This summer's successful United Parcel Service strike delivered a clear message to the labor movement: It's time to organize the service economy. The lesson resonated in Oregon, where service-sector jobs (including cashiers, cooks, waiters, janitors, hospital workers and retail clerks) outnumber manufacturing jobs three to one. Just last week, the Service Employees International Union Local 49 won a pay hike for striking orderlies and maintenance workers at Kaiser Permanente. The union is also trying to organize janitors at Intel. A month earlier, the Oregon branch of AFSCME unionized skycaps at Portland International Airport, and the Oregon Public Employees Union won the right to represent low-paid staffers at the Parry Center for Children. Local labor, however, has been unable to crack one key service industry: restaurants. Food service workers, in fact, have made up nearly half the total job growth in the local retail economy during the 1990s. To the chagrin of local labor advocates, however, Portland's restaurant union is an infamous underachiever. In a city that has more than 2,000 restaurants and has seen an estimated 230 startups in the past two years, Local 9 represents only 12 eateries. "This union needs help," says former AFL-CIO research director Amy Klare. Klare is right. Within the past year, the union lost a high-profile union drive at Old Wives' Tales restaurant and ousted two top union organizers amid charges of money mismanagement ("Cash-ing Out," WW, Feb. 26, 1997). Last month, Local 9 was put under trusteeship, bringing the fiscal, legal and managerial responsibilities of the local union under the rule of the international union. As a result, Val Connolly, the union's regional vice-president, came up last week from San Francisco to oversee a new organizing effort at Ruth's Chris Steak House at 309 SW 3rd Ave. The cavalry may have arrived too late. Despite getting off to a promising start, the drive is currently in danger. The campaign began on a promising note Sept. 9, when Local 9's new organizer, Mark Latta, handed Ruth's Chris waiter Andrew Jay a stack of election-authorization cards. Latta, one of Local 9's three full-time staffers, explained to Jay that 60 percent of the Ruth's Chris employees needed to sign the "A-cards" to kick off a successful union effort. It took Jay and fellow staffer Misha Sashayvich less than a week to get 90 percent of their co-workers to sign (see "Choice Cuts"). "It was easy," Sashayvich says. "We didn't coerce anybody. Everybody was very interested." Even waiter Tim Edwards, who says he's anti-union, originally supported the drive. "The management at Ruth's Chris just has it all wrong," he says. Edwards, 29, has been in the restaurant businesssince his teens. "They don't handle complaints well. The solidarity of union representation seemed like the only way to deal with them." According to Sashayvich, however, there was some confusion about the cards. "I thought we had to get the cards signed so we could get the union to talk to us," she says. Instead, Local 9 took the cards and filed them with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election, a move that surprised, and angered, some restaurant staffers. Several Ruth's Chris employees say they were told the cards would simply get the process rolling, leading to an informational meeting where staffers could find out more about the union and how an election might proceed. They were startled to find out during a Sept. 23 meeting with Latta that an election was already under way. "I was not aware that there was going to be an election," says Tom Swafford, a 37-year-old waiter. "We signed the cards to show that there was interest in the union--for them to come and say what they have to offer. We were all in the dark about what the objective was." Union reps typically meet with the employees well before handing out A-cards to explain union policies and election procedures and gauge the level of support. "It's very important when you're organizing to make sure people know exactly what they're signing," says Klare. "A union that's doing a good job would have talked to the employees first," says another local union rep who wishes to remain anonymous. "You bring people together before you file. What they've done is committing suicide." Over at Ruth's Chris, Edwards says Latta's support for Local 9 has waned. "Filing for an election happened too fast for people's comfort level," he says. "I think they have ruined their chances." Despite repeated phone calls from Willamette Week, Local 9 would not discuss its lackluster efforts in Portland. The union's ongoing troubles come at a time when counterparts in western cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Las Vegas are flourishing. HERE Local 226 in Las Vegas, for example, is one of the highest-profile, most successful unions in the country. Business Week recently called Local 226 "one of the country's fastest-growing unions." In the past five years, the union has doubled its membership to 40,000 and represents virtually every major hotel in town. Other West Coast cities have equally impressive records. After winning a high-profile election this summer at the staunchly anti-union Marriott Hotels, San Francisco's restaurant union is currently negotiating a contract with the company. Seattle Local 8 boasts 5,000 members and 30 union restaurants. "Local 9 suffers from a lack of money and a lack of leadership," says Klare. The only way the local can solve that problem is by bringing in more people. They're not off to a good start at Ruth's Chris. |
