chipotle protest...