Looks like the union organizing Starbucks is smelling an opportunity in hash browns. While contract negotiations continue with the coffee giant, the organization behind Starbucks Workers United is intensifying efforts to make Waffle House its next restaurant conquest.
The labor group isn’t settling for the $20-an-hour pay floor it won for most fast-food workers in California. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is targeting a minimum wage of $25 an hour for employees of the iconic breakfast chain.
In late 2022, the SEIU set up a cross-employer proxy called the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW). It is not a union in the traditional sense. Instead of being limited to employees of a single concern, membership is open to all hourly service workers who want counterinfluence over their respective bosses. The idea is to muster an army of wage earners so they can flex their collective might to right the wrongs afflicted on co-members.
The USSW believes it has that need for group action right now within Waffle House, the iconic 24-hour chain based in Georgia. The rallying point is the $3 fee employees are reportedly charged per shift for meals they’re entitled to eat while on the clock. The money is deducted from paychecks regardless of whether the food is actually consumed, according to the union.
It announced with the usual bluster that employees of a Waffle House in Conyers, Georgia, were walking off their jobs on Monday to protest the standing $3 meal charge.
It was another of the “strikes” the SEIU and its affiliates routinely call in hopes of drawing the public’s attention. In truth, the job actions usually amount to a handful of employees being paid by the union to grouse about their working conditions while video cameras capture the show.
The union also distributes quotes like these from employees who may be involved: “If Waffle House thinks they can keep getting away with docking our pay for meals we don’t eat, they clearly don’t understand the power we’ve built in our union,” said Cindy Smith, an employee of a Waffle House in Atlanta.
Accompanying the demand that Waffle House kill the $3 meal fee is an insistence that the chain raise its minimum wage to $25 and set certain scheduling guarantees so employees have some predictability about their earnings.
The temptation is to slough the whole thing off as more union posturing. But recent developments make that response foolhardy.
The “strike” at the Conyers Waffle House likely didn’t bring the breakfast chain—or even that unit—to its knees. But the SEIU has gads of money, and it’s been having considerable success in wresting concessions from employers through what’s called sectoral bargaining, or organizing a whole sector’s employees rather than the workforce of a single company. By using that approach, the union was able to ramrod through the $20 minimum wage for California employees of fast-food restaurants with at least 59 sister stores nationwide.
The effort also established a new wage-setting system where fast-food employees and union officials have a loud say in what the workers should be paid.
The SEIU followed up its victory in California with the establishment of a permanent sectoral-bargaining body, a cross-employer organization called the California Fast Food Workers Union. It’s the West Coast parallel of the USSW, though with a narrower focus.
The Fast Food Workers Union is already lobbying to have California’s new fast-food wage-setting council raise the pay floor for quick-service workers there by another 3.5% on Jan. 1.
Since the unionization of Starbucks began in August 2022, executives of other chains have voiced little concern about their charge becoming labor’s next target. After the organizing effort caught fire, they were content to roast marshmallows and shrug off the situation as Starbucks’ problem.
Maybe employers should take a cue from their employers and start thinking about the benefits of collaboration. Who said sectoral bargaining can’t work both ways?