For Some Food-Service Workers, Unions Are Finally Gaining Steam

Change had gone too far at Anchor Brewing Company when management took away the employees’ beer earlier this year. Leading up to the eventual sale of the legacy Californian brewery to the Japanese behemoth Sapporo Holdings Ltd. in 2017, workers had seen an erosion of company culture and benefits, including the loss of a 45-minute paid lunch. More recently, full-time employees’ maximum accrued sick time was cut from 160 hours to 80 hours, and security cameras were installed.

But losing employees’ long-standing right to beer during lunch or shift breaks felt like the final straw: A few weeks later, employees at Anchor went public with their effort, with support from the Democratic Socialists of America and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, to unionize the brewery.

“The culture has just changed. It’s been this steady downward progression for those of us working there,” Garrett Kelly, 31, a cellar worker and former brewer for Anchor, says. “I think a lot of us felt emboldened by the Sapporo buyout.”

Following the 2008 financial crisis, frustrated employees throughout food- and beverage-related industries in the United States began to organize. With the federal minimum wage for tipped workers frozen at $2.13 since 1991, real wages barely growing — they crept up a little under 0.2 percent per year for American workers since 1973 (and in some cases, they declined) — and more than one in nine full-time workers paid wages that would keep them in poverty, low-wage employees in burger joints, craft breweries, third-wave coffee shops, and similar workplaces are turning to organizing in pursuit of more livable wages and better working conditions.

For the employees at Anchor Brewing, unionizing is a means to preserve both their own livelihood and the company culture. Although the craft beer industry has exploded in the United States, with over 7,000 active breweries in 2018, according to the Breweries Association, wages haven’t kept up with growth.

“Our starting wages at Anchor currently are lower than they were five years ago, but the cost of living in San Francisco has risen exponentially,” says Kelly, who has reached a wage of $18.35 per hour after working at the company for three and a half years. Back then, he says, the starting rate was $17.25, but it has since fallen to $16.50. With the median monthly rent in San Francisco reaching nearly $4,500, according to Zillow, several Anchor employees now commute upwards of two hours from outside the city to work, and they hold down multiple jobs. “It’s difficult to survive,” Kelly says. “This used to be a place you could make a career, support family with. That’s no longer the case.”

Kelly noted, though, that although unions in craft breweries are nearly unheard of, they’re not uncommon among macrobreweries. Brewers for Anheuser-Busch InBev, many of whom are unionized with the Teamsters, can earn between $29 to $33 an hour, according to Glassdoor, plus benefits and cash bonuses.

The increasing pains of unsustainable wages in the craft beer industry resonate with many in the service industry, a sector that, similarly, has a terrible track record when it comes to unionization, and has suffered from low and largely stagnant wages for decades. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2018, only 1.3 percent of the workforce employed in food services and drinking places was unionized in 2018, compared to 10.5 percent of the overall workforce; meanwhile, the median pay for someone in the industry, including tips, is just over $20,000.

It should be noted although unions have been in decline, barring a slight growth in 2017, researchers have found that the desire for and interest in unionization has in fact grown since the 1970s. A recent paper on “worker voice,” or how much say workers felt they had on workplace issues, found that almost half of non-union workers in 2017 said they would enjoy the chance to join a union, an increase from one-third of non-union workers in 1970.

These findings have some bearing on the ongoing Fight for $15 movement, which began in 2012 and has since pushed for unionization, along with increased wages, in the low-wage workforce, including the fast-food industry. The movement is supported and funded by organizations like the Service Employees International Union and Fast Food Justice. The fast-food industry has been notoriously difficult to unionize, owing to factors like employees perceiving their jobs as temporary, or the fear of being (illegally) fired for attempting to unionize. In some high-profile cases, fast-food corporations have claimed that the franchise model is to blame for stalled union efforts: According to Rebecca Givan, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, corporations say the franchise owner is legally the employer, and that they have no control over working conditions or wage increases; franchisees say corporations dictate other costs, like branding and marketing deals, that cut into their profits, which are already thin. For workers, this means adopting a two-fold strategy to put pressure both on their legal employer (the franchisee) as well as the organization which holds power to force higher wages (the brand).

