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Indybay Feature
Smashed Up: Young Service Workers on the Sanctity of Small Business
The Easy Bay Solidarity Network tackles the myth of the small business and hallow criticisms of the recent uprisings against police brutality.
It was the first Friday of December, which in Oakland usually means hoards of people descending onto Telegraph Avenue for the monthly Art Murmur festival. But on this night, a much different crowd filled the streets. After successfully shutting down the 880 freeway and West Oakland BART station, hundreds of people outraged at the recent police murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner marched towards 14th and Broadway downtown. Suddenly, the sound of shattering glass echoed everywhere; someone had smashed out the windows of a new wine bar. Cheers of joy went up from most of the crowd, but a few rushed to protect the vandalized shop: “Stop! This is a local business!”
Although corporate chains bore the brunt of the vandalism and looting in the most recent wave of actions against police murders, protesters also tagged and smashed windows at smaller businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods like Temescal and Downtown Berkeley. In the wake of these actions, some movement sympathizers have been quick to criticize the vandalism of local businesses, implying that locally owned businesses are not a legitimate target of popular anger. Even some who sympathize with property destruction of corporate targets like Chase Bank argue against targeting small businesses.
Based on our experience working for small businesses and as white workers who are actively in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, we want to suggest that not only is it appropriate to organize against and express anger at such places, but given the corresponding rise of upscale establishments, mass displacement, and police violence in the Bay Area, it may also be a strategic direction for our movements.
Locally-grown exploitation
The defense of small businesses in the Bay Area relies on a misplaced liberal morality which contrasts “good” local businesses and “evil” corporate ones. This dichotomy has become dogma for many people, who amount their consumer choices to brave political acts. Feel bad about sweat shops? Purchase your next gift at a local boutique! Recession got you down? Shovel dollars into your local economy and dad just might get his job back. But are local businesses actually better for the majority of us?
The dominant image of small businesses as Mom and Pop stores run by elderly couples who work long hours as a labor of love is not reflected in the local economy. The reality is closer to a young, wealthy owner who does not work in their own store but instead employs a small group of wage laborers. And since small businesses don’t have the profit margins of large corporations, they often rely on sweatshop discipline and poverty wages to make ends meet. Most anyone who has worked in the industry can attest to a repressive atmosphere: workers are not allowed on breaks, are scolded for talking to co-workers and punished for showing up five minutes late. Furthermore, even service workers who make tips frequently earn below a living wage and are subjected to unpredictable work schedules that necessitate finding a second or third job. When these practices happen at large corporate chains, they become the themes of documentaries, muckraking articles in the liberal press, and bumper sticker slogans. But when they’re used by local businesses, they’re written off as necessary evils.
In higher-end establishments, employers frequently justify poor treatment by trying to instill pride and artistic ambitions in their employees; workers are all but required to do extra learning, research, and labor outside of the workday to satisfy the employers’ need to serve the coolest new cocktail or coffee bean. At a recent mandatory meeting for an East Bay-based organic catering company, workers were told by the CEO: “This is not a job; it’s a craft. You are all artists, and you should treat your job as such. If you don’t, you won’t succeed in this company.” What he was saying was that if you do not invest hours off the clock in becoming a more efficient and valuable worker, we won’t employ you.
By romanticizing small businesses like the hip restaurants, cafes and bars currently springing up all over Oakland, we gloss over the experiences of the low wage workers who make them possible. When compared to the horrendous treatment that service workers must endure, the shattering or spray-painting of a few windows does not even the score.
A divided house
While we as low wage white service workers are exploited by small business owners, we must recognize that our race and class positions heavily shape our treatment in the workplace. Our jobs are often segregated in much the same way the Bay is, that is, although we work for the same employer, our experience of work is dramatically different. Young service workers are often subjected to bad treatment and low wages, but they are also offered the jobs that pay relatively better, bring in tips and earn more respect from management. Back of the house workers (i.e dishwashers, lower-level cooks), in addition to dealing with unpredictable schedules, job instability, and intense pace of work, are also paid less and completely excluded from the broader culture and decision-making of the workplace. Back of the house employees are usually immigrants and almost always people of color, and are thus subjected to a variety of racist abuses from higher-ups. At our work places we’ve seen chefs berate prep cooks for “not speaking English correctly,” small organic farmers complain that their Latino farm workers are “lazy because they hang out with their family and community too much,” and a group of immigrant women workers be falsely accused of stealing and subsequently fired. Multiply these encounters thousands of times and you get an idea of the nature of local business in the Bay Area.
Additionally, wage theft among immigrant workers is occurring on a drastic scale. Wage theft in California costs workers an estimated $390 million a year, and it largely affects those in smaller independent businesses, as these employers more frequently operate “under the table” and pay people in cash. Furthermore, workers who try to reclaim these wages by filing complaints with the state only recover roughly 17 cents on the dollar, as businesses have developed a variety of tricks to avoid payment.
As white workers, we realize that there is a huge difference in how we experience working in these places. Racial segregation, hierarchies, and exploitation of immigrants prop up these businesses, so it’s important for us to find creative ways to work in solidarity with our coworkers, both in our workplaces and in the streets. Although we too labor under highly exploitative conditions, we must admit the relatively superior position we are in, in terms of the jobs/wages that are accessible to us, and the fluidity with which we can change employers.
Small business, the police, and displacement
Most of the vandalism during recent actions happened in rapidly gentrifying areas where long-term Oakland residents, working class people and people of color are being displaced and upscale restaurants, craft coffee shops and other small businesses are moving in.
