Death & Co.’s recent union drive could have made history. But the failed effort underscores the challenges that come with unionizing bar staff, even as restaurants, cafés and hotels see an uptick in labor organizing.
Waffle House workers launched a three-day strike in South Carolina in response to low pay, harsh working conditions and staff shortages. They are supported by the Union of Southern Service Workers.
By organizing today’s “unorganizable” Southern workers, the Union of Southern Service Workers seeks to follow in their footsteps of downtrodden workers excluded from the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act of 1935 who fought for recognition.
Workers at a “high-incident” Starbucks in Eugene, Oregon, are often expected to manage in-store conflicts and crises on their own. They say they're unionizing in response to the company not training or compensating them well enough for the task.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has a national Restaurant Organizing Project that has helped support unemployed restaurant workers throughout the pandemic. The aim is to organize workers in the industry to reshape it in the long run.
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Starbucks portrays itself as a “community of partners,” not an average workplace. But now that workers are organizing a union drive in Buffalo, that warm and fuzzy rhetoric has vanished, replaced by coercion and union-busting.
It's hard to say a story is a blistering indictment of privilege without making it seem medicinal, which The White Lotus is not.
The men and women who went to work and war during World War II were backed by a care economy. We need one too. What are the basic facilities necessary to enable our society to function? And then let’s fund the answer.
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