Back of House Latino Restaurant Workers Are Largely Unseen, So Are Their Rights.
Latino immigrants are the backbone of New York City restaurant kitchens. The work iso ften taxing, underpaid, and precarious. So why haven’t NYC restaurant workers organized?
Within an hour of opening, a popular restaurant in North Brooklyn already has a waitlist for the night. Patrons are lingering outside in the cold, waiting to grab a classic burger, drink a beer from a comically large mug or indulge in the restaurant’s famous martini for $16.
Carlos Castillo, a barback and food runner at the restaurant, can tell you exactly how much olive juice it takes to fuel said martinis on a busy Thursday night.He’ll likely not interact much with the restaurant’s patrons or the bartender, but he’ll bring you ketchup if you ask for it.
Like many runners, barbacks, or back of house kitchen staff in New York City, Castillo is one of the thousands of Latino workers that power the city’s bustling restaurant industry in ways that are not entirely visible to the patrons.
Restaurant labor is busy and chaotic. It largely happens behind the scenes in the kitchen, from food preparation, to dishwashing, and clean-up. Some front of house roles such as food runners, individuals that seamlessly deliver food to one’s table and pick up dirty dishes ,are, by design, not meant to be noticed by the diner.
Restaurant workers are bound by the whims of the industry, leading to inconsistent working conditions. Organizations, both governmental and nongovernmental, that seek to protect workers, have made significant progress, but there’s still a long way to go. In spite of wage legislation in NYC that protects documented and undocumented workers alike, restaurant workers continue to suffer from workplace injustices, including wage-theft, which comes in many forms.
Several of their peers in the service industry, most recently delivery workers, have demonstrated the power of collective action. Some wins include striking bargains and passing legislation to improve working conditions, like better access to bathrooms for app-based food delivery workers.
But, in an industry that is largely furnished by personal ties and immigrant networks, significantly stratified by distinctions between the front of house and back of house, and no common enemy, it is unclear whether restaurant workers will ever band together as a unified front.
Nationally, the restaurant and food service industry employs over 12 million people. In 2020, the restaurant industry employed over 200,000 workers in New York City. The median worker salary is $30,000 per year – one of the lowest median salaries in private sector industries. In 2020, Latinos made up 27% of the total labor force in the City, but accounted for nearly half of the restaurant workforce.
By many measures, the restaurant industry is characterized by tight-profit margins, low wages, wage-theft, a high turn-overrate among employees, and implicit hierarchies between tipped and untipped workers.
Workers in the back of house are predominantly non-white and may be low-wage workers employed as line cooks, dishwashers, cleaners, and porters. Hanna Goldberg, a doctoral student in the department of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center,s hared that generally, front of house restaurant workers who are more likely to be tipped also represent a larger proportion of white and more highly-educated restaurant workers in the industry.
The pandemic’s early death toll was a rare instance when the city named and saw restaurant and delivery workers. They were celebrated and mourned as essential. According to Ruth Milkman, a CUNY sociologist of labor and labor movements, the pandemic exposed the “trials and tribulations”of the essential workers that make up the industry.
In New York City, one in ten restaurant workers live in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona per a study released by the Office of theComptroller, both of which are predominantly Latino.I n Corona alone, one out of three people has contracted COVID since the beginning of the pandemic and the neighborhood’s death rate is significantly higher than the city’s average.
Data collected by the city shows that Hispanics made up 44% of the restaurant industry’s workforce by 2018, making them the largest ethnic group employed in the industry.
In response to the pandemic’s uneven toll, restaurants, nonprofits, and charity organizations set up fundraisers to support undocumented restaurant workersthat were out of work or excluded from government relief funds. The RestaurantWorkers Community Foundation (RWCF), a charity organization based out of NewYork, launched a relief fund in March of 2020, which raised almost $7 million dollars over the next few months.
Caroline Hatchett with theRWCF said the pandemic exposed common restaurant worker vulnerabilities including a lack of access to healthcare and the precarity of an irregular immigration status. It also reinvigorated conversations around the sub-minimum wage. A 2021 One Fair Wage report reported that low wages, reduced tips, and the risk of contracting COVID-19 are contributing to workers leaving or thinking about leaving the industry.