These new businesses cater almost exclusively to people with money, both in their aesthetics and in the price of their products. Low wage workers are not the intended market for $12 craft cocktails, $40 dinners and $3 cups of coffee that take 20 minutes to make, even if we can splurge on a night out once in a while. Whole blocks of Uptown are overrun by fancy bars that cater to a gentrifying, privileged class that defines food and drinks by how rare, artisanal and “exotic” they are. In other words, they are marketed exclusively for those with money.
More importantly, as these small businesses move into neighborhoods that have long been populated by working-class people of color, they make demands of the city to protect their investments. This usually means beefing up police presence in neighborhoods targeted for development. As former Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts said back in 2010,
“I believe police departments are economic drivers. If you have bad stories coming out about crime or bad policing, investors are not going to come to a city. So in an industrial age city that is built much like Oakland has been an industrial age power house, it has to redo itself, it has to re-engineer itself with a different economy, and in order for that to happen you have to have a lot of investment, whether its federal funds or from private investors to come. Nobody’s going to invest in a city when you have a high crime rate so you have to drop that.”
When combined with the suspicion of white neighbors, this increased policing in certain areas can have deadly consequences, as we saw with the police murder of unarmed Alex Nieto in San Francisco in 2014.
Small businesses also collaborate with the city to receive lucrative tax breaks, which line the pockets of business owners and developers, even as those same developers loot the wealth that our communities create through our labor and drive up housing costs. For example, $50 million was invested to renovate the Old Oakland neighborhood, now populated mostly by upscale bars and restaurants which receive a variety of tax breaks and other subsidies from local, state and federal programs. How often do we see these same establishments using their resources, social capital, or political connections to contribute to community struggles for justice? In times of low protest activity, businesses often work actively against the communities they are located in. In a January 2013 “community forum” held at Homeroom, a mac and cheese restaurant in North Oakland, mostly white residents talked about “cracking down on crime” in the neighborhood — a far cry from addressing the displacement of long-term residents. But during the current upsurge in popular anger, small business owners are coming out loudly in the media to assert that they support the fight for racial equality, but as they like to claim, rioting is just distracting from the message. As the executive chef of the wine bar mentioned above said after his windows were smashed: “I understand what you are protesting—what happened to [Eric Garner and Mike Brown] was wrong—but what’s happening to us, that’s fucked up.”
In actuality, this class of small business owners can only survive through the employment of cheap labor, largely provided to them by undocumented immigrants and young people, criminalization of communities of color, and state intervention. They are not upset because rioting “distracts from the message.”, they never cared about the message in the first place. In fact, they are scared because those things which allows them to generate their wealth are finally being called into question and lots of people are listening.
An injustice anywhere
We cannot create exceptions or excuses for exploitation and injustice. As workers in the local service industry, it makes no difference to us whether our boss is a local resident who only owns one or two restaurants, or whether he’s a billionaire CEO living in a mansion. The mere fact that the businesses we work for are built on the exploitation of our labor, racial hierarchies, state violence, and displacement of whole communities, makes them perfectly justifiable outlets for our anger and our movement organizing. We are not just talking about vandalism, but about a broader orientation that rejects the sanctity of small business and re-affirms a strategy based in dismantling white supremacy, police violence and the exploitation of labor.
While we know that merely forcing these businesses out of town would not lead to a more just situation for workers or residents, we also can’t envision a democratic community alongside any space that caters to wealthy, mostly white people and survives through the exploitation of workers and preferential treatment from the state. When the riots inevitably die down, what can we do to continue to express our discontent?
Merely criticizing or vandalizing these upscale businesses will probably not bring us justice. We also need to organize amongst our co-workers, demand better conditions, form pockets of organized workers and take direct action, both in the streets and on the job. Joining our often-segregated workforces together with a strategy rooted in direct action, which at times will include mass rebellion, has the makings of a powerful movement. We’ve seen how much we can do in the streets in a short amount of time — shutting down multiple major routes of transportation for two weeks in a row is no small feat– imagine what we could do if we kept going.
This article was written by the East Bay Solidarity Network.
The East Bay Solidarity Network is an organizing collective based in Oakland. We support working-class and poor people in directly confronting exploitation, violence, and injustice. We organize strategic direct action campaigns against landlords, employers, and the state, as well as form alliances with communities and organizations who are most affected by capitalism and systems of domination. We want to resist all manifestations of oppression that occur in our world, in our organizations, and in ourselves. This means actively fighting white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and colonialism. We also seek to mobilize the resources of privileged communities to lend capacity and tangible support to those who are struggling for their own liberation.
To contact us, please visit eastbaysol.wordpress.com, or email eastbaysol [at] gmail.com, or check us out on Facebook.
If you’re having a problem with your boss and want to fight back, call us: 510-556-4208
If you’re having a problem with you’re landlord and want to fight back, you can call: 510-239-3219
Articles cited:
http://libcom.org/library/who-gives-orders-oakland-police-city-hall-occupy
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Oakland-Economy.html
http://sf.eater.com/2014/12/8/7354137/windows-smashed-chef-roughed-up-at-brand-new-oakland-wine-bar
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wage-theft-action-20141024-story.html
https://oaklandnorth.net/2013/01/08/residents-pack-open-forum-to-discuss-crime-surge-in-the-temescal-area/
Although corporate chains bore the brunt of the vandalism and looting in the most recent wave of actions against police murders, protesters also tagged and smashed windows at smaller businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods like Temescal and Downtown Berkeley. In the wake of these actions, some movement sympathizers have been quick to criticize the vandalism of local businesses, implying that locally owned businesses are not a legitimate target of popular anger. Even some who sympathize with property destruction of corporate targets like Chase Bank argue against targeting small businesses.
