“I often had to skip meals”: Senate Dining Room Workers Want a Union, Say They’re Living in Poverty

[Judi Lynn]

Tuesday, Nov 24, 2015, 1:35 pm

“I often had to skip meals”: Senate Dining Room Workers Want a Union, Say They’re Living in Poverty

BY Bruce Vail

Elected members of the U.S. Senate don’t have to look very far to see fresh signs of the national Fight For $15 movement: It’s made its way from the McDonald’s hamburger joints back home to their own cozy Capitol Hill dining room.

The cooks and waiters working for a catering company that operates the Senate restaurant are speaking up for better wages and the right to unionize, even as they serve up luxurious meals to well-paid politicians and their well-heeled guests, say labor activists in Washington, D.C. Their efforts have persuaded some 34 members of the Senate to support the campaign, and are once again highlighting the need for the federal government to clean its own house and raise labor standards for its own contract employees.

“We’re looking for a minimum wage of $15 and a union,” says John Holbrook, one of about 90 food service workers employed at Senate office buildings by Restaurant Associates, a catering company based in New York. They also want to be represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 32BJ, a large local that is best known for representing building services workers in cities on the East Coast.

Restaurant Associates has been resisting these demands, according to Paco Fabian, a spokesman for the union advocacy group Good Jobs Nation, even though the company is already partially unionized. Food service workers on the other side of Capitol Hill in the dining rooms of the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, have long been organized as members of UNITE HERE Local 23. Other Restaurant Associates catering contracts employ UNITE HERE members, and the company’s parent corporation, U.K.-based multinational Compass Group is partly unionized in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere.

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18635/senate-dining-room-workers-union-seiu-fight-for-15

[Jefferson23]

1. Completely pathetic and shameful..for crying out loud. n/t

[valerief]

2. Like senators could give two fucks. They'll send your ass to Syria first. They're like

the honey badger. Honey badger (and Senate) don't give a shit. It just takes what it wants.

[merrily]

3. The Senate Dining Room

[rurallib]

4. IIRC Bernie Sanders stood with these folks in their fight for $15

and often eats meals with them.

[zentrum]

5. And DC is full

....of poverty and homeless people that these guys in their limos ride by every day.
They. Do. Not. Care.
Never forget---the White House itself was built by slaves.

We are not their constituency. Corporations are.
Except for Bernie, Warren, the lamented Feingold, and Representatives Keith Ellison---maybe Barbara Lee, none of them are honest brokers. Maybe Al Franken. Are there others?

It's a tragedy that capitalism has devoured Democracy.

[Doctor_J]

6. I thought there was an EO that gave all of the federal workers a raise.

WTF happened to that?

[Hestia]

7. They aren't federal workers - they are contract workers through a private entity