Tell the Bosses We're Coming by Shaun Richman

Author:Shaun Richman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2020-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Let’s Spitball a Few More Scenarios

Let’s imagine a hospitality industry labor board. What kinds of companies are covered by the hospitality board? Well, hotels and restaurants for sure. Maybe fast food is under the jurisdiction of a retail industry board, or maybe it’s spun off to a subdivision of hospitality. Is airline catering here, or under transportation? Again, I would expect a certain degree of forum-shopping by the employers as some industrial boards prove to be particularly deft and aggressive in improving standards for workers, while others might be less aggressive on sectors that are outside of their bread and butter or have weaker unions.

For now, let’s think about hotels and restaurants where there is a long history of worker organizing efforts and some pockets of union strength. This labor board could do anything from raising the minimum wage of hotel housekeepers to abolishing the practice of tipping in restaurants. It could, and should, take on more than mere paycheck issues. It could ban “clopens,” which is the practice—more prevalent in fast food and retail—of assigning an employee to work the first shift of the day after she just finished the last shift of the night before, leaving little time for rest between closing and opening. It could take on issues of harassment in the workplace like granting cocktail waitresses the right to refuse to wear “uniforms” that are too sexually exploitative. Or it could extend a standard that unions have managed to win here and there through collective bargaining, but is a necessary right and a fight that would resonate across an industry. A good example would be mandating that all hotels—not just the union shops that have won it so far—install “panic buttons” for housekeepers to call for help when a customer is being creepy or aggressive.

The workers’ representative on the board—nominated by the secretary of labor or the White House or anybody with the appropriate authority and picked from among the handful of organizations that represent hospitality workers—could force a vote on any of these issues. Maybe it’s on a schedule, maybe it’s on demand, maybe there’s a limit of how many new issues can be raised in a year. Regardless, once a vote is scheduled on an issue of importance to the workers in the industry, every union and workers’ center with an organizing stake in the industry would agitate for a yes vote.

What would this look like? Surely there would be a lot of petition-signing (on paper in the shops, as well as online) and asks to call or email the industry and public representatives on the board. Hopefully, there would be some visibility actions—buttons and T-shirts and that kind of stuff. Rallies and hand-billing in key locations. Every union and worker center campaigning on the issue should definitely be organizing workers into dues-paying membership.

One would expect the unions would have an analysis of which major employers would have the most outsized influence on the other two board members and target them for disruption—including slowdowns, consumer boycotts, and rolling strikes.

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