REFUSING to SERVE: Restaurant workers are rejecting low wages and deteriorating conditions.

• Author: Herman, Alice

ON May 1, nineteen workers at an [HOP in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, walked out in the middle of a shift.

The new franchisee had been paying employees late--and in some cases, not at all. Employees were getting frantic.

The general manager had resorted to paying her staff out-of-pocket, but that worked only for so long. She wasn't getting paid, either.

"Since day one, they started missing payroll," says Alma Becerril, who had worked at the restaurant as a general manager for fifteen years. "A lot of people didn't get paid. Sometimes I had to wait two paychecks to get my payments." When staff walked out mid-shift, Becerril's daughter, Vanessa, who also worked at that location, recorded and uploaded a video of the walkout to TikTok with a description of the wage theft her coworkers had endured. The recording went viral.

"We started getting all kinds of calls about the video," says Juan Miranda, the organizing director of Siembra NC, an immigrant solidarity network based in Durham. The company, Miranda says, had "kept people they knew could not legally work, told [the manager] to pay them cash, and then eventually just told them they would not pay."

With so much to lose, undocumented workers rarely confront their employers publicly. "They fear retaliation, or some are just used to it," Miranda says. On May 17, with Siembra's support, the IHOP workers won $20,000 in back pay from the company.

Across the country, food service workers are mobilizing for better wages and conditions, taking part in job actions, and, in some cases, launching campaigns for union recognition and the protections that come with it. I spoke with more than a dozen current and former restaurant workers who had either stayed in the industry throughout the pandemic and resisted low wages and unsafe conditions, or quit, refusing them altogether.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and research from worker organizations--including the restaurant advocacy group One Fair Wage and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United--supports the stories so many workers tell about the hospitality industry: Wages are low, abuse is endemic, and people are fed up.

For H. Wade, who preferred not to use her full name out of concern for professional repercussions, the pandemic spelled the end of her career in food service, but the events that precipitated her resignation took place years earlier.

While working at a Brooklyn restaurant called Peaches HotHouse in 2018, Wade says, she was sexually harassed by a coworker who made lewd jokes about her and speculated about her sex life. Wade, a supervisor at the time, described the encounter in her notes for...