FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁ See Mike Crumplar, “Crumps Meets Betsey Brown and the Ion Pack,” Crumpstack, April 26, 2022, https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/crumps-meets-betsey-brown-and-the; “My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual,” Crumpstack, August 3, 2022, https://mcrumps.substack.com/p/my-own-dimes-square-fascist-humiliation.

₂ Christina Morales, “Barboncino, a Brooklyn Pizza Restaurant, Becomes a Union Shop,” The New York Times, July 26, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/dining/barboncino-brooklyn-pizza-union.html; Duncan Freeman, “In a New York City first, a union slice,” The Chief-Leader, August 1, 2023, https://thechiefleader.com/stories/in-a-new-york-city-first-a-union-slice,50849.

One night in early July 2022, I received a panicked call from a friend at Barboncino, the popular Neapolitan pizzeria where I was working in Brooklyn. A pipe had burst, flooding the basement with wastewater. My friend, a bartender, and one of the bussers had spent hours cleaning up the mess, their legs wrapped in garbage bags, trying to save pizza dough and other ingredients from the sewage. Having gotten the situation under control, the owner, Ron, wanted them to get back to working tables. (He was not actually present but on the phone with the shift manager.) Reasonably enough, they had refused and were worried about losing their jobs; my friend asked if I knew any labor lawyers. “Well,” I said, “we can find you a lawyer. Or we can try to organize a union.”

As it turned out, my friends did not get fired. The shift manager covered for them, telling the owner that they’d gone back to work when really they’d gone home. Still, we decided to get organized anyway. I reached out to the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and had my first phone call with Andrew, a staff organizer at a union local in New York who would spend many volunteer hours on the Barboncino campaign. I pulled a list of workers’ names and contact information from the scheduling app we all used to trade shifts. We began assembling a spreadsheet, noting whether people worked back-of-house or front-of-house, what their roles were, what their social connections across the restaurant were, as well as their grievances and complaints. The spreadsheet was titled “bosses can’t throw us a pizza party if we already work in a pizza shop.”

Our first organizing committee meeting took place the next week over Zoom. By mid-August, we were meeting in person at some comrades’ apartment down the street from the restaurant. We focused on building out the spreadsheet, identifying shared grievances, fears, and concerns, as well as potential recruits to the organizing drive. At this point, we weren’t openly talking “union,” although many of us hoped we could build the campaign in that direction; instead, we focused on discerning the issues that would move our coworkers to action – any kind of action. We began to see the restaurant in a new way by studying how the workplace was already organized. What happened in different parts of the restaurant? What kinds of workers did what kinds of work? How did people and things move through the space? What kinds of relationships did workers have to each other across divisions of labor? Were those divisions inflected with other forms of difference? And, most importantly, where in the restaurant did workers have the most power?

The restaurant contained three strategically important choke points: the oven, the bar, and the dish pit. A sit-down strike at any of these, for example, would cripple the business. The kitchen – open plan and organized around a gigantic brick oven – was the productive heart of the restaurant. Customers would pass by as they walked to their tables, arching their necks to watch as the pizzas got made. At Barbs, this was a three-person job: one worker stretched the dough, the next applied toppings, and a third operated the brick oven. Generally, the chefs and other veterans, mostly white men, worked the oven. They would also rotate across other roles, like prepping pizzas or making salads. The more junior cooks, responsible for more mundane and repetitive tasks, were often Black men. A finished pizza would be passed to the shift manager for slicing and circulation to the floor, where it was taken to its table by a server. They would be responsible for performing the emotional labor of making sure everyone had everything they needed for the evening. (Servers were mostly white and largely, though not exclusively, women.) While classed as front-of-house, bartending paralleled kitchen work in several important ways. More stationary than servers, bartenders stayed behind the bar making drinks for tables on the floor, although they were also responsible for serving the customers sitting at the bar. Bussers (almost always men) passed through each of these realms, ferrying dishes and glassware to and from the basement. They might also be tasked with retrieving more pizza dough from storage, ingredients from the walk-in refrigerator, or ice from the ice machine. (Servers would also fill in these roles as needed.) The dish pit, also in the basement, was always occupied by a single worker, isolated from everyone else; every dishwasher I worked with at Barbs was a man of color. All in, there were around fifty workers to organize, unevenly distributed across front- and back-of-house. The latter was a much smaller group with higher turnover; the former was wider and more diffuse – many front-of-house workers on our initial list weren’t regularly scheduled and would pick up shifts intermittently – but generally more stable.