Based on our experience working for small businesses and as white workers who are actively in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, we want to suggest that not only is it appropriate to organize against and express anger at such places, but given the corresponding rise of upscale establishments, mass displacement, and police violence in the Bay Area, it may also be a strategic direction for our movements.
Locally-grown exploitation
The defense of small businesses in the Bay Area relies on a misplaced liberal morality which contrasts “good” local businesses and “evil” corporate ones. This dichotomy has become dogma for many people, who amount their consumer choices to brave political acts. Feel bad about sweat shops? Purchase your next gift at a local boutique! Recession got you down? Shovel dollars into your local economy and dad just might get his job back. But are local businesses actually better for the majority of us?
The dominant image of small businesses as Mom and Pop stores run by elderly couples who work long hours as a labor of love is not reflected in the local economy. The reality is closer to a young, wealthy owner who does not work in their own store but instead employs a small group of wage laborers. And since small businesses don’t have the profit margins of large corporations, they often rely on sweatshop discipline and poverty wages to make ends meet. Most anyone who has worked in the industry can attest to a repressive atmosphere: workers are not allowed on breaks, are scolded for talking to co-workers and punished for showing up five minutes late. Furthermore, even service workers who make tips frequently earn below a living wage and are subjected to unpredictable work schedules that necessitate finding a second or third job. When these practices happen at large corporate chains, they become the themes of documentaries, muckraking articles in the liberal press, and bumper sticker slogans. But when they’re used by local businesses, they’re written off as necessary evils.
In higher-end establishments, employers frequently justify poor treatment by trying to instill pride and artistic ambitions in their employees; workers are all but required to do extra learning, research, and labor outside of the workday to satisfy the employers’ need to serve the coolest new cocktail or coffee bean. At a recent mandatory meeting for an East Bay-based organic catering company, workers were told by the CEO: “This is not a job; it’s a craft. You are all artists, and you should treat your job as such. If you don’t, you won’t succeed in this company.” What he was saying was that if you do not invest hours off the clock in becoming a more efficient and valuable worker, we won’t employ you.
By romanticizing small businesses like the hip restaurants, cafes and bars currently springing up all over Oakland, we gloss over the experiences of the low wage workers who make them possible. When compared to the horrendous treatment that service workers must endure, the shattering or spray-painting of a few windows does not even the score.
A divided house
While we as low wage white service workers are exploited by small business owners, we must recognize that our race and class positions heavily shape our treatment in the workplace. Our jobs are often segregated in much the same way the Bay is, that is, although we work for the same employer, our experience of work is dramatically different. Young service workers are often subjected to bad treatment and low wages, but they are also offered the jobs that pay relatively better, bring in tips and earn more respect from management. Back of the house workers (i.e dishwashers, lower-level cooks), in addition to dealing with unpredictable schedules, job instability, and intense pace of work, are also paid less and completely excluded from the broader culture and decision-making of the workplace. Back of the house employees are usually immigrants and almost always people of color, and are thus subjected to a variety of racist abuses from higher-ups. At our work places we’ve seen chefs berate prep cooks for “not speaking English correctly,” small organic farmers complain that their Latino farm workers are “lazy because they hang out with their family and community too much,” and a group of immigrant women workers be falsely accused of stealing and subsequently fired. Multiply these encounters thousands of times and you get an idea of the nature of local business in the Bay Area.
Additionally, wage theft among immigrant workers is occurring on a drastic scale. Wage theft in California costs workers an estimated $390 million a year, and it largely affects those in smaller independent businesses, as these employers more frequently operate “under the table” and pay people in cash. Furthermore, workers who try to reclaim these wages by filing complaints with the state only recover roughly 17 cents on the dollar, as businesses have developed a variety of tricks to avoid payment.
As white workers, we realize that there is a huge difference in how we experience working in these places. Racial segregation, hierarchies, and exploitation of immigrants prop up these businesses, so it’s important for us to find creative ways to work in solidarity with our coworkers, both in our workplaces and in the streets. Although we too labor under highly exploitative conditions, we must admit the relatively superior position we are in, in terms of the jobs/wages that are accessible to us, and the fluidity with which we can change employers.
Small business, the police, and displacement
Most of the vandalism during recent actions happened in rapidly gentrifying areas where long-term Oakland residents, working class people and people of color are being displaced and upscale restaurants, craft coffee shops and other small businesses are moving in.
These new businesses cater almost exclusively to people with money, both in their aesthetics and in the price of their products. Low wage workers are not the intended market for $12 craft cocktails, $40 dinners and $3 cups of coffee that take 20 minutes to make, even if we can splurge on a night out once in a while. Whole blocks of Uptown are overrun by fancy bars that cater to a gentrifying, privileged class that defines food and drinks by how rare, artisanal and “exotic” they are. In other words, they are marketed exclusively for those with money.
More importantly, as these small businesses move into neighborhoods that have long been populated by working-class people of color, they make demands of the city to protect their investments. This usually means beefing up police presence in neighborhoods targeted for development. As former Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts said back in 2010,
“I believe police departments are economic drivers. If you have bad stories coming out about crime or bad policing, investors are not going to come to a city. So in an industrial age city that is built much like Oakland has been an industrial age power house, it has to redo itself, it has to re-engineer itself with a different economy, and in order for that to happen you have to have a lot of investment, whether its federal funds or from private investors to come. Nobody’s going to invest in a city when you have a high crime rate so you have to drop that.”
