FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

American restaurant workers are growing restive, from cooperative takeovers in Baltimore, to strikes at Fenway Park concession stands, Rebel Cheese in Texas, and Waffle House in the Deep South, to the battle for union recognition at Blue Bottle Coffee in California, and the ongoing struggle at Starbucks everywhere in between. Despite this recent activity, which has emerged through affiliations with national unions as well as through self-activity and independent union formations, union density in the industry remains one of the lowest in the country at 1.6 percent.

I spoke with food service workers in Chicago who have cooked for every facet of the industry, from fast-food assembly lines to “very from-scratch” upscale dining. Though Chicago is once again a hub of service industry organizing, none of the people I spoke with had worked in a unionized or cooperative shop. However, they rigorously dispelled any illusion that the back-of-house is depoliticized. As one worker put it, “I’ve been a jackal my whole life, while everyone else here has done what you’re supposed to do in capitalism, put your 40 hours in at the same place, and they’ve been here for so long, and none of them are doing well because of it.” They each provided a clear and detailed analysis of exploitation at the level of the kitchen, the restaurant group or chain, and the industry as a whole. Managers create an illusion of meritocracy to drive productivity, while the steady consolidation of restaurant ownership conspires to keep the career ladder from ever reaching the top. They described how the natural collectivity among people sharing in difficult and dangerous work becomes a tool for extracting unpaid labor. They also offered their visions for a better world of restaurants, drawn from the very ambition and loyalty that the bosses have learned to manipulate. For these kitchen workers, the pandemic’s disruption of the endless supply of cheap labor revealed possibilities for resistance; they warned that these opportunities must not be allowed to fade from view. Fragments of our conversations are reproduced below.

My first cooking job was right after I dropped out of school. I was working the flat-top at a Chipotle. It was right in the middle of the E. coli scare. It was honestly the most annoying thing in the fucking world. I heard Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” four times as much as I needed to. They were kind of a pioneer of this business model, but now there’s a lot of upscale fast-casual places that are popping up, where it’s not seen as fast food, but it is. It’s serving food, not really cooking. You just work a grill, and you fry off the chicken that’s already chopped up. You hold it hot, lunch-counter style, on a steam table, just hitting the slop. There’s customer-facing stuff too. You talk to people in various states. It’s a lot of emotional labor.

Sorry, I’ve never had to just describe mechanically what this work is. I feel like I’ve spent so much time trying to compartmentalize it that now I’m, like, struggling to recall. Like, what do I do all day?

And then we had another guy that we hired who was overqualified, who had, like, 15 years’ experience and was an actual kitchen manager at a pretty busy $10,000-a-night restaurant. KMs will have administrative duties, but they’re also expected to actually cook back there. It depends on the place. Sometimes you’ll have a KM who just doesn’t do anything but scheduling and hitting on girls. And sometimes you’ll have one who’s actually out there on the line every night. But my understanding is that his job duties there were fairly elaborate. And I was like, “Why’d you leave that job and come here?” And he was like, “I had a breakdown.” I was like, “What happened?” He’s like, “I have an ulcer. Like, I have to purge my stomach of blood every single night. I have to throw up in the bathtub.” These are not uncommon things to hear. And these are not people who are, like, 49 years old with a lifetime of drinking and getting stoned. An ulcer is kind of an old-fashioned thing to have, especially when your main other interests are Marvel movies and vaping.

So, these two figures that I immediately met were kind of a vision-of-your-future kind of thing. The younger one already had gray hair, it was completely white. He was 27. So, the first two people I met in the industry were both dying and spewing blood and bile everywhere.

I staged, which is where you work a trial shift; some places are nice enough to pay you for it. There’s not really an interview process in most places like that. They just throw you in there. And I could tell that this manager was like, “Goddamn it, this fucking idiot.” I was just someone who was available. I didn’t even know which ones were the quart deli containers and which ones were the pint delis. “The bigger ones are the quarts, you idiot.” I was like, “That makes sense, boss.” I remember at the end of my first stage shift, I was like, “Do you think I did well?” He’s like, “You’re almost certainly going to get hired.” They were like, this guy can fog a mirror. 