The basement flood infamously known among the workers as “Poop Night” had provided the impetus for the organizing drive, but ultimately, it did not figure especially largely in the organizing itself. Instead, workers shared concerns about wages, workplace safety issues (especially around harassment by customers), and the changing culture of the restaurant. When we formed the organizing committee, Barboncino was going through a transition: we knew that Ron, the owner-founder who opened the shop in 2011, was preparing to sell. We also suspected that if he found out we were organizing, he was likely to shut the restaurant down altogether – a common union-busting strategy in the service industry. On the other hand, we imagined that new owners, saddled with bank loans and/or anxious investors, would not be in a position to implement a lockout. So, we kept our efforts secret until the sale was complete.

In our organizing conversations, we emphasized that change was coming. How could workers hold on to the things we liked and fix the things we didn’t? Given that the boss never actually came into work, staying underground was quite a bit easier than it might have been. The nooks and crannies of the restaurant that workers used to hide from customers and managers hosted countless organizing conversations. We joined coworkers on their cigarette breaks and went out with them for drinks after close. We started organizing post-shift gatherings ourselves; if a coworker had to choose between staying to talk and catching the last bus to Queens or the Bronx, we’d pool our funds to pay for a car. As the organizing progressed, we learned that the boss’s kids were involved in Lower Manhattan’s lightly fascist film scene. He is listed as a producer on several of their films, and the whole family would appear in the daughter’s latest effort, a transphobic “satire” starring her brother.¹ This gave us further motivation and a good organizing line: the profits our labor had created were being used to spread hate against our friends and loved ones.

*

For all the indignities of service work, it is important to note that Barboncino was a comparatively plum gig. The money was decent, and while it was always busy, there wasn’t the suffocating “time to lean, time to clean” atmosphere of more upscale places. The relative absence of the old boss, whose greatest business skill seems to have been hiring interesting people who are fun to be around, allowed for a degree of autonomy on the shop floor that many workers had never experienced and to which they became accustomed. There were still managers, of course, but they were usually promoted from within, and most of them worked as hard as anyone else in the shop. Cigarette breaks were lengthy; the kitchen would whip you up a pizza whenever you wanted; friends and family ate and drank for free, or at a very steep discount; on-shift drinking and drug use was widespread. If you were having a bad day and wanted to take a smaller section than usual, someone would cover for you. Tips were pooled, so everyone was incentivized to look after each other anyway. It was chaotic and inefficient, but the tables got turned and everyone made money while holding on to a modicum of dignity – a rarity in service work.

This freedom was limited in important ways, however. While workers might have had control over how they carried a dish to a table, for example, they had no say over how many dishes the restaurant actually owned. For months, workers had lamented a lack of plates, utensils, and glassware; when the ice machine broke, it took months to fix, sending bussers into restaurants up and down the street with buckets, begging for ice; a growing number of pests could be found skittering through the kitchen and across tables – to say nothing of the dank basement – which ate into tips. Resentments between (and within) front-of-house and back-of-house festered under these conditions. Fights were breaking out in the kitchen, servers snapped at each other in front of customers or walked off their shifts. Everyone’s jobs were getting harder, and no one had been able to make sense of why until we learned that the owner was preparing to sell.