When combined with the suspicion of white neighbors, this increased policing in certain areas can have deadly consequences, as we saw with the police murder of unarmed Alex Nieto in San Francisco in 2014.
Small businesses also collaborate with the city to receive lucrative tax breaks, which line the pockets of business owners and developers, even as those same developers loot the wealth that our communities create through our labor and drive up housing costs. For example, $50 million was invested to renovate the Old Oakland neighborhood, now populated mostly by upscale bars and restaurants which receive a variety of tax breaks and other subsidies from local, state and federal programs. How often do we see these same establishments using their resources, social capital, or political connections to contribute to community struggles for justice? In times of low protest activity, businesses often work actively against the communities they are located in. In a January 2013 “community forum” held at Homeroom, a mac and cheese restaurant in North Oakland, mostly white residents talked about “cracking down on crime” in the neighborhood — a far cry from addressing the displacement of long-term residents. But during the current upsurge in popular anger, small business owners are coming out loudly in the media to assert that they support the fight for racial equality, but as they like to claim, rioting is just distracting from the message. As the executive chef of the wine bar mentioned above said after his windows were smashed: “I understand what you are protesting—what happened to [Eric Garner and Mike Brown] was wrong—but what’s happening to us, that’s fucked up.”
In actuality, this class of small business owners can only survive through the employment of cheap labor, largely provided to them by undocumented immigrants and young people, criminalization of communities of color, and state intervention. They are not upset because rioting “distracts from the message.”, they never cared about the message in the first place. In fact, they are scared because those things which allows them to generate their wealth are finally being called into question and lots of people are listening.
An injustice anywhere
We cannot create exceptions or excuses for exploitation and injustice. As workers in the local service industry, it makes no difference to us whether our boss is a local resident who only owns one or two restaurants, or whether he’s a billionaire CEO living in a mansion. The mere fact that the businesses we work for are built on the exploitation of our labor, racial hierarchies, state violence, and displacement of whole communities, makes them perfectly justifiable outlets for our anger and our movement organizing. We are not just talking about vandalism, but about a broader orientation that rejects the sanctity of small business and re-affirms a strategy based in dismantling white supremacy, police violence and the exploitation of labor.
While we know that merely forcing these businesses out of town would not lead to a more just situation for workers or residents, we also can’t envision a democratic community alongside any space that caters to wealthy, mostly white people and survives through the exploitation of workers and preferential treatment from the state. When the riots inevitably die down, what can we do to continue to express our discontent?
Merely criticizing or vandalizing these upscale businesses will probably not bring us justice. We also need to organize amongst our co-workers, demand better conditions, form pockets of organized workers and take direct action, both in the streets and on the job. Joining our often-segregated workforces together with a strategy rooted in direct action, which at times will include mass rebellion, has the makings of a powerful movement. We’ve seen how much we can do in the streets in a short amount of time — shutting down multiple major routes of transportation for two weeks in a row is no small feat– imagine what we could do if we kept going.
This article was written by the East Bay Solidarity Network.
The East Bay Solidarity Network is an organizing collective based in Oakland. We support working-class and poor people in directly confronting exploitation, violence, and injustice. We organize strategic direct action campaigns against landlords, employers, and the state, as well as form alliances with communities and organizations who are most affected by capitalism and systems of domination. We want to resist all manifestations of oppression that occur in our world, in our organizations, and in ourselves. This means actively fighting white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and colonialism. We also seek to mobilize the resources of privileged communities to lend capacity and tangible support to those who are struggling for their own liberation.
To contact us, please visit eastbaysol.wordpress.com, or email eastbaysol [at] gmail.com, or check us out on Facebook.
If you’re having a problem with your boss and want to fight back, call us: 510-556-4208
If you’re having a problem with you’re landlord and want to fight back, you can call: 510-239-3219
Articles cited:
http://libcom.org/library/who-gives-orders-oakland-police-city-hall-occupy
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Oakland-Economy.html
http://sf.eater.com/2014/12/8/7354137/windows-smashed-chef-roughed-up-at-brand-new-oakland-wine-bar
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wage-theft-action-20141024-story.html
https://oaklandnorth.net/2013/01/08/residents-pack-open-forum-to-discuss-crime-surge-in-the-temescal-area/
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I'm so happy this was posted. I have for years tried to convince liberal friends that "small business" is still business.
The Real Food Company is two expensive natural food stores in San Francisco’s Russian Hill and Marina District neighborhoods. I was employed as a cashier at the Polk Street store from March 2012 to March 2013. After I got fired I wrote this leaflet. A friend and I distributed about 1500 of them to customers outside both stores on a series of Sunday and Monday evenings in June and July 2013. Sunday and Monday evenings are the busiest periods at the stores.
As a former employee of Real Food who left on good terms with my fellow wage slaves, my perspective had credibility with my former co-workers. And as someone who was no longer employed here I could now act with a complete impunity that is unavailable to people still employed there.
Like everything else that I generate in this vein, this is part of a larger everevolving template for anti-state communist action embedded in the everyday life concerns of mainstream working people.