I was just a new cook, and I was young, and I was not confident in my skills. And they literally told me, “You’re ass. You need to make up the time difference, so come early tomorrow, but you’re not clocking in until you’re scheduled in.” I got bullied into it.

It’s not like coding or whatever-the-fuck. What do people with money do? It’s not like that Silicon Valley grind culture where they’re like, “Yo! Just pulled another 180-hour week.” Are there even that many hours in a week, dude? That shit is always so funny to me. Like, did you really? When Elon says that shit, like, “I sleep at the factory. What are you doing?” I think about pulling that much time in a place where there’s fire and knives everywhere and unstable people running around and half of them are on drugs.

It’s really hard to move upwards in this, unless you’re going inside of the organization. They really tightly control people’s careers in that way. It’s like, do I try to, you know, make a jump somewhere else and potentially lose maybe a decade of progress and work that I’ve put into this? It’s a tough call to make.

That kind of thing doesn’t really exist for most people – that kind of opportunity to actually be rewarded for your effort. The problem is that that effort is usually unpaid labor and that labor is usually doing things that you’re not asked to do, that you’re not being paid for, and that are not in your job description. 

I was in a hurry because I didn’t want to get fired. I was very much aware that I was replaceable. They obviously replaced somebody with me, and I was just some idiot. I wasn’t making much money here, but I couldn’t stop working. And because I was the one opening, if I didn’t get the oven turned on in time, we could lose, like, an hour of service, and they’d just replace me with a third idiot. And showing up like, “Hey, sorry, fellas, I was 30 minutes late to opening because I was rendering aid to a guy in cardiac arrest outside of the morgue” isn’t going to fly.

He wasn’t there when I got off work. 

But I was the only person in the restaurant until like 1pm who could do the short-order cooking. It was going to be a crazy-busy day, and we were already down one person – we needed four people to open, and we only had three. I am the only person who can do this right now. And I had just bonked myself in the head real hard. I wouldn’t do this now, but at the time I was just like, well, I have to. And with an obvious concussion, I proceed to crank out like hundreds of sandwiches. I’m dizzy, I’m totally off. I tell some of my coworkers, and they’re getting me water, and they’re like, “Make sure your head doesn’t sag too much,” keeping an eye on me. And I did it till 1pm and got relieved. By then the lunch rush is pretty much over. 

I had to borrow bus fare from a coworker once because I didn’t even have $2.25 to get home. I ended up becoming kind of friends with the guy – but he wasn’t my homie. I had to be like, “Hey, can I borrow 20 bucks so that I can buy a bus pass for the week?” And he was like, “Sure, bud.” And he didn’t have two fucking sticks to rub together either, right? And I was like, “This is one of the most humiliating things I’ve ever had to do.” And he was like, “I know, man. I just need you to be here.” And, you know, these kinds of extracurricular activities are not just part of it – in a lot of ways, they are the job.

Probably the biggest single factor in keeping people at this restaurant, who have been exploited for so long, is that they all genuinely care for each other and like being around each other and working together. Like, they literally babysit each other’s kids. They are actual friends outside of work. They make time for each other. And it’s been used as a cudgel to keep them hostage here, basically. 

It’s the same thing with safety regulations and stuff. If I go a little bit slower, you know, I can minimize the risk of injury to myself. But the boss is always like, “I need you to be as safe as possible, as fast as possible. Oh, I would never tell you to go any faster than safe! Never! That is not what this is about! That’s not what we do here! But you are going too slowly.” You don’t expect to take your 15-minute break, or whatever, because that doesn’t exist. None of that exists. There’s no mandated, you know, anything. In a lot of situations, people are getting paid under the table – a lot of them because they don’t have status, or they don’t have a bank account. There’s a lot of, “Just get it done.” 

In my first week at this barbecue place, I was making a salad, and a lot of the arugula was wilted. The owner was right there, and I said to her, “Hey, are we okay to serve the salad?” She picks up the arugula with her bare hands, puts it right to her nose and smells it and goes, “Doesn’t smell like anything,” and puts it back in the salad bowl.

