Submitted by lorinpda on Fri, 01/01/2010 - 16:35

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Published at Community Media Workshop by Curtis Black

A new organization of restaurant workers had its first small victory last week. Hours before a scheduled protest over unpaid wages, an Andersonville restaurant owner asked to meet with representatives of the Chicago chapter of the Restaurant Opportunity Center.

ROC-Chicago charges that workers at Ole Ole, 5413 N, Clark, are owed nearly $200,000 in unpaid wages.

Staff in the front of the house were working "completely for tips," said Jose Oliva of ROC. "It's an extreme case of what we call customer-subsidized wages." In the kitchen, workers were going weeks and months without getting paid – often quitting in frustration and moving on, he said. "I actually think they count on that," he said.

A message for the owner of Ole Ole was not immediately returned.

At a meeting with the owner on Monday, "we were able to make it clear that the workers are not willing to take it any more," said Oliva. "We're cautiously optimistic" that the restaurant will negotiate an agreement to pay back wages and improve working conditions, he said.

Wage violations and other abuses are endemic to the restaurant industry, Oliva said. "We get calls every day about this kind of thing," he said. While immigrant workers are particularly vulnerable, all workers in the "new economy" – with its widely-touted flexible workforce – are subject to abuses, he said.

Greater flexibility means weaker standards for tracking hours and fewer avenues of redress, he said. "People not being paid in full, being paid in straight hours for overtime – it can happen to anybody."

ROC-Chicago is completing a study of the restaurant industry in Chicago, which employs 250,000 workers, Oliva said. They found that 75 percent of restaurant workers earn poverty-level wages, and less than 10 percent get paid sick days.

Two-thirds of workers preparing and serving food reported going to work sick in the past year, he said. ROC has lobbied Congress in support of the Healthy Families Act, seeking paid sick days for restaurant workers.

ROC was founded in New York by surviving employees of Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center, where 73 workers perished on 9/11. The group now has eight regional affiliates. Beyond traditional protests by restaurant workers over workplace concerns, there's a training curriculum for restaurant career development -- and in 2003, ROC opened the cooperative restaurant Colors (the name reflects the diversity of the Windows workforce) in midtown Manhattan.

ROC-Michigan is opening a second Colors in Detroit next year, Oliva said, and ROC-Chicago is talking with a local nonprofit about a joint job training program and possibly a cooperative restaurant here.

ROC is part of a growing movement of workers centers which responds to the new economy and its contingent workforce just as industrial unions responded to industrialization, Oliva said.

"The restaurant industry today is like the auto industry in the last century," he said. "It's the core of the new service economy" and the pacesetter for labor relations. With 13.5 million workers, restaurants are the largest – and fastest growing -- private sector employer in the nation. "And conditions in the industry are not good," said Oliva.

This Newstip edited by Curtis Black
Contact: 312-369-7783 | fax 312-369-6404 | curtis@newstips.org
Newstip Date: 12-23-2009