LES MISERABLES: SIX-FIGURE-INCOME-STEPHANIE HONG’S 100% RAW DEAL FOR THE WORKING POOR AT THE REAL FOOD COMPANY
Frequent shoppers at the Real Food Company no doubt notice that this store sheds employees more frequently than most yuppies change their shirts. ‘Help Wanted’ signs are permanent front window fixtures at Real Food for painful and obvious reasons:
At Real Food, store employees work at a frantic pace, selling expensive items, to expensive people, in two of the most expensive neighborhoods of the most expensive city in the United States -- and 95% of us do this for wages that condemn us to hardcore poverty. Pay levels for most Real Food Company staff members never rise more than a few dimes above the lowest amount that Real Food Company owner Stephanie Hong is legally allowed to get away with paying. There are people who have been working at Real Food for more than five years who make less that $13 an hour. Others have been here for more than a decade, and aren’t even getting $15 an hour. This store’s high sales volume brings in plenty of money for repeated store renovations, but never enough for pay increases. Frenetic toil for Ronald McDonald compensation levels ensures “Chief Operating Officer” Stephanie Hong a comfortable six-figure annual income and a lovely condo with a spectacular view at 2140 Hyde. The phenomenal high rate of turnover at the Real Food Company helps to keep those who haven’t been fired yet atomized, intimidated, and bewildered, and guarantees that this abysmal setup will continue.
The Real Food Company presents the public face of a spunky little locally owned natural foods store fighting the good fight against GMO’s, with a corporate mission of helping neurasthenic yuppies think they can live to be 140 by wolfing down bushels of overpriced organic kale. This is nothing but ‘Greenwashing.’ The Real Food Company is a textbook example of the hyper-exploitation and relentless on-the-job policing of the working poor in an ever more socially stratified United States.
Let’s take a tour of the Polk Street store, as seen through the eyes of the people who make this place run:
1: One of many negative hallmarks of the rise of digital technologies is the extinction of privacy. It is now a given that an individual is not entitled to any form of privacy in any public space, especially in the workplace, and most especially in a low wage dead-end workplace like the Real Food Company. Take a look at the small cameras ringing the store’s ceiling behind the cash registers. They are not aimed at the customer’s side of the register, but at the cashiers. This in-store digital surveillance system worthy of a medium security prison isn’t for the protection of the employees in the unlikely event of an armed robbery, but to allow Stephanie’s management minions to spy on the harried staff, the fear being that the wage-slaves might be tempted to steal, since their wages aren’t enough to live on. This invasive Orwellian touch is an expression of the relentless suspicion and hostility with which six-figure-Stephanie relates to the people she impoverishes and exploits.
2: Few people who work at Real Food spend their meager pay shopping at this phenomenally overpriced store; the $25 jars of almond butter are a laughingstock among store employees. But in order to work hard, we have to eat, and this is where “Culls” come in. “Culls” are food items that are slightly damaged or past their expiration date. Employees are allowed to buy these for a nominal five cents per item. Culls are a form of officially sanctioned dumpster diving, allowing the overworked and underpaid staff to keep burning enough calories to produce enough surplus value to feed six-figure-store-owner-Stephanie’s profit hunger.
3. Offering employees nothing and demanding everything, store managers run staff members through periodic asinine “employee assessments,” as if employment at this Gluten-Free-Jack-in-the-Box has any kind of future. Significant wage raises to a level that an adult can live on in 21st century San Francisco are never on the agenda. The only question is how much more can you give and how much more enthusiastically and frantically you can give it. If you put on the requisite fawning cringing act, you may be rewarded with a whopping .25 cents per hour raise. If you are less than effervescent in your enthusiasm, you are free to lose your meager income, and be replaced by a steady stream of the fearful unemployed lured by those permanent “Help Wanted” signs. In a place like the United States there is always plenty of fresh desperation for six-figure-Stephanie to feed on.
LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES…
A stock response at this point is to say, “Dude, that’s life in the service sector! The work is supposed to be shitty and pay bad! Don’t like it? Go get another job!” The US has entered a period of long-term economic decline, and many socalled “good jobs” have permanently ceased to exist. Most of us can’t become cyber-weenies -- and many of us wouldn’t avail ourselves of that option even if it became available to us.
A problem doesn’t cease to be a problem simply because large numbers of other people are being victimized by it. The appalling situation that prevails in today’s service sector messes up the lives of a vast number of people and this situation must be confronted and abolished.
From the old IWW of one hundred years ago to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950’s and 1960’s, appalling social conditions have been rendered inoperative and overturned when those affected by them have taken sustained collective action to abolish those conditions. The right kind of on-the-job direct action at a relatively small, awful, and incompetently managed exploiter like the Real Food Company could have a positive ripple effect among employees of bigger sweatshops like Whole Foods and Trader Joes.
A terminally deformed scene like the one at Real Food Company produces endless toxic workplace melodramas. Again the main malefactor here is the store’s owner, Stephanie Hong. Stephanie presents an image of herself as a “nice” person by leaving the hands-on staff harassment to escapees from the Addams Family like General Manager Jean Greenfield, and Jean’s homunculus, Jason, at the Fillmore store. “Shift leads” (a shift assistant manager and straw boss) are employed for their eagerness to crack the whip on the field hands and their skills at apple-polishing -- and we’re not talking about the produce now. These servile servants are themselves frequently and cavalierly consigned to the ranks of the unemployed when their usefulness to the program has expired. At the Real Food Company, high turnover is everything.
On “LinkedIn,” Real Food’s “Chief Operations Officer” -- a two-syllable word for this is “owner” -- Stephanie Hong acknowledges membership in the “San Francisco Employers Advisory Council.” The SFEAC is an exploiter’s cabal where people like six-figure-Steph get advice in how to get away with as much as possible at the relentless expense of the proles. A recent former president and secretary of SFEAC, Bob L. Zaletel, is an attorney with Litler, Mendelson, one of the largest and most notorious anti-labor law firms in the US. By every salient indicator, the Real Food Company is a completely anti-working class operation.