And I was like, “Okay, I hate this job. I’m not going to work here long.” And my coworkers generally had a similar attitude. And so from that moment on, I had no real kind of desire to make that place any better. I’m just there to get my paycheck and to make sure my coworkers aren’t getting run down by the job, that we’re all taking an even share of the load, basically.

If there was a meritocracy, I would have been one of the front-of-house managers at the bakery, rather than just someone who trained every single person who came in and then had all the backs of all these kids as they came in.

At my very first restaurant, there was this guy who had been working with the company for 14 years, a Mexican immigrant; he’d been at this restaurant as the head cook since they opened. A sous chef position opened up, and he spoke good English, and he was on top of his shit, and he still got passed over for like the third time. And he just went right back to me like, “Yeah, man, I just gotta keep grinding, I just got to keep working for it.” And it was just like, dude, that is so insanely depressing. It is a very real thing that people who maybe had one job and they just knew the right person or talked the right way and got jumped up. 

It’s like what you’re seeing with television right now. People feel so wrapped up in these labor struggles with SAG and the Writers Guild because they see this industry that they love – it’s not just like, “Oh, I’m not going to be able to work,” it’s “This is getting killed in front of me, it’s not going to exist anymore.” And that’s how I feel about this on some nights.

That sous was always like, “You know how cool it would be if we could just all make more of an even wage and share the profits from this company? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could just, like, not even have to worry about profit? We could all get together and run a real punk-rock pizza shop. Just putting out good food and saying “Fuck you” to everything else. No one has to work more than like 40 hours a week and everyone’s just kind of having a good time.” That would be amazing. It’s just kind of impossible.

All of that money kind of dried up years ago at this point. Things haven’t gotten better. In the years since, things have continued to get worse. The economy’s in shambles right now. Now, we’re not only seeing a plateau, but because the small business owners are seeing a contraction, they’re pulling back on a lot of the benefits and stuff that they would have been offering before. Now they’re getting really tight because there’s this uncertainty, and it’s left people high and dry.

Man, the silence from these restaurant companies has been sickening. I’ve worked for places that employ large numbers of people that they very well know are undocumented. Those people, even before this, already had a really tense existence. They’re in my thoughts every day. The people that sign their checks have a lot on their conscience. 

It sucks to have to say “undocumented” over and over again because that’s not a term I believe in. My family’s from the parts of Mexico that have been Texas and Mexico and everything else at different times. We straddle the Rio Grande. I have family in San Antonio and just across the border that do not get to see each other. Up here there’s a huge diaspora from the area where my mom is from. There’s a lot of people here who feel this way, who have people at arm’s length across a fucking wall right now. And we’re the lucky ones – like, we’re not the people who are actively being hunted or kidnapped right now – but everyone is going through it.

The people who they’re snatching up off the streets are the people who are most likely to be subject to the large-scale wage theft in our industry, the large-scale abuse. So all this is on top of what they’re already going through. They’re already owed money. They’re exploited. Where does their money go when they get black-bagged and taken to a Salvadoran super-jail? These companies are just pocketing those wages. 

The companies owe them legal representation at the bare minimum. More than a plurality of these people make up all of the most important jobs in our industry. It’s crazy to me that the owners don’t even see it as an attack on their livelihood, even from raw capitalist reasoning, that they can’t even bring themselves to protect their own investments. They’ve made a lot of money off the backs of these people, and they owe them a share of that. And undocumented workers aren’t just doing turn-and-burn, mercenary labor in restaurants. Like, undocumented people have built these restaurants, have been fixtures of their teams. There’s a lot of messaging and virtue-signaling about this, but I don’t see a lot of people just putting up legal defense. I think that would be a good start, to get your own people out of maybe-permanent detention and untraceable bondage – like, holy shit! It’s disgusting. Stuff like this really makes you want to give up.

When Covid was squeezing the industry, I think it was in Alabama, places like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were trying to get permission to use children and people who were in jail, right?

That’s the future of this, I think. When we all get priced out, I don’t think restaurants are going away. I think we’re gonna lose all the best ones. And there’s going to be a lot of places that are using children and people in jail at 50 cents on the dollar. Jesus Christ. It’s hard to want to come back every day and make people’s wedding cakes, right? You know, for their fun little real estate networking events and their MLM weddings.