It’s always strange to me to see people dismissing food service as “easy work” rather than the important work of feeding people in a safe, and clean environment. If it was not for unionization efforts in the early 20th century, we wouldn’t have food safety standards as well as general workplace safety laws. There wouldn’t be rules around gloves, hand washing, food storage, cleaning equipment, not to mention all the sharp or hot instruments and tools they use throughout the day. On top of all of that, they need to be paid a living wage so they give a shit to follow the rules around keeping the kitchen clean. These are skills, between proper food storage and preparation, and cleaning. Never mind that basic math, customer service, responsibility prioritization are all skills. Food service is in no way “unskilled labor.”

People who work in food service are feeding you. Chipotle workers are not just “throwing cheese and rice into a tortilla” they are preparing meat and dairy (two biggest food safety concerns in any kitchen), they’re cleaning the instruments between use, they’re handling and cleaning produce as well as the floors and other surfaces. You want them to have clean, safe environments so you don’t get sick from said food. You want them to know what to use to clean their cooking equipment versus the bathroom. How long meat can be in the fridge before it gets thrown out. Corporations will never ever prioritize those rules because those rules cost money which eats into their profits. Employees coming together for collective bargaining and unionization is how we get these rules that make our lives a lot safer and healthier. A lot of people struggled and died for these laws to take place, and unfortunately we still need to defend them.

The employees were responding to understaffing, dangerous work conditions, undertraining, and lack of communication or care from management.

If you're at the point you're planning to quit the job, why not try to make it better for everyone? When you leave a job that isn't treating it's workers as they should, they will just hire someone new, treat them the same, and the cycle will continue.

Unionizing is hard, but is work for the greater good.

The next time you're at any place serving food, be sure to tell the folks preparing your food about your opinions on the matter.

Union workers and union shops come in all types. It's not just highly skilled trades that require or benefit from unions. The service industry was LONG overdue for unionization given the low pay and abuse of workers.

I see this all the time, this idea that only "skilled" labor is worth anything (and as if dealing with customers without gouging their eyes out isn't a skill)

Labor is labor. There is no company without those workers. There's no profit without them. They are the value. Why should the value they generate only go to the top?

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The majority of people I see in here screaming about unionization don’t strike me as the type that have ever been union labor.

How do I know that? They seem to think being in a local is the silver bullet cure for everything negative they see in their current employer and fail to realize that 85% of the time, union-company negotiations move at a glacial pace and you typically achieve half of what you expect too. See: the nurses at Maine Med who’s CBA allowed them to be stripped of PTO for jury duty, bereavement and military service. Someone on the union side dropped a huge fuckin ball on that one

Being in a union absolutely does have its pros and I won’t deny that but people act like it’s sunshine and rainbows 100% of the time