04 Jun 2026

Gimme a Break

by Rax King

Why are restaurants such a bitch to unionize, I wondered, as I read Jaya Saxena’s recent interview with longtime food service worker Hannah Chouinard over at Ravenous. Chouinard is a member of Attaboy Local 134, composed of workers from the New York location of cocktail hotspot Attaboy. They seem well-positioned to succeed where other food service unionization efforts have stumbled: these workers are specialists in their field who tend to stay there for years, and—while the union does want higher wages for back of house workers, as well as health insurance—its demands pertain more to quality of life than to compensation. They aren’t chiseling into the company’s profits; they want a safer workplace where they aren’t expected to come in sick. As union demands go, Local 134’s seem pretty humble. Still, Saxena writes, management has been engaging in the usual “union avoidance” tactics, including arguing that unions simply don’t make sense for the industry. There’s some logic to that attitude, to be fair: as Saxena points out, the small number of staff of most restaurants and the workers’ frequent transience present hurdles for unionization efforts. In any event, despite promising to bargain in good faith, they’ve even fired a union member with no history of disciplinary issues in his long tenure at the bar.

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.