The Mindful Marketplace with Joel Skene

Bridging Labor Gaps for Justice in the Service Industry - Part 2

• Joel Skene / Jen Hampton

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Discover the untold stories of service workers fighting for better conditions as we sit down with Jen Hampton from Asheville Food and Beverage United. This episode peels back the layers of the food and beverage industry to reveal the strength found in unity and the importance of investing in people for sustainable change. Jen's insights offer an eye-opening perspective on the transformative power of collective campaigns aimed at securing living wages, fair scheduling, and paid time off for service workers. We embark on a journey through the organization's mission to not only uplift service industry professionals but also to bridge the gap across various labor sectors, fostering a more equitable workforce.

As we unpack the effects of the pandemic on the service industry, it's clear that adversity has bred empowerment and solidarity. Hear about the organic emergence of a private Facebook group that transformed into a rallying point for workers and the resulting camaraderie that's driving a revolution in workplace dynamics. We weigh in on the pivotal moments that are reshaping the power balance between employees and employers, and how a small-town upbringing informed our approach to nurturing community within the labor force. Find out how you can be part of the movement and contribute to the cause, taking away not just an understanding of the issues at hand but also the knowledge of how collective action can create a tide of positive change.

https://sites.google.com/view/avlfbu/home
https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2023/11/15/asheville-food-beverage-united-becomes-labor-union-seeks-members/71583224007/

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Joel :

What if investing in each other could change the world? I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious and this is the Mindful Marketplace. And welcome back to part two of my discussion here with Jen Hampton of Asheville Food and Beverage United. I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious and you are listening to the Mindful Marketplace. If this is your first time with us, welcome. We're glad to have you On this program.

Joel :

We talk to the entrepreneurs, advisors, industry leaders, economic experts and entrepreneurs who are questioning the assumption that there's only one bottom line and who are not only solving a market problem to make a profit, but who are solving a social problem to make an impact. It's where we learn how to connect our money and our businesses to our values, our communities and ourselves. If you missed part one of my conversation with Jen Hampton, please go back and listen to that. It was a really great and enlightening conversation about what it's actually like for service workers, both kind of in the past in her experience in decades working in the past, in her experience in decades working in the industry, but then also in these last few years as far as the changes that have happened around COVID and the changes that have happened in the economy since then. So I'm going to welcome Jen back into the conversation here. Jen, thank you so much for being back with us.

Jen:

Oh, I'm so excited to continue the conversation. This is great.

Joel :

Yeah, there's been some new news reports out about your work. There's been just a lot. I've been seeing what you guys are doing popping up more and more and more, little by little, and it's exciting to see that momentum. Could you first just kind of give us a little overview of the work you're doing with Asheville Food and Beverage United and just more broadly, just kind of tell us a little bit about kind of what that is and what you're doing?

Jen:

Yeah, sure, I'd love to talk about Asheville Food and Beverage United. We started just as a group of people talking under a tree in the River Arts District about how could we organize restaurant workers and what would that even look like and what do we want to organize for, and really just had that conversation for a full year before we decided to launch our first campaign and make ourselves known to the world as Asheville Food and Beverage United, which we had our first campaign and coming out party, so to speak, at the 2022 May Day celebration in Pritchard Park, anyway. So we decided that we wanted to organize around things like living wages and fair scheduling and paid time off, because those are the things that we felt service workers really needed the most, and came up with that campaign. And then, in talking to people, we discovered other issues that we can get into later, but we have really nailed down our purpose as being to advance the economic, social and political interests of our members, unorganized workers and the working class as a whole, and to do that, we want to unite all workers within the service industry and to improve the pay and working conditions for everybody.

Jen:

We want to work with employers to address grievances that employees have by trying to, you know, appeal to them privately and work with them, you know, but we are willing to do things like strikes and boycotts, but we'd rather just try to, you know, settle it as a collaborative effort. And we also want to make sure that we promote, like safe food practices, basically in the food service industry, because that's been a major thing that service workers have complained about, you know. Yeah, and just whatever we can do to unite workers across the industry. And really I also convene the Western North Carolina chapter of the Southern Workers Assembly, which is a movement to. It's a network of unions and other worker-led organizations working to organize workers across the South. So my opinion and my belief is that just the whole working class needs to unite in solidarity or we're not going to see any changes in our society that we need to see.

Joel :

Yeah, because you mentioned it's not just servers, it's not just kind of people working in restaurants which we talked about, which is your background. But you also mentioned you know, especially here in Asheville, where you are, but you know kind of there being a very close tie there between restaurant workers but also hospitality workers, people working in hotels and especially like in the Airbnb market that's ever growing. Now I guess why is that cross? Why are those partnerships important to you?

Jen:

Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because when we started organizing, we called it Asheville Food and Beverage United because our sole focus was the restaurant industry. But as we started talking to workers, we started hearing from people who work in retail shops and in hotels even a couple that clean short-term rentals and you know they want representation too. They also want some help, and so we've expanded it to. We won't turn away any worker who wants help with any kind of workplace issue. If they want help organizing their workplace, we will help them.

Jen:

And because we want to do that? Because it is really vitally important that the working class in this country, especially in the South, start standing together in solidarity. Because the reason things have gotten to the way they are is because people with, you know, nefarious goals in mind want to keep the working class divided. Because they know that there are so many of us that if we come together and realize that we all have basically the same issues, they might just look a little different here and there, but we all have the same issues. We're all part of the working class and we all need to stand together to demand the changes that we need to improve our lives, because the situation right now is not sustainable for anybody, Not even those at the top.

Joel :

Yeah, yeah. So tell me a little bit about that. What do you mean by it's not sustainable for those at the top?

Jen:

I mean, if the working class keeps being decimated to a point where we can't afford to live near these jobs, especially these service jobs, if we can't afford to live here, then there's not going to be anybody to work at these restaurants, you know, these restaurants, you know. And there's not going to be anybody to serve these tourists that come here, you know, expecting the outstanding service that we normally have here in Asheville. If we keep driving people away, those businesses are going to suffer, the tourism industry is going to suffer, and then it would just be a chain reaction that just goes all the way to the top. If you don't have any workers, you don't have any profit.

Joel :

No, that's a good point. Is that because it seems to me like there's a narrative out there, or a status quo, that the idea of an empowered workforce is somehow bad for business? Would, you agree with that or would you disagree with that?

Jen:

I disagree with that because, like we talked about last week, workers, especially service workers, are the front line. You know we represent your businesses, we are the face of