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Lela Nargi
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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
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.
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
“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...
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