We needed to redirect our coworkers’ anger upward, so we developed what we came to call Fork Theory. It’s not that the dishwasher is bad at his job or that the bussers are slacking; it’s that there simply aren’t enough forks. And why? Because instead of investing in wages or even capital improvements to the restaurant, the owner was cashing out. Workers who had kept the restaurant afloat through the darkest days of Covid were particularly open to our message. “The pandemic changed everyone’s understanding of the world and of what their needs were,” Andrea Lopez, a longtime bartender, told me. “It wasn’t enough to have a place where you could party. For the employees, there was a lack of a sense of safety, and the managers were very frustrated by their inability to get anything done.” She went on: “It used to be that Ron was hands-off because he was like the dad at the party: he knew he had to stay upstairs. But then, after the pandemic, he was hands-off because he was protecting his own safety, and to hell with the rest of us.” What had been experienced as autonomy increasingly felt like abandonment.

*

It took months for the transition in ownership to actually unfold. The new bosses – a Millennial husband-and-wife duo, both Oberlin graduates – would not officially take over until late October, when they announced a “mandatory” all-hands meeting at 2pm on a Wednesday. Many workers, both front- and back-of-house, had schedule conflicts, so the new owners quickly changed tack and communicated that the meeting was not mandatory after all. Still, many of us were left feeling disrespected, especially those who would be missing out on tips, as customers would not be seated that afternoon.

By the time the meeting was announced, we had collected about 25 signatures to a letter addressed to the new owners, Jesse and Emma (or “Jemma,” as we called them privately), asking for a meeting to discuss workers’ issues and concerns. With the announcement of the all-hands, we decided to wait to deliver it until we’d heard what they had to say. “Our number one goal as owners is really good communication. We want to be as honest and as forthright with all of you guys as humanly possible,” they told us. “We want to be able to have honest dialogue . . . about what we’re working on.” This included changes to how scheduling would be organized – workers would go from knowing their schedules four weeks in advance to just one – and a crackdown on drinking on the job. Each worker was entitled to one free drink after they clocked out, the bosses said, before clarifying that this was a privilege that could be taken away at any time. They also introduced the new industry-specific HR company they’d hired, whose website noted: “If you depend on union labor, it can significantly impact your workplace culture, profit margin, and overall business strategy . . . [We can] help you develop a union avoidance strategy, where threat of unionization exists.”

A few days later, about a half dozen workers marched into their office to present our letter, now bearing 30 signatures from both front- and back-of-house. “At Wednesday’s meeting,” we wrote, “you emphasized the importance of communication and dialogue. In that spirit, we, the restaurant’s non-managerial staff, would like to invite you to sit down with us . . . without managers or HR present. We would like for this to be the first of regular, monthly meetings between the owners and staff. We want to foster a culture of workplace democracy on issues related to pay and working conditions, to discuss traditions we’d like to protect, and provide input on other matters related to the future of Barboncino.”

This was our opening gambit: at the meeting, we would articulate demands for across-the-board pay raises as well as greater input into workplace policies. We knew that the bosses were always likely to say no, but we felt that it was necessary to demonstrate to our coworkers that we had given management the opportunity to do the right thing before escalating into a demand for union recognition. After all, it wasn’t Jesse and Emma who had abandoned us during the pandemic, and it wasn’t their kids palling around with downtown Manhattan fascists. Maybe this time the new boss wouldn’t be the same as the old boss.

After a brief silence, the new owners agreed to meet early on a Monday morning in November. More than a dozen workers attended in person while others provided testimony to be read aloud: they spoke to cost-of-living struggles, ongoing issues in the workplace (e.g. clear rules about discipline, guidelines for dealing with abusive customers, and still needing more forks), and their desire for a voice in what changes were coming to the restaurant that they had kept alive. Finally, we presented management with three specific demands: (1) a raise to $15/hour for front-of-house (up from $10/hour) and a $25/hour floor for back-of-house, where wages ranged wildly; (2) workers should be allowed to provide feedback on the forthcoming employee handbook; and (3) the bosses should commit to meet with us again early in the new year. They promised to “strongly consider” everything that had been proposed.

