Portside

Workers at the Crown Heights pizzeria Barboncino are organizing a union with Workers United. It would be the first pizzeria of its kind to go union in New York — and perhaps not the last.

The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Union Kitchen last fall, detailing 26 violations of labor laws protecting unionizing workers.

When kitchen workers at Twin Peaks in TN walked out, protesting a racist manager along with unfair firings and wage theft, they were joined by wait staff who had been abused by the same manager.

Cafeteria staff make learning and healthy development possible by providing balanced meals to kids who otherwise might not get them. In return, they bring home some of the lowest earnings of the generally underpaid K–12 workforce.

App-based delivery firms rarely classify their drivers as employees deserving benefits. But gig workers’ demands for fair treatment are gaining traction in courts worldwide.

From basic safety issues like nonslip mats in the kitchen to better salaries and benefits, the fight to create a more just industry ramped up this year.

There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.

After months of activism by Sodexo employees, the company has decided to change the way it calculates hours for full-time jobs and allow several thousand workers back on the company health care plan.