“IT’S TIME TO STOP SINGING AND START SWINGIN’!”
Unions are no longer defensive organizations protecting wage earners from employers, but auxiliary mechanisms of capitalist exploitation. Getting a labor brokerage to fight our battles for us will never be as quick and effective as wildcat action against management, and against management’s wannabe collaborators, the unions.
This means --
A series of rolling sickouts, where a majority of store employees call in sick on the same day. We should not do this once, but again, and again, and again, and combine this with --
a high-profile public information campaign drawing attention among the public at large to how bad it is to work for Stephanie Hong, Inc.
For the duration of the effort, it can also be useful to draw attention to how much cheaper it is to shop at other service sectors sweatshops. Customers can save 20% and more by patronizing the Trader Joe’s at California and Hyde.
The only thing exploiters understand is force. Sustained, on-the-job direct action hammering this store’s profit margin can bring about massive across-theboard pay hikes, and abolish management’s ability to abuse the staff at will.
STARTING PAY AT THIS PLACE SHOULD BE AT LEAST $18 PER HOUR -- SIX-FIGURE-STEPHANIE CAN CERTAINLY AFFORD IT.
The Real Food Company is vulnerable. The Real Food Company is an incompetently run operation built on a culture of extreme exploitation. Bareknuckle collective direct action is the only thing that can bring a halt to this. The right kind of belligerent solidarity can impose massive pay and benefit increases, and serve as a style model in combativeness for our fellow hard-pressed wage earners at Trader Joes and Whole Foods. Our bosses are our enemies. The U.S. economy is our enemy. We have nothing to lose but our pains.
POSTSCRIPT: This leaflet was initially distributed among employees attending the June 19th mandatory company meeting. At this meeting, six-figure-Steph referred to this leaflet and claimed with disgusting temerity that the abysmal wages she pays are “competitive.” Wages at the Real Food Company are “competitive” with what people worked for in the pre-Civil War plantation south, but they are not remotely “competitive” with the astronomical cost of living in end-stage gentrification SF. Only a cosseted child of privilege like Stephanie Hong can have the gall to claim that eleven or twelve bucks an hour is a livable rate of pay for this city. It goes without saying that if the purpose of this leaflet was to engage in cordial dialog with six-figure-Steph, we’d offer to type it again more slowly.
WHEN WE ACT TOGETHER AGAINST OUR EMPLOYERS WE ACT IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL EMPLOYEES EVERYWHERE
Contact us at:
tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com
This text can also be seen online at: http://www.indybay.org
As a former employee of Real Food who left on good terms with my fellow wage slaves, my perspective had credibility with my former co-workers. And as someone who was no longer employed here I could now act with a complete impunity that is unavailable to people still employed there.
Like everything else that I generate in this vein, this is part of a larger everevolving template for anti-state communist action embedded in the everyday life concerns of mainstream working people.
LES MISERABLES: SIX-FIGURE-INCOME-STEPHANIE HONG’S 100% RAW DEAL FOR THE WORKING POOR AT THE REAL FOOD COMPANY
Frequent shoppers at the Real Food Company no doubt notice that this store sheds employees more frequently than most yuppies change their shirts. ‘Help Wanted’ signs are permanent front window fixtures at Real Food for painful and obvious reasons:
At Real Food, store employees work at a frantic pace, selling expensive items, to expensive people, in two of the most expensive neighborhoods of the most expensive city in the United States -- and 95% of us do this for wages that condemn us to hardcore poverty. Pay levels for most Real Food Company staff members never rise more than a few dimes above the lowest amount that Real Food Company owner Stephanie Hong is legally allowed to get away with paying. There are people who have been working at Real Food for more than five years who make less that $13 an hour. Others have been here for more than a decade, and aren’t even getting $15 an hour. This store’s high sales volume brings in plenty of money for repeated store renovations, but never enough for pay increases. Frenetic toil for Ronald McDonald compensation levels ensures “Chief Operating Officer” Stephanie Hong a comfortable six-figure annual income and a lovely condo with a spectacular view at 2140 Hyde. The phenomenal high rate of turnover at the Real Food Company helps to keep those who haven’t been fired yet atomized, intimidated, and bewildered, and guarantees that this abysmal setup will continue.
The Real Food Company presents the public face of a spunky little locally owned natural foods store fighting the good fight against GMO’s, with a corporate mission of helping neurasthenic yuppies think they can live to be 140 by wolfing down bushels of overpriced organic kale. This is nothing but ‘Greenwashing.’ The Real Food Company is a textbook example of the hyper-exploitation and relentless on-the-job policing of the working poor in an ever more socially stratified United States.
Let’s take a tour of the Polk Street store, as seen through the eyes of the people who make this place run:
1: One of many negative hallmarks of the rise of digital technologies is the extinction of privacy. It is now a given that an individual is not entitled to any form of privacy in any public space, especially in the workplace, and most especially in a low wage dead-end workplace like the Real Food Company. Take a look at the small cameras ringing the store’s ceiling behind the cash registers. They are not aimed at the customer’s side of the register, but at the cashiers. This in-store digital surveillance system worthy of a medium security prison isn’t for the protection of the employees in the unlikely event of an armed robbery, but to allow Stephanie’s management minions to spy on the harried staff, the fear being that the wage-slaves might be tempted to steal, since their wages aren’t enough to live on. This invasive Orwellian touch is an expression of the relentless suspicion and hostility with which six-figure-Stephanie relates to the people she impoverishes and exploits.
