Subject: Restaurant Workers 
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 09:56:41 -0800 (PST) 
From: obu@teleport.com 
To: iu640-l@iww.org 
---------- 

 
 On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Jeffrey Brite wrote: 
 
  I'm trying to do some research on restaurant workers, but I'm having a little problem getting started.  Can anyone help?  I'm looking for information on the industry standard for restaurant workers in the US   and Other Industrial workers, like wages, benefits...  Any 
help will do, 
NET
PIGS
Jeff,
       The survey and restaurant workers organizing drive that Alexis mentions happened in State College, PA back in 1973-74.  Members of the IWW, including me, who were
students at Penn State, attempted to organize the entire restaurant industry of the town.  We started without any particular place in mind, and conducted a "wages, hours,
and working conditions" survey among as many restaurant workers as we
could contact.
  The survey was done under the auspices of the Penn State student government, where a few members of the branch were "senators".  Our basic method of circulating the survey
forms was to walk in to a restaurant and, making sure that no boss could hear what was going on, explain the survey and its purpose to one of the workers and ask if he or she could circulate the forms and ask people to fill them out and send them back to a P.O. Box.
 We stressed that anyone who responded would remain anonymous.  It didn't hurt that we were doing a student government sponsored survey, rather than an openly pro-union
survey, and we ended up getting responses from workers in almost every restaurant in State College.
       The results gave us a picture of what the organizing possibilities werelike in each workplace.  We put colored pins in a map of the town showing the location of each
restaurant: white for "No chance", yellow for "Maybe", black for "Ripe for organizing", red for "Wobs and sympathizers onsite." An example of a ripe for organizing place would be
a diner where almost the entire staff filled out the forms and returned them in the same envelope with their names written at the top along with comments denouncing their
boss.
       The first place we tried to organize was a Kentucky Fried Chicken thatshowed up as a hotspot on the map and had a very high turnover rate. Members of the branch who needed
work applied for the open jobs, and soon at least a third of the 15 or so KFC workers were wobblies who had applied with the intention of trying to organize.  Within a short while a
majority (in fact just about everyone) had signed authorization cards and were holding regular organizing meetings.  The boss still knew very little about what was happening.  Rather than taking the NLRB election route, the workers decided to try to get "voluntary recognition" by all showing up at the same time wearing IWW buttons and displaying the stack of signed cards to the boss, whose name I forget.  The result was a walkout that lasted for months until the KFC went out of business (reopening a year later with a different franchise).  The boycott that the branch organized was extremely successful, so that the scabs that were hired to replace the strikers had no one to serve most
of the time.
       Anyhow, the drive spread to several other restaurants, including a Roy Rogers where an NLRB election that voted down the union 2-1 was held.  The firm of Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler and Krupman that Alexis and the other Borders workers in Philadelphia encountered during their organizing drive was hired by the State College restaurant owners' association, and tens of thousands of dollars were spent to defeat us.  After a while the
organizing drive fizzled out without ever getting employer recognition or a contract anywhere.  However, conditions and pay did improve somewhat, at least for a while.
   I'm getting ready to head for work, so I have to cut this short. Using a survey to locate the hotspots is a great way to stir up a lot of trouble and publicizing the results just by itself lets people know what miserable employers restaurants can be. Using this approach to prepare for a city-wide drive allows you to take a proactive, strategic approach rather than the reactive approach that most recent IWW drives have taken. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss this further.
 
In Solidarity,
Frank