“So I was getting myself ready for the revolution till I remembered I have work in the morning… the revolution will have to wait till after 5 PM I guess” ~ Apes of the State
There is a concerning trend that I have noticed in my experience doing radical organizing: I’m typically the only restaurant worker in the room. That is, when I’m even able to make it to the room at all. Meetings will often be scheduled with only a few days’ notice, maybe a week or so in advance. So, we can try our best to get our shifts covered if it conflicts with the meeting time. Which it usually does because they will often be scheduled during the evenings on weekdays (anywhere from 5-7pm), or midday on the weekends (anywhere from 12-4pm). As a 7-year service industry veteran, I very rarely happen to be free during these times. I might get lucky and have one of my off days lined up with a day the meeting happens to be scheduled, but that’s not typical.
Serving the 9-5
Let me explain why these meeting times are so hard for us. My job exists to serve the 9-5. Many restaurants open every day at 11am, just in time for the 9-5ers to come out for their lunch or their business meetings. And then, we’re open late, generally until 11pm or later, to entertain the 9-5ers after they get off of work. There’s something in the restaurant industry called the “mid shift” which is usually from 11am-7pm or 8pm which is designed to be there to serve the rushes from both of these crowds. Further, as a chronically understaffed industry with chronically underpaid workers, many of us are forced to work at least one double per week, meaning you’d probably be working 11am-10pm or so in this theoretical restaurant that I’ve been describing. Now, couple this with the fact that most restaurants will pressure workers to have “open availability.” Meaning, you have no set schedule; one week you could be working a mix of opening, mid, or closing shifts, or all of the same. Or you could have three doubles or no doubles. You just won’t know. Even the days you work could change week-to-week, and they often do. Finally, our bosses will frequently release the schedule just a day or two before we’re supposed to work it. While not every restaurant or retail store may be the same, our schedules are always unpredictable.
We are 21st century servants. Many of us in this industry joke about how we “live” at the restaurant, which brings me back to my original point that I’m usually the only food worker in radical spaces. I’ve heard friends say “how can we get more ‘normies’ into our spaces and engage in the struggle?” and my response is that there’s a reason they aren’t in our spaces: These radical spaces are usually structured around the 9-5ers. The meetings happen after they get off of work on weekday evenings, and days when they’re off of work, like middays on weekends.
This matters. We must meet people where they are. According to the National Restaurant Association: “The restaurant and foodservice industry is the nation’s second largest private sector employer, providing 15.5 million jobs – or 10 percent of the total U.S. workforce. This includes 12.4 million jobs at eating-and-drinking places, plus an estimated 3.1 million foodservice jobs in other sectors such as healthcare, accommodations, education, food-and-beverage stores, and arts, entertainment and recreation.”
What’s the number one private sector employer, you might ask? The retail industry. According to the National Retail Federation, “The retail industry supported 55 million full-time and part-time jobs in 2022, accounting for 26 percent of total U.S. employment.”
Combined, food and retail workers, whose jobs are designed to revolve around the 9-5, make up 36 percent of the country’s workforce. 36 percent of this nation’s working class is being structurally excluded from organizing spaces.
A major consequence of this exclusion is that organizing efforts are taken over by members of the labor aristocracy (probably unconsciously, in many cases, but still…) The labor aristocracy is disconnected from the daily life and struggle of those who work to serve them. We must resist replicating the top-down structures that surround us in this capitalist society we live under: Our goal should always be to build social movements that are committed to the unity of the entire working class. This is the only way that we can begin building a better world.
The IWW and Resisting Exclusionary Impulses
I would like to note here that most of my organizing experience is with the IWW, organizing militant, grassroots unions in the service industry. As of yet, I’ve been on three organizing campaigns at three different restaurants, and when we, the service workers, created this organizing space for ourselves, we found ourselves meeting late at night, around 10, 11, or even midnight, when our coworkers got off work. Or early in the morning at 9 or 10 before we had to go into our shifts.