2: Few people who work at Real Food spend their meager pay shopping at this phenomenally overpriced store; the $25 jars of almond butter are a laughingstock among store employees. But in order to work hard, we have to eat, and this is where “Culls” come in. “Culls” are food items that are slightly damaged or past their expiration date. Employees are allowed to buy these for a nominal five cents per item. Culls are a form of officially sanctioned dumpster diving, allowing the overworked and underpaid staff to keep burning enough calories to produce enough surplus value to feed six-figure-store-owner-Stephanie’s profit hunger.
3. Offering employees nothing and demanding everything, store managers run staff members through periodic asinine “employee assessments,” as if employment at this Gluten-Free-Jack-in-the-Box has any kind of future. Significant wage raises to a level that an adult can live on in 21st century San Francisco are never on the agenda. The only question is how much more can you give and how much more enthusiastically and frantically you can give it. If you put on the requisite fawning cringing act, you may be rewarded with a whopping .25 cents per hour raise. If you are less than effervescent in your enthusiasm, you are free to lose your meager income, and be replaced by a steady stream of the fearful unemployed lured by those permanent “Help Wanted” signs. In a place like the United States there is always plenty of fresh desperation for six-figure-Stephanie to feed on.
LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES…
A stock response at this point is to say, “Dude, that’s life in the service sector! The work is supposed to be shitty and pay bad! Don’t like it? Go get another job!” The US has entered a period of long-term economic decline, and many socalled “good jobs” have permanently ceased to exist. Most of us can’t become cyber-weenies -- and many of us wouldn’t avail ourselves of that option even if it became available to us.
A problem doesn’t cease to be a problem simply because large numbers of other people are being victimized by it. The appalling situation that prevails in today’s service sector messes up the lives of a vast number of people and this situation must be confronted and abolished.
From the old IWW of one hundred years ago to the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950’s and 1960’s, appalling social conditions have been rendered inoperative and overturned when those affected by them have taken sustained collective action to abolish those conditions. The right kind of on-the-job direct action at a relatively small, awful, and incompetently managed exploiter like the Real Food Company could have a positive ripple effect among employees of bigger sweatshops like Whole Foods and Trader Joes.
A terminally deformed scene like the one at Real Food Company produces endless toxic workplace melodramas. Again the main malefactor here is the store’s owner, Stephanie Hong. Stephanie presents an image of herself as a “nice” person by leaving the hands-on staff harassment to escapees from the Addams Family like General Manager Jean Greenfield, and Jean’s homunculus, Jason, at the Fillmore store. “Shift leads” (a shift assistant manager and straw boss) are employed for their eagerness to crack the whip on the field hands and their skills at apple-polishing -- and we’re not talking about the produce now. These servile servants are themselves frequently and cavalierly consigned to the ranks of the unemployed when their usefulness to the program has expired. At the Real Food Company, high turnover is everything.
On “LinkedIn,” Real Food’s “Chief Operations Officer” -- a two-syllable word for this is “owner” -- Stephanie Hong acknowledges membership in the “San Francisco Employers Advisory Council.” The SFEAC is an exploiter’s cabal where people like six-figure-Steph get advice in how to get away with as much as possible at the relentless expense of the proles. A recent former president and secretary of SFEAC, Bob L. Zaletel, is an attorney with Litler, Mendelson, one of the largest and most notorious anti-labor law firms in the US. By every salient indicator, the Real Food Company is a completely anti-working class operation.
“IT’S TIME TO STOP SINGING AND START SWINGIN’!”
Unions are no longer defensive organizations protecting wage earners from employers, but auxiliary mechanisms of capitalist exploitation. Getting a labor brokerage to fight our battles for us will never be as quick and effective as wildcat action against management, and against management’s wannabe collaborators, the unions.
This means --
A series of rolling sickouts, where a majority of store employees call in sick on the same day. We should not do this once, but again, and again, and again, and combine this with --
a high-profile public information campaign drawing attention among the public at large to how bad it is to work for Stephanie Hong, Inc.
For the duration of the effort, it can also be useful to draw attention to how much cheaper it is to shop at other service sectors sweatshops. Customers can save 20% and more by patronizing the Trader Joe’s at California and Hyde.
The only thing exploiters understand is force. Sustained, on-the-job direct action hammering this store’s profit margin can bring about massive across-theboard pay hikes, and abolish management’s ability to abuse the staff at will.
STARTING PAY AT THIS PLACE SHOULD BE AT LEAST $18 PER HOUR -- SIX-FIGURE-STEPHANIE CAN CERTAINLY AFFORD IT.
The Real Food Company is vulnerable. The Real Food Company is an incompetently run operation built on a culture of extreme exploitation. Bareknuckle collective direct action is the only thing that can bring a halt to this. The right kind of belligerent solidarity can impose massive pay and benefit increases, and serve as a style model in combativeness for our fellow hard-pressed wage earners at Trader Joes and Whole Foods. Our bosses are our enemies. The U.S. economy is our enemy. We have nothing to lose but our pains.
