One of the restaurant industry’s harshest critics announced Thursday that it intends to pressure governments at all levels into codifying a Restaurant Workers Bill of Rights, a set of broad deliverables all employers would have to guarantee their staffs. The obligations would change the very nature of employment in the business, at a cost that would fundamentally alter restaurants’ financial modeling.
Indeed, the non-negotiables posed by the union-backed Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, or ROC, are profound enough to undermine a key reason why restaurants have become America’s kitchens. What’s transformed restaurants from a luxury into an option for nearly everyone is their affordability. Hamburgers were available everywhere before two brothers in California fired up the grill of a new sort of operation 70 years ago. The breakthrough from Dick and Mac McDonald was figuring out a way to sell them for 15 cents.
The employment policies ROC hopes to mandate would range from ensuring that every employee takes home enough pay to cover rent, food and other essentials, to providing everyone on the payroll with health insurance.
There are five core principles to the labor advocate’s Bill of Rights:
- The right to a thriving life, or being freed from constant financial worries and making do with less for the family.
- The right to healing and rest, or the benefits of policies such as paid sick time, paid family leave and paid vacations.
- The right to a safe and dignified working environment.
- The right to health and bodily autonomy, or healthcare coverage and getting time to see a doctor.
- The right to participation in government—union-speak for permitting workers to organize, lobby and demonstrate for or against social and political matters.
The principles are lofty ones, and the fifth pillar is clearly intended to open restaurant doors to groups like the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, the group that provides funding to ROC.
But before operators roll their eyes or mockingly hum Kumbaya at such pie-in-the-sky notions, perhaps they should look at their labor schedules for the coming week. Still have slots to fill, even with shortening your hours and closing part of the dining room?
Maybe radically altering the industry’s labor model isn’t such a bad idea, given that people don’t want to work in it and robots aren’t the cure-all some had hoped, as our FSTEC conference on technology clearly attested. As ROC officials noted in announcing the Bill of Rights, 60% of current restaurant workers want to move into other fields.
The Bill of Rights grew out of a survey the group conducted to pinpoint what restaurant workers don’t like about their jobs. Interestingly, the group said, it learned that many liked the work and particularly relished the comradery of being part of a team. What they abhorred is the way they’re treated, presumably by management and bad-apple guests, and the constant struggle to survive financially.
As impractical as the Bill of Rights clearly is, maybe the industry should suspend its defenses long enough to consider what employees say would keep them in restaurant jobs. Maybe it’s time to whiteboard how some of those wants could be met without going broke.
The worst thing operators could do is dismiss the Bill of Rights as ridiculous, the sort of blue-sky effort that’s too out there to be embraced anywhere but in Berkeley, Calif., and a few communes.
Isn’t that what the industry used to say about a $15 minimum wage? Now California is facing the prospect of a $22 an hour mandate.
The industry should also keep in mind how its world changed on Sept. 5, when the SEIU succeeded in replacing the legislative process of setting fast-food wages and working conditions with a mechanism where workers and unions have hands on the controls. As 40% of a council that’s empowered to set the quick-service sector’s work standards, and allies likely to wield another 20% of the voting power, they’re in an ideal position to ramrod measures like the Restaurant Workers Bill of Rights into a regulatory reality.
And last we heard, labor advocates are already mobilizing to adopt a Fast Act-like measure in nine other states.
Ostriches have been well-served by the defensive tactic of keeping their heads in the sand. That approach will only leave the restaurant business gasping for oxygen.