Yet in the past seven years, hundreds of thousands of fast-food workers have organized to leverage pressure on their employers, including striking and protests. “Things are building off each other in a way because we’re experiencing a lot of pressures that weren’t there,” says Saru Jayaraman, president and cofounder of the restaurant worker advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. “High levels of inequality, the mortgage crisis, increased profiles of sexual harassment and racial discrimination — all are creating the ability for workers to stand up.”

The movement has found some success: Four states and the District of Columbia have signed legislation creating a path for $15 minimum wages. Riding the movement’s energy, three Portland, Oregon, locations of the Pacific Northwest’s regional fast-food chain Burgerville managed to unionize in 2018, with help from Industrial Workers of the World. Currently, they are demanding $5 per hour raises, from Portland’s current $12 per hour minimum wage up to $17 per hour; better health care; and protection for undocumented workers at Burgerville.

“There does seem to be an increasing sentiment of questioning the established economic order, questioning capitalism,” says Emmett Schlenz, 24, a spokesperson for the Burgerville Workers Union. “Workers laboring, suffering under these conditions over time — they don’t have to deal with this; there could be something better.”

According to Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology specializing in labor and labor movements at CUNY, the revitalization of unionization and organizing stems from millennials who have come into the workforce post-financial crisis and are saddled with unsurmountable college debt. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that nearly 76 percent of new union members in 2017 were under the age of 35. “There’s some new energy,” Milkman says about the organizing movements in the foodservice workforce.

Alec Hershman, 33, a barista at Ann Arbor, Michigan’s chainlet Mighty Good Coffee, was part of its union organizing drive this past August. It was recognized at the end of October, seeing 15 baristas organize with IWW. “We really have an overeducated, over-talented staff, and that has led to the professionalization of some of these industries in terms of the craft,” says Hershman, who has a few college degrees and plenty of debt. “Once you’ve committed that time to one practice, you want it to be sustainable, and the wages have not been historically sustainable.”

Mighty Good Coffee’s unionization included discussions about improving workplace dynamics, with demands that include a $15 living wage, paid sick leave, and more formal programs to foster professional development, like third-wave craft coffee training.

The unionization at Mighty Good highlights a snowball effect that is increasingly associated with organizing. In private sectors like digital media and in public sectors like education, union drives and strikes quickly developed from flash-in-pan anomalies to a growing norm. The Ann Arbor baristas’ own drive came about after employees heard a 2018 episode on the Boss Barista podcast interviewing their former coworker Nya Njee and found an earlier episode discussing Gimme! Coffee’s success in unionizing. Both Hershman and Samantha Mason, 27, one of the organizers of the Gimme! Coffee union in Ithaca, says that baristas from around the country have begun to reach out with questions on organizing in their own coffee shops.

“I really want to develop a barista council, where baristas across the country set up phone calls and discuss what’s going on in the workplace, addressing issues,” Mason says. “To me, coffee is a big deal — it’s not going away. Being a barista, it’s a common job now.”

As demonstrated by the Fight for $15, labor organizing is far from beholden to traditional collective bargaining tactics. Contractors for the venture capital-backed grocery delivery app Instacart found ways to organize using Facebook and Reddit, and air grievances with each other as well as customers. This past January, months after a change in Instacart’s policy that enabled tips to be used to pad shoppers’ wages, 150 Instacart shoppers signed an online petition, backed by the labor group Working Washington, to bring attention to this policy. Their efforts resulted in media coverage, with Instacart announcing it would change its tipping policy, and 600 Instacart shoppers meeting online to discuss next steps in achieving fair wages.

Sage Wilson, a spokesperson with Working Washington, explains that the focus of their campaign was essentially to drive home the inequality of a startup valued at $7 billion using tips to pad contract workers’ wages.

“The thing that made Instacart workers effective: A large number of Instacart workers organized, and a large number of customers [were] pissed off,” Wilson says. “That combination is hard for a company to resist.”

Of course, many of these efforts come with risks. With increased minimum wages, restaurants have cut shifts and staff. But many, like the folks at Anchor, believe it’s a fight not just worth taking up, but one that their livelihoods depend on.

“As folks of our generation have seen, we do have power,” Kelly says. “You can change things for the better. That’s one thing hope we’re able to do in this campaign, whether in the craft beer industry or America as a whole: We can show what is possible.”

Matt Sedacca is a writer based in New York City.
Editor: Erin DeJesus