Although, in other radical spaces, this isn’t taken into consideration. Most of the people in these other spaces don’t want to meet at these “odd” times. But, why are these odd times? Are we really going to let the capitalist 9-5 workweek dominate even our liberated spaces? If so, these spaces are not truly liberated. How can we get more of these 70.5 million food and retail workers into our radical organizing spaces? These are questions we must ask ourselves.
This is also a reflection of the lack of solidarity in many of the traditional business unions. The IWW emerged as a response to the domination of business unions by the labor aristocracy. Today’s food and retail workers are in a similar position as the “unskilled” workers who originally built the IWW: These workers were rejected by the labor establishment, despite the fact that they were some of the most exploited workers and made up a substantial portion of the working class. This prompted them to build their own radically inclusive union, the One Big Union open to all workers. But, the history of the IWW doesn’t guarantee anything; our commitment to the abolition of the wage system and the unity of the working class (which is a rampart against the domination of the labor aristocracy and class collaboration) must be renewed time and time again. Not just in the IWW, but in every radical organizing space.
Social Isolation
Another point of exclusion is more social in nature. Service workers form our own social groups that are completely separate from radical social groups.
How do you get into radical organizing spaces? Having social relationships and sharing community with people in them! Again, this makes it tough for service workers to establish themselves in these spaces.
The liberated spaces that many of our communities have built don’t exist late at night. When we get off from work, my peers and I will go out to other bars that might still be open (which isn’t a healthy option for many of us). We befriend the workers at those other workplaces. We share our grievances we had that day at work over a beer. We talk shit about our shitty bosses. We have a pretty close-knit community. In any given town, you will find that a lot of the service industry workers know each other, especially with how frequently some of us hop from restaurant-to-restaurant, store-to-store, bar-to-bar. But this community that exists is isolated from radical communities.
As a rank-and-file service industry worker and radical labor organizer, I can tell you that the issue isn’t that service workers don’t want to organize: They simply don’t have access to organizing spaces. The tools, resources, and community are not easily accessible.
Thinking Outside the 9-5
I have outlined a structural flaw that plagues many organizing spaces, but what is there to do about it? How do we bridge the gap? How do we activate these 70 million or so service workers?
One thing that my local branch of the IWW has done in the past is to organize “meet-a-wobbly” events at local bars. We hang out with each other where the rest of the working class is hanging out and build relationships. We introduce them and invite them to radical community, something many working-class folks may have never seen or experienced. host events that are designed to bring these people in. Let’s merge our radical communities with working class communities.
Once we’ve started to build these relationships and bring people into our radical spaces, we must be flexible. We have standing committee meetings in our IWW branch, but if a new fellow worker is unable to attend due to schedule conflicts, we can find a new time for when that committee meets to ensure that everyone can participate. This can be a really intimidating ask in other groups. When everyone in the chat overwhelmingly says “Yeah, Tuesday at 6pm works great,” I think to myself “Damn it, that’s Taco Tuesday, I’ll never get that day off. Do I say anything? I don’t want to inconvenience the rest of the group…”
I encourage folks reading this to be flexible; don’t be afraid of having a midnight meeting or informal gathering (if I knew my comrades were hanging out at midnight when I got off work, I might not go to the bar as much). Also, having an alternating meeting schedule can really boost engagement: As an example, one week have a meeting on a Friday evening at 6pm for the 9-5ers and then one week have a meeting on a Tuesday at midnight and alternate between the two. So many of these 70 million or so workers, and even other workers outside of this industry, are awake, bored, and restless from 11pm to 2am. But because of the 9-5 capitalist schedule, it is stigmatized to even text someone at this hour, despite the fact that so many of us are awake.
Let’s normalize gathering, meeting, plotting, and scheming in the shadows! The revolution will not revolve around the 9-5; so our organizing spaces shouldn’t either.