According to Francisco Tecaxco, a worker rights coordinator with New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), workers with fewer employment options, such as recent immigrants and/or undocumented immigrants, are not part of the labor shortage. Rather, they are filling roles, accepting subminimum wages when others might not. The organization has seen wage theft cases double since thebeginning of the pandemic, from 30 per month to up to 60 per month.
“I don't blame my people for taking jobs that are $10, $12 an hour, because that was all that was available to them,” Tecaxco said.
Restaurant workers are also more likely to fall victim to wage theft due to the often independent, covert nature of the industry and its hiring practices. A common restaurant job trajectory starts with dishwashing, a job that some workers described as physically demanding and low-paying at $200-$300 per week. Data on restaurants and food services indicates that the average, national annual salary of a dishwasher is $13,224.
Wage theft can include sub-minimum wage payment, tip theft, and unpaid work, like unpaid shortbreaks or unpaid overtime. Accordingto a 2015 study by the Center for Popular Democracy, wage theft may also beexacerbated by employer’s unfair and strategic tactics, including intimidation,retaliation, and other forms of worker harassment. The study concludes thatwage theft in New York City and New York state remains rampant.
Mother Jones recently reported that wage theft is getting worse due to Department of Labor backlogs and understaffing at the government agency. Even if individuals are able to reclaim their lost wages, some workers are not receiving their payments in time to pay-off COVID related debts.
City officials say they are working to raise workers’ awareness of their rights through focused outreach.
“The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, through the Office of Labor Policy and Standards, has worked to raise awareness of and enforce labor protections for workers in the restaurant industry including their right to Paid Safe and Sick Leave and, for fast food employees, their right to dependable schedules through Fair Work week law,” a DCWP spokesperson said over email.
The city department does not enforce wage laws. They are under the jurisdiction of the state. Workers must instead work with attorneys, nonprofit organizations, and eventually, the New York State department of labor to contest wage issues.
Miguel Romero Lara, who worked at the Waverly Diner in the West Village for nearly 25 years, experienced wage theft throughout the majority of his working years. With the help of lawyer Vivianna Morales, Romero and seven other workers filed a federal wage theft claim under the Fair LaborStandards Act in August 2015.
When Nick Serafis, the owner of the diner, greatly reduced Romero’s hours in retaliation, Romero quit and filed a claim for retaliation and intimidation with the NationalLabor Relations Board (NLRB).
Serafis filed for bankruptcy in2018, flipping the wage theft claim process to a bankruptcy process and therefore evading substantial back payments for years of wage theft. Bankruptcy is among the most common tactics some employers use in order to evade settlement payments for successful wage theft claims.
Ultimately, Romero received a settlement through the bankruptcy process as well as a settlement from the NLRB retaliation claim. Though it was a difficult process, he would still recommend filing a claim to workers who think they were wronged.
“We’re going after justice.I’ve shared the number for the Department of Labor with a lot of people… I tell them to call, get a consultation, and sue. If they know they’re being robbed of their money, I tell them to sue because it’s not fair,” Romero said in Spanish.
Morales, Romero’s lawyer, said the wage and hour area of the law has grown significantly in the last 15 years. Wage and hour cases, by Morales’ estimation, now make up about 10% of the docket in New York’sSouthern District, New York’s federal court. She partially attributes this to changes in New York State law, including the Wage TheftPrevention Act of 2011, which added an additional layer of regulation to the industry, including additional documentation requirements to educate and inform workers. It may be that workers have become more savvy and more generally awareof the law and are therefore more likely to know their rights and consider filing a complaint, Morales said.
“People have really woken up, they’re much more informed these days,” restaurant manager José RobertoGonzález, 35, said. Social media has also contributed to workers' enlightenment of their rights, he said.
Since he arrived in New York City from Mexico almost16 years ago, González has worked exclusively in restaurants. Throughout his time working in the industry he's heard about workplace abuses including forms of wage theft and racia ldiscrimination.
Angel Sotamba has worked in the restaurant industry in New York for over two decades and said employers have changed their behavior since new regulations like the Wage Theft Prevention Act were adopted.