*

Weeks went by. By the time the follow-up meeting took place in late January 2023, some workers’ anger had reached a boiling point, and the new owners’ apparent apathy didn’t help. When we returned to the issue of wages, the answer was clear: back-of-house raises would continue to be handled on an individual basis while front-of-house could expect not to receive any raises at all. “If we were to give you guys a raise, we would have to close,” they said. Given that they had just hired a new general manager, given other managers raises, and earmarked money for both marketing and human resources, the owners pleading poverty was not well received. Still, they denied that they could afford to spend any more on labor; we would have to wait for the business to expand, they said, which would then produce the profits that could be reinvested in wages. In the meantime, prices would go up, which would increase check sizes, which would increase tip sizes, and with which we would have to make do. “We can’t afford it,” the bosses said. “Neither can I,” a worker replied.

There was, however, a caveat: “Obviously,” Jesse admitted, “if the state enacts a higher minimum wage, we will make those changes as we need to.” Frustrating as this was to hear, we knew it could be useful: they could pay us more; they would just need to be compelled to do so. But despite the bosses’ condescension, or maybe because of it, many of our coworkers left the meeting more disheartened than angry. The bosses had come to the table because they felt that they had to, but they did not feel that they had to go any further. They did not feel that they had to take us seriously. Unfortunately, some workers’ response to being treated like bratty and deluded children was to begin to believe that maybe we were in fact behaving like bratty and deluded children.

In the weeks that followed, the organizing committee saw significant drop-off in participation. Increasingly, I found myself mediating between one group of worker-organizers who wanted open class warfare as soon as possible and another who felt that we had already gone too far – difficult to countenance when all that we’d done was stage a pair of slightly spicy meetings with the bosses. We hadn’t yet taken any shop-floor action or escalated our demands in any way. If core organizers were already spooked by such minor conflict, how could we expect to actually win union recognition? While some kind of escalation was the obvious next step, I did not feel confident that most people were prepared to take it. Still, the committee pressed ahead with a scheduled “town hall” at which we would gauge our co-workers’ interest in affiliating with an international, collecting cards, and demanding recognition.

We held the meeting at a nearby restaurant that had shut down months before. (Two of our organizers had worked there previously, and their friend, a bartender, still had the keys.) One lapsed organizer warned me that turnout would be dire; in fact, the meeting went almost as well as it possibly could have. More kitchen workers came out than they had for any previous organizing event. We distributed homemade buttons, which were such a hit that we had to warn people not to wear them to work before we announced ourselves publicly. Workers asked questions, talked through their fears, and expressed their vision for a different sort of restaurant that they wanted to fight for. This was the beginning of the formal union drive; we had rediscovered our momentum.

Then, about a week later, I was displaced from my home when the FDNY came to control an electrical fire in the apartment directly above mine. All the water from their hoses flooded into my unit, soaking everything that wasn’t already smoke damaged. I wasn’t exactly sorry to leave the place – I’d had bedbugs three times in as many years – but it forced me to make some difficult choices. The restaurant wasn’t my only job; on top of working and organizing there, I was in a PhD program, enrolled in a full course load and teaching a class of 120 students. I had reached the limits of what I was able to handle; I was, literally, burnt out. I left Barbs, promising to support the organizing in whatever way I could.

*

At first the campaign thrived, or at least it appeared to: inspired by workers at Starbucks, the Barboncino union affiliated with Workers United and filed for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election. They won a unanimous victory later that spring, generating headlines in publications from The Chief-Leader to The New York Times.² To celebrate its win, the union threw a massive party, well attended by service industry veterans from around the city. A wave of unionization even seemed to be building, as Nitehawk Cinema workers formed a union with volunteer support from Alex Dinndorf, one of the core Barbs organizers, through EWOC. “A bunch of workers, front-of-house and back-of-house, wanted a union, believed in a union, and they fucking did it,” Dinndorf recalled of the Barboncino campaign. While Workers United provided legal support, no staff organizer was ever assigned to the campaign. “There wasn’t someone telling us, ‘You have to do this and that, and, if you don’t hit this structure test, we’re gonna drop you.’ Which, ironically, is probably what I would do now,” Dinndorf, now a staff organizer with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), joked. “The workers just did it. They did it themselves.”

