LOVE THY LABOR

LIFE GETTING ORGANIZED

Meghesh Pansasri, center, with his employees at Nani's Kitchen. From left, Andrea DePasquale, Cole Roemer, Johanna Teissonniere,

and Bri Hargrove. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

LOVE THY LABOR

Nani’s Kitchen workers unionized with the blessing of their boss. Why aren’t more restaurants union shops? It’s complicated.

BY REBECCA RAFFERTY @RSRAFFERTY BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

About a month ago, workers at Nani’s Kitchen, an Indian restaurant at the Mercantile on Main food court collection of eateries in the Sibley’s building, did something remarkable: they voted to unionize.

Even more extraordinary, perhaps, was that their boss, the owner Meghesh Pansasri, encouraged them to do it. Upon conceiving of Nani’s, Pansasri says, his first call was to the A.F.L.C.I.O.

“I was like, ‘Hey I’m opening a restaurant, what do you guys want me to do?’” says Pansasri, who is also a labor scholar. “Ultimately, all I did was stay out of the way.”

Nani’s five workers are now represented by Workers United, a national union with roots in Rochester’s garment industry. They’re currently in the process of drawing up a contract for negotiation and for Pansasri to sign.

The situation at Nani’s is an anomaly. In Rochester, only one other food and drink establishment, SPoT Coffee on East Avenue, is a union shop. But Pansasri and Workers United hope Nani’s will inspire an expansion of organized labor in food services in the region.

The movement can almost only go up. Across the country, just 1.2 percent of the estimated 11.9 million people working in restaurants and food services belong to a union, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, making the industry one of the least unionized of any employment sector.

It might seem counterintuitive that so few workers in an industry notorious for its instability, poor scheduling, low benefits and pay, and abuse from superiors and customers, turn to unions for help.

But Gary Bonadonna explains that organizing restaurant employees is

Pansasri urged his employees to unionize when he opened his restaurant. They took him up on it. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

tricky. The industry’s high turnover rate and part-time employees make getting enough workers on board with the idea of a union long enough to form one difficult. When there is sustained interest, he says, it often gets tamped down with threats and misinformation from owners.

Some owners follow through and fire organizing workers, as happened in Buffalo when SPoT Coffee workers there sought to follow the lead of their Rochester counterparts.

“The things I heard are genuinely ridiculous,” Bonadonna says, citing bosses who believe they’ll lose control of their company or their ability to direct employees.

Then there are the whisper campaigns among bosses and workers alike, who paint unions as protectors of “lazy” workers and as third-party sharks who collect dues but don’t do much.

In many cases, though, bosses don’t have to react; the organizing efforts of workers often peter out on their own.

“It’s a human thing to not want to rock the boat,” Bonadonna says.

At Nani’s, workers say forming a union was less about rocking the foundation than it was about stabilizing it.

Workers there share tips and make the coveted $15 an hour that has been a rallying cry in the industry for several years. They get a week of paid sick leave annually, and the company covers half of the monthly payment for the health care package it offers full-time workers through the Healthy New York EPO plan.

“We had to unionize at Nani’s because we already had very good conditions, and we think that it’s important to kind of try to start pushing this and encouraging other restaurants to unionize,” says Andrea DePasquale, 24, the shift leader at Nani’s.

DePasquale has been working in the food service industry since she was 15.

She has seen restaurants and bars that don’t offer sick leave or health insurance or shield employees against occupational hazards and harassment. Many, she says, are inflexible with their scheduling and won’t guarantee the weekly hours that employees need to pay their bills. Workers could complain, she says, but those who do run the risk of “being taken off the schedule,” a tactic restaurants use to get rid of workers who cause problems.

Conditions like those are part of the reason that restaurants nationwide, once battered by the pandemic, are now experiencing severe staffing shortages, unable to find workers as warmer weather and reduced restrictions on dining have combined for an upswing in business.

“The industry is in pretty bad shape right now,” DePasquale says. “Something like 30 percent of the 9 million jobs that are missing from America right now are service- or customer service-based jobs, and people aren’t going back to them for a reason.”

Some restaurants around the country have gotten creative in an effort to lure new employees, including offering signing bonuses and higher wages, and introducing pro-worker changes like distributing compensation more evenly.

Bonadonna says unionizing can help solidify incentives that attract workers and keep them on the job. Turnover in the hospitality and restaurant industry has consistently hovered above 70 percent for several years, about 30 points higher than the rest of the American private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Unionizing can give people more control over their work lives, and access to resources and advocates who can help them navigate any problems that arise. Collective bargaining agreements typically include guarantees on wages and hours, standards for handling workplace disputes, and protocols for firing or laying off employees.

