Restaurant Industry Execs Are Very Worried About Food Service Workers Unionizing
At the October 2022 summit of the National Restaurant Association's legal wing, union-busting lawyers shared their latest strategies for shutting down workplace democracy. Recent food service union successes, it seems, have worried industry executives.
Members of a recently formed union of Starbucks workers hold a rally to celebrate the first anniversary of their founding, December 9, 2022 in New York City, New York. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images)
“Comrades,” said Chappell Phillips, as he grabbed the microphone, “please do not leave the conference. It’s all better from here.”
Phillips, an executive at the buffet restaurant chain Golden Corral, stood at a podium in the front of a hotel ballroom in Atlanta, before some one hundred restaurant executives, managers, and union-avoidance lawyers mingling and sipping weak coffee.
Minutes earlier, the government’s top labor watchdog had been standing at the same podium delivering the keynote speech here at the October 2022 summit of the Restaurant Law Center, the legal arm of the National Restaurant Association.
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