POSTSCRIPT: This leaflet was initially distributed among employees attending the June 19th mandatory company meeting. At this meeting, six-figure-Steph referred to this leaflet and claimed with disgusting temerity that the abysmal wages she pays are “competitive.” Wages at the Real Food Company are “competitive” with what people worked for in the pre-Civil War plantation south, but they are not remotely “competitive” with the astronomical cost of living in end-stage gentrification SF. Only a cosseted child of privilege like Stephanie Hong can have the gall to claim that eleven or twelve bucks an hour is a livable rate of pay for this city. It goes without saying that if the purpose of this leaflet was to engage in cordial dialog with six-figure-Steph, we’d offer to type it again more slowly.
WHEN WE ACT TOGETHER AGAINST OUR EMPLOYERS WE ACT IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL EMPLOYEES EVERYWHERE
Contact us at:
tiborszamuely [at] yahoo.com
This text can also be seen online at: http://www.indybay.org
I notice in the above post which i mostly agree with there is no mention of organizing a Union among Small business workers . Why Not ?
I very well know the problems and limitations of many Unions (including the one mostly likely to be interested UNITE-HERE 2850 ) but what's the alternative ?
And if not one of the Labor Council afffilated unions why not talk to the iWW (who are now engaged in a Whole Foods organizing drive ) ?
There are also Labor Centered groups who , while most of their activists are members of various unions , are independent of any one union .
A few that come to mind are the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists , Asian/Pacific Labor Alliance, Coalition of Trade Union women and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee .
You could contact them for advice (advice not domination ! ) and support .
I very well know the problems and limitations of many Unions (including the one mostly likely to be interested UNITE-HERE 2850 ) but what's the alternative ?
And if not one of the Labor Council afffilated unions why not talk to the iWW (who are now engaged in a Whole Foods organizing drive ) ?
There are also Labor Centered groups who , while most of their activists are members of various unions , are independent of any one union .
A few that come to mind are the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists , Asian/Pacific Labor Alliance, Coalition of Trade Union women and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee .
You could contact them for advice (advice not domination ! ) and support .
When i wrote my response i hadn't read all of the previous posts. So i missed the last post which concluded that Unions are now all "' Company Unions '' that will do nothing for workers.
is that a fact ? So why then if unions are now just another Mgmt. tool there are such determined efforts by Corporations to break any Union drives ?
Why has companies with dramatically different customer bases like WalMart and Whole Foods have fired workers across the country on various excuses ? When their real ''crime''was organizing .
Are the CEO's really so ignorant of their real interests ?
I don't think so, Obviously the leaders of many (most ) unions practice class collabaration not Class struggle .
But corporate tops want NO Workers orgs . They want NO other entity telling them want to pay ''their ''workers ''.
And re walkouts and other forms of direct action demanding $18 an hr (among other demands ) Great ! But let's say the boss gives in . But then six months , a year later reverses the increase .
Do you then walk out again and again ? I'm sure you know that many workers that have families etc aren't permanant activists always prepared for battle .
There needs to be a on going organization to defend workers rights . and of course such a group has a lot more power if they are part of a much larger organization (ie a Nationally based union )
is that a fact ? So why then if unions are now just another Mgmt. tool there are such determined efforts by Corporations to break any Union drives ?
Why has companies with dramatically different customer bases like WalMart and Whole Foods have fired workers across the country on various excuses ? When their real ''crime''was organizing .
Are the CEO's really so ignorant of their real interests ?
I don't think so, Obviously the leaders of many (most ) unions practice class collabaration not Class struggle .
But corporate tops want NO Workers orgs . They want NO other entity telling them want to pay ''their ''workers ''.
And re walkouts and other forms of direct action demanding $18 an hr (among other demands ) Great ! But let's say the boss gives in . But then six months , a year later reverses the increase .
Do you then walk out again and again ? I'm sure you know that many workers that have families etc aren't permanant activists always prepared for battle .
There needs to be a on going organization to defend workers rights . and of course such a group has a lot more power if they are part of a much larger organization (ie a Nationally based union )
Regarding unions: as is noted in 'The Communist Maniifesto,' capitalism is the most protean and dynamic form of social organization of all time. With unions, capital moved the goal posts many decades ago; what was once resistance to the boss and a viable mechanism of working class self-defense has now become social work, and a way to incorporate potentially unruly proles into capitalist social peace and law and order.
Sure, corporations don't like unions; who ever said capitalism was supposed to be a cooperative form of social organization? Competing business enterprises drive each other out of business all the time. That doesn't make unions viable mechanism of resistance by wage slaves.
As G. Munis says in his brilliant and concise pamphlet, 'Unions Against Revolution.' unions have become transmission belts from capital to labor that help to adjust labor to the requirements of capital.
We need to develop a new form of mass direct action in the workplace where we band together to extract concessions from exploiters by damaging their economic interests, and not hand ourselves over to them tied at the wrists and ankles by the limits to action imposed on us by Taft-Hartley and every other anti-working class law that unions are obligated to play along with.
The Munis polemic can be read here:
http://www.oocities.org/cordobakaf/munis.html
Sure, corporations don't like unions; who ever said capitalism was supposed to be a cooperative form of social organization? Competing business enterprises drive each other out of business all the time. That doesn't make unions viable mechanism of resistance by wage slaves.
As G. Munis says in his brilliant and concise pamphlet, 'Unions Against Revolution.' unions have become transmission belts from capital to labor that help to adjust labor to the requirements of capital.
We need to develop a new form of mass direct action in the workplace where we band together to extract concessions from exploiters by damaging their economic interests, and not hand ourselves over to them tied at the wrists and ankles by the limits to action imposed on us by Taft-Hartley and every other anti-working class law that unions are obligated to play along with.
The Munis polemic can be read here:
http://www.oocities.org/cordobakaf/munis.html
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