Such guarantees were what SPoT Coffee workers were after when they unionized in 2019. Their effort spawned what reportedly became the largest union of a café or restaurant chain in the United States. SPoT has 22 locations, mostly in western New York.

In the past, other restaurants in Rochester have unionized, but they’ve been few and far between. Workers at the former Roncone’s on Lyell Avenue formed a union in 2006. For a time, workers at the former Pier 45 tapas restaurant at the Port of Rochester, had a union. Both establishments have since closed.

As far as Pansasri is concerned, unionized workers make for a more successful business.

“There’s a level of productivity that you get out of your workers when they feel safe and secure,” he says. “When I’m working on new stuff at the restaurant, every employee feels invested in it because they feel invested in the shop.”

Pansasri, a 26-year-old graduate student originally from Kolkata, is all-in on labor rights.

He’s earning a degree in American Studies at Nazareth College, and currently writing his thesis on the labor movement in Rochester. He’s particularly fond of the work of writer and anarchist political activist Emma Goldman, a 19th-century Russian immigrant whose involvement in the labor movement was inspired by her experience working in one of Rochester’s garment factories as well as the notorious 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago, which began as a peaceful rally for an eight-hour workday and devolved into violent chaos.

“There’s this really intense culture of misinformation about what unions are, how they function in the labor economy, and what their cultural significance is,” Pansasri says.

“I mean, just what they’ve done for American workers alone, from the eight-hour workday and child labor laws to workers’ comp,” he adds, “everything we have comes from labor union struggles.”

LIFE DRAFT PICKS

Answers to this puzzle can be found on page 34

Across

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PUZZLE BY S.J. AUSTIN & J. REYNOLDS

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Down

1. Sgt. Friday’s org. 2. Treat for after a Little League game, perhaps 3. **Features of Hagrid’s dog Fluffy 4. Everlasting 5. L.L. Bean competitor since 1938 6. **South American camelid, or with 108-Down a beer poured by 16-Down 7. Newspaper often sold next to the Herald 8. Place to fill up in Canada 9. **Midway point of a bowling match 10. Grandpa Simpson 11. Attack from a defensive position 12. “War and Peace” and “The Brothers Karamazov”, e.g. 13. Largest organ in the human body 14. Wyatt Earp or Seth Bullock 15. ___ Khan 16. **River condition ideal for rafting 17. Non ___ (not so much, in music) 18. Brand on a truck outside a restaurant 28. Singer James 30. Alma mater for Leonard Nimoy and Jackie Robinson 32. “___ Beauty” (Gerald Manley Hopkins poem) 35. Little devils 37. Cambodian currency 39. Grumpy Cat, e.g. 40. What a relief pitcher might be brought in to do, slangily 41. All bark ___ bite 42. Memo abbr. 43. Leonine cry 45. Junior 46. Famous orca 48. Take a drag of a joint 49. Hydrocarbon suffixes 52. Container for cider 54. Student grant named after a senator 55. Knocked on the noggin 57. Direction in Spain 58. Goes to P.T. 60. Language of Pakistan 62. Stun with a gun 65. Severely dry 67. Man’s nickname that sounds like the start of a kindergarten song 69. Unit of force equal to 10 micronewtons 71. “You’re telling me!” 72. Shuttle launching group 74. Black, in poetry 75. Loading point 76. Di or da preceder in a Beatles song 77. **Large folivore native to South Central China, or a beer poured by 3-Down 79. **Question you might text your Postmates driver, or a beer poured by 9-Down 81. **Men?, or a beer poured by 16Down 82. Years in Paris? 83. Sweeties 86. Time that seems like it will never end 88. Next 89. Mnemonic for the first three colors of the visible spectrum 92. The Beehive State 94. The Fuzz 96. Manning and Whitney, for two 99. Emitted 101. Formally opine 103. Linear, for short 104. Gland whose name literally means “to the kidney” 106. Danish or Berliner 107. Laurence who wrote “Tristram Shandy” 108. **Little Hershey treats, or with 6-Down a beer poured by 16-Down 109. Grouchy-sounding award? 110. “Cloister and the Hearth” author 111. Rise 112. 1983 title role for Michael Keaton 115. Home of 4.6 billion people 117. “Othello” antagonist 119. Light bulb, in comics 120. Trial 122. Roadside bomb, for short 124. Hair spray alternative 126. Fictional planet of ‘80’s TV