04 Jun 2026

Gimme a Break

by Rax King

Sometimes, the question of why restaurants are so intransigently difficult to unionize implies that other industries have been simple, an implication which isn’t as true as it might seem. Anyone reading this grew up either surrounded by strong trade unions, or in the rubble of their post-Reagan demolition. Still, that’s the model we know: tradesmen who were able to parlay valuable skills into health insurance and pensions. One of the most lasting successes of the 20th-century unionization boom is that trade unions feel almost inevitable now, at least in strongholds like New York, where they’ve retained a good amount of bargaining power. To observe that restaurants are harder to unionize than construction was (or healthcare, or mining) is also to say that their bargaining power doesn’t feel inevitable in the same way, though the labor they represent is no less valuable.

And so, the thinking goes, of course carpenters and transit workers have unions: we wouldn’t have houses or trains without them. The stakes are simply lower for cocktail bars on the user end, even if the people who work in those places need tolerable working conditions just as badly. It’s not that most people believe the workers in food service establishments deserve to be plagued by lean or erratic scheduling, or the inability to take time off when they’re sick. But it’s easy to accept the premise that the people in some jobs are obligated to live that way. The question then becomes not how to protect every worker everywhere from such cruelties, but how to funnel the cruelties into a couple of unfortunate industries which must then carry the stink of the dead-end job on them. Restaurants, with their miniscule profit margins and those impossible-to-predict rhythms of rushes and dead shifts, are a tempting scapegoat. And it’s all too easy to turn their workers into untouchables—especially the undocumented ones in the back of house, who are often too scared, in these fascist times, to report abuses they experience on the job.

That’s what feels inevitable: the inherent awfulness of the restaurant job.