Justice is Served: Restaurant Workers Organize in the US and Around the World

To introduce some of the intertwined issues of the global economy, the US restaurant industry, and racial justice, I want to tell you about my friend Sekou Siby -- who is himself, as so many of us are, a product of globalization. Siby is an immigrant from Ivory Coast, which is in West Africa. He was a student organizer involved in political campaigns in Ivory Coast, and then conflict erupted and he really had to get out, and he came to the United States. Back home in Ivory Coast, Siby was a French teacher, he had a degree -- he speaks five or six languages. He came to the United States and ended up working in restaurants, like so many people who come from all over the world. In September 2001, Siby was working at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. Siby had a hard time after the September 11 attacks because the weekend before, he had been playing soccer with a lot of the other immigrant workers who ended up dying that day. When the Restaurant Opportunities Center was formed in New York in 2002, Siby was its first member, along with many other former Windows on the World workers. He became an organizer with ROC, then a lead organizer, and is now Executive Director of the organization in New York. To me, Siby's story encapsulates much of what is going on globally and how it affects us locally.

The restaurant industry is now the largest private sector employer by far in the United States. It has about 13 million employees nationwide. This is related to the global phenomenon of manufacturing either leaving the United States, or disappearing completely because of technology. What's taking over is a service economy both in the United States and worldwide. And within the service economy, the restaurant industry in particular is growing by leaps and bounds. These jobs are being filled by people who have been 'globalized' out of their countries, either due to land loss or due to political issues for which, in many cases, the United States is partly responsible.

In large part the industry is made up of very low wage jobs, and there is terrible exploitation. But what most people don't know is that there actually are living wage jobs in this industry. A server in a fine dining restaurant in New York or even in Detroit or Los Angeles can make more than $100,000 a year. However, people of color and immigrants are not able to access those jobs. There's a glass ceiling. ROC United is a national restaurant workers' organization which grew out of a local organization called ROC New York, which Fekkak Mamdouh (co-author of The Accidental American) and I founded right after the September 11 attacks. Our model is to fight large, high-profile restaurant companies and get them to do things they never would have thought of doing, like provide paid sick days and promotions and health insurance and job security and grievance procedures. We have been able to win these improvements for thousands of workers, in addition to restoring about $5 million in stolen tips and unpaid wages.

That's one aspect of our work, but at the same time we are showing a different way of doing things. We have opened a worker-owned, fine dining restaurant in New York City called Colors. It is a restaurant in the evening and during the day it is a huge training facility where we train workers of color to advance to these living wage jobs. We also do research and policy work (see www.rocny.org).

New Opportunites for Solidarity

We are creating a new alliance of workers all up and down the food chain. We work with farm workers, meat and poultry processing workers, food retail and distribution workers, supermarket workers, and restaurant workers. One of the groups in the alliance is an international food workers' group because we know that the food system is international. We know that our food comes from elsewhere and ends up on our tables in the fancy fine dining restaurants, but the laborers have not been talking to each other, so we created this alliance to bring us together and ultimately impact the food system. We go to big fancy conferences like Slow Food Nation, and we say "As long as you're thinking about sustainable and local food, let's talk about sustainable labor conditions too, because you're never ever going to have a sustainable food system without sustainable labor conditions. Especially because nobody is going to be able to afford all these fancy products you're making with alternative and locally grown ingredients, if none of us have good wages."

There are now ROC chapters in other parts of the US, and we're very excited that we are beginning to interact with the global restaurant workers' movement. This has to be the way forward -- developing international labor standards and international worker solidarity around the world. There are really amazing and creative ideas around the world that we are beginning to import to strengthen our organizing.

Recently we were able to meet with the restaurant workers' union in Mexico (thanks to TIGRA). We asked them, do you ever have this problem where they hire the white people in the front in these fine dining restaurants in Mexico City and the darker-skinned Mexicans in the back? And they said, we never really had that issue before, but more recently all these American corporations have started to come into Mexico City and set up hotels and set up restaurants, and usually they come in and the first thing they say is "Can we have a tall, white-skinned Mexican working in the front of the house?" What this means is that globalization is not just about exporting horrible jobs, and exporting exploitation, it's also about exporting US racism.

And what is our response to that? It is to globalize racial justice.