640 Restaurant, Hotel and Building Service Workers
The IWW has members in a wide range of food, drink, hotel and other hospitality establishments. This entire industry, comprising thousands of workers and worth billions of pounds, has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for terrible wages and working conditions. Employers in this industry exploit young, inexperienced and immigrant workers who often know little about their rights at work or how to organise as a union.
Only recently have the mainstream unions begun to recognise these conditions, whereas the IWW has been fighting for decades. Records of IWW restaurant workers’ direct actions against bosses stretch as far back as the early decades of the 20th century. The IWW’s structure of grassroots, bottom-up organisation, its flexibility, militancy and low dues rates mean that it is the ideal union for workers in bars, restaurants and the hospitality industry.
The IWW supports commonsense needs like subsidies for late-night travel, protection of bar and nightclub workers from abusive and drunk customers, and solid health and safety regulations. But it also wants more than this - the IWW pushes for a new approach to work based on the principle that everything that is produced, all services that are provided, come from the hard work of workers, not bosses. So, although bosses, restauranteurs and entrepreneurs 'earn' megabucks, we are the only union that recognises that all of that wealth belongs to the workers who created it.
Over the last few years, the IWW in the USA has undertaken organising at the Starbucks Coffee chain, and has built union branches in around a dozen stores around the North East and Midwest through creative direct action and solidarity unionism. Visit the Starbucks Workers’ Union website.
In the British Isles, the IWW also organises among coffee shop workers under IU 640 as part of our Baristas United campaign. We welcome workers from all coffee shops, not just Starbucks. Visit the Baristas United website.
Whatever job you do in the food service and hospitality industries, sign up with the IWW, and get organised!