At the same time, however, the notion of shop-floor action became increasingly fraught, knotted up with interpersonal resentments. Between the election victory and the first bargaining sessions, a rift that had been developing within the union for some time deepened and widened, finally calcifying into two tendencies: the agitational and the diplomatic. In fairness, almost every union contains these tendencies, but at Barbs, each rendered the other ineffectual. While agitation had been key in winning the election, the agitators themselves had exhausted their coworkers’ good will, alienating the very people they were supposedly organizing. In turn, they came to see coworkers with whom they disagreed as obstacles to organize around rather than minds to change. Conversely, many of the more pacific organizers – those who could play nice with the bosses even as they sought to represent the interests of the workers – seemed to throw up their hands and withdraw from participation in the union altogether. That is, at least until the agitators got themselves fired, by which point there was not a lot of willingness to fight for them to keep their jobs.

“I think we got unanimity because the restaurant was a community, and, at the end of the day, outside of any sort of union context, people were still interested in each other and in fighting for each other,” Lopez, the bartender, told me. “Unanimity is a beautiful indication of that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody’s on the same page.” Briana Brady, a server, put it even more damningly: “There are moments in which anger can make you feel really powerful. But I think that there were a lot more moments where my anger felt helpless.”

If, in the process of organizing a union, workers are left feeling more helpless – that is to say, less powerful – than they did when they began, something has gone catastrophically wrong. The matter at hand, always, is to help people see that the potential to shift the balance of power in the workplace already exists, even before the first formal “organizing conversation” happens. They are already organized around the pizza oven, the bar, the pit, the tables. They just have to put down the peel, the jigger, the sponge, the dish rack, and walk away. Even a synchronized slowdown just as the dinner rush began could have had tremendous impact: the line cook and pizzaiolos taking extra special care to place each ingredient exactly where it ought to be; the bartenders measuring pours as precisely as possible; the servers walking orders from the kitchen to the table slowly and carefully; the bussers picking their way down the narrow steps into the basement so as not to drop any glasses; the dishwasher scrubbing each plate so thoroughly that it glistens. While the fear of reprimand and backlash would still have been present, such an indirect confrontation with the bosses – no less dramatic for being mediated by the work process – might have been more effective than sit-down meetings that felt like they might (and sometimes did) explode into shouting matches at any time. It’s one thing to rile people up; it’s another thing to give them something to do.

Instead, the union stuck to symbolic actions to demonstrate unity: wearing buttons and organizing a shirt day. This, and a very well-run election campaign, was enough to win a unanimous victory before the NLRB. But entering negotiations without having shown management how far you’re willing to go is a surefire way to see contract bargaining drawn out ad infinitum. And the more time went by, the less leverage the union had as the bosses came closer and closer to being able to cut their losses. 

*

When I began working on this essay, in January 2025, bargaining had been ongoing for more than a year and a half. Shifting from a recognition fight to a contract campaign is always a tricky transition, but it was particularly so at Barboncino: missteps made after the NLRB election squandered whatever power had been won in recognition. In significant ways, the union had to start from scratch and turn towards social organizing – putting on barbecues and karaoke nights, for example – to build cohesion and boost morale. What’s more, the structural conditions that make organizing a restaurant union so difficult to begin with don’t just disappear once you’ve won recognition. 

Back-of-house workers especially remained a challenge to organize, partly due to high turnover and partly due to misinformation spread by managers. As one of the cooks, Steve Bunting, put it to me, organizing in the kitchen was “a lot of putting out fires because someone else stopped just short of lying.” Despite the fact that it is, in some ways, the most collaborative place in the restaurant, something about kitchen work seemed to militate against a sense of collectivity. “Kitchen folk are strong headed and independent. They want to ‘earn’ it; they don’t want to be ‘given’ it. And some people, unfortunately, perceive a union contract as being ‘given’ something,” Bunting said. “It’s the nature of the work. You have to be in your head to keep up on a busy night . . . The whole system is built for people to come in and sit in their anxiety for six or seven hours straight.” Hardly fertile ground for developing a sense of solidarity.