When Sotambafirst arrived in the U.S. he workedas a dishwasher for $200 per week and had little knowledge of the industry, his rights or his worth. He also believes that some will continueto exploit workers.
Sotamba said that some restaurants will cross the line and pay less than minimum wage. “Some places are abusive. They think that because you’re Hispanic, you don’t have rights,” he said.
Possible Paths Toward Change: Unionization Versus Legislation
If workers want to see labor reform, the path of least resistance would be through legislation and regulation, since U.S. labor law is tilted in favor of private employers, Milkman, the sociologist said. “The union path is so difficult,” she said.
On the other side, employers can work with organizations like the National Restaurant Association which says its mission is to serve the industry at large. Goldberg, the sociology researcher, said the group’s main goal is to defend the business interest of corporations and employers.
“[The Nation Restaurant Association] doesn’t care about people.They care about profits, about their shareholders making money,” Fekkak Mamdouh, senior director and co-founder of One Fair Wage, an organization that seeks to raise industry standards through legislation, said. The National Restaurant Association did not respond to multiple email and phone requests for comment.
The National Restaurant Association, which Milkman referred to as “the other NRA,” is a restaurant trade group with a 2019 annual revenue of nearly 108 million dollars and its own political action committee. NRA membership is dominated by major chain restaurants.
Union participation in the UnitedStates reached its apex in the wake of the Great Depression and has steadily decreased since the 1980s. But the tide seems to be turning. According to the National LaborRelations Board, there has been a 57% uptick in union representation petitions in the first half of the current fiscal year, compared to this time last year. Workers at Starbucks and Amazon are spearheading historic unionization efforts in New York.
The recent union triumphs at Starbucks and Amazon are being led by a college-educated working class that feels a strong sense of agency.
“There are some parallels to the 1930s when the Great Depression led some newly radicalized and relatively educated young people to become labor organizers,” Milkman said.
Back of house restaurant workers in a city like New York are more likely to come from immigrant communities with a comparably lower sense of agency based on education status. By some estimates, over half of all foreign-born immigrants aged 25 or older have not attended college or received a college degree. Further, 31% of undocumented immigrants in New York City haven’t obtained a high school diploma.
Though this educational disparity may partially explain the lack of organization among back of house restaurant workers, it doesn’t explain the emergence of perhaps the most galvanizing workers movement in the city since the start of the pandemic: los Deliveristas Unidos. Led largely by Indigenous Guatemalan and Mexican food delivery workers, the group rose out of a solidarity built through shared cultural roots and in some cases, strong family ties.
If food delivery workers and back of house restaurant workers share many of the same characteristics, including the essential worker label during the peak of the pandemic, why haven’t back of house restaurant workers organized?
Union participation in the food and beverage industry is at a historic low. A study released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this past January, revealed that only 1.2% of employees working at food and drinking establishments were unionized, the lowest percentage in the private sector.
Among occupational groups, unionization rates were also lowest in food preparation and serving related occupations, at 3.1% compared with education, training, and library work that has a unionization rate of 35%. Among major race and ethnic groups, Hispanic workers have the lowest percentage of union participation at 9% while Blacks have the highest at 11.5%.
Grassroots organizations like theRestaurant Workers Union (RWU), formerly known as the Restaurant WorkersCommittee, emerged in light of the Covid-19pandemic to fight low wages in the restaurant industry and protect its immigrant workforce. The group is building its membership to hold its first congress but getting workers to attend has proved difficult.
“We can't climb out of a 70 year historical hole in one day, this will be a long protracted process,” said Diego, a leader at the RWU, who declined to share his full name for privacy concerns.
Other factors, such as wage disparities, as well as general cultural differences between front of house workers and back of house workers in New York City restaurants can add to the challenges of organizing workers as a group.
The fact that there is different legislation for how these two groups of workers within the same workforce are paid does not help address the extreme disparities between them, Goldberg, the sociology researcher said.
As independent restaurants operate on their own terms, restaurant workers cannot unite against a common, identifiable foe, adding another challenge. Even if the legislative approach for making change in the industry could lead to more regulations, those would have to be enforced for conditions to improve. Until then, back of house workers will have to fend for themselves, navigating a web of decentralized resources.