Still, even in the kitchen – and even without a contract – workers sensed the presence of the union. “People felt more secure in their jobs. They didn’t feel like the first time they looked at someone sideways they were going to get fired, which is the case in a lot of kitchens. I’ve seen it happen,” Bunting told me. “And even when it’s not the case in a particular kitchen, I think most people have seen that kitchen and tend to feel like that could be the case anywhere. But with the union, you had to have a reason to fire somebody, and that was huge.” Front-of-house workers felt the change too. “I was a doormat when I started working at Barboncino. I let my employer walk all over me, and I really don’t feel like that anymore,” Aidan Hart, the busser who survived Poop Night, told me. “I look back on all the jobs and all the shit I had to eat through the years . . . The person I am now, I’d either organize the place or walk out the door.” 

And yet, in multiple interviews conducted early this year, workers were pessimistic about Barboncino’s viability as an enterprise and what that might mean for the union itself. “The restaurant isn’t as busy as it used to be. Prices have gone up significantly. They laid off our sous chef. They’ve cut our shifts in half. We used to have morning shifts seven days a week; now, we have none. They hired a manager who is actively hostile to both staff and customers and has definitely done damage to their business,” Becca Young, a server, told me. “Ultimately, we don’t get to decide what they spend their money on, and we don’t get to decide when they decide to call it.”

A few weeks after we spoke, in February 2025, the owners decided to call it: Barboncino would close at the end of the month. The union failed to win a contract, and neither Jesse nor Emma deigned to attend effects bargaining. In fact, much like their predecessor, they had been absent from the business for months.

Across industries, sectors, and geographies even the best organized unions struggle to stop owners from closing up shop. If the owners decide they’re done – if they can afford to decide they’re done – workers can’t force them to stay. The reverse is also true, however: when owners invest a whole bunch of capital in an enterprise, this gives workers a window of opportunity to organize themselves before the bosses make their investment back. So it was at Barboncino. 

But here’s the trouble: The clock is ticking, and you make your first move; then, you wait. You have to wait because you need to see what the boss is going to do – or, rather, you need what the boss is going to do to be seen. Maybe you know what the boss is going to do because this isn’t your first campaign, and you know that it doesn’t matter what kind of person the boss is, or where they went to school, or how they address you, but that they are going to be compelled to act in certain ways by forces greater than themselves to protect their business and their reputation. Maybe you know this, but your coworkers don’t, or don’t believe it, or don’t want to believe it. Maybe they just want to see it for themselves. Fair enough. But this means you have to wait. And wait. And the clock is still ticking. And you’re still waiting. Maybe the boss makes their move, you respond – and you’re back to waiting. Who, now, is really in control? Who is setting the tempo?

Every union drive, every organizing campaign, every workplace struggle, formal and informal, is, on some level, about time. A demand for more of a voice on the job is a demand for a greater say in the ends to which one’s time is put. Clock in and your time is no longer your own; clock out and you are, once again, on your own time. It is no coincidence that the new bosses’ first reforms at Barboncino were to change how scheduling worked and to effectively prohibit people from hanging out at the bar for too long after they got off their shifts.

For the Barbs union, then, the time spent waiting for the bosses to respond was not only time lost against the ticking clock but time that was actively given back because we did not claim it for ourselves. “There were a series of crises that were basically management’s fault,” one core organizer, Michael Kemmett, recalled to me. “And then the ones that followed were [from] our own mismanagement of our response.” Every day spent waiting to hear what Jesse and Emma were going to say or do made them appear to be, once again, the prime mover in workers’ lives at exactly the moment when the opposite should have been true.

If every workplace struggle is about time, then it is also about space, as the two are always, everywhere linked. For as effective as workers were at using the space of the restaurant to organize, we did not effectively reorganize the space of the restaurant into something other than the place where people went to work. We knew where our leverage was, but we didn’t use it; we didn’t use it, because we weren’t ready to use it; we weren’t ready to use it, because we wanted to give the bosses the chance to make themselves the bad guys. And they did – they always do – but by the time this was evident to everyone, it was too late.

It takes practice and experimentation to learn how to move quickly and efficiently. But sometimes, when the DoorDash orders are piling up and the ice machine is broken and the roasted peppers are 86’d, you just have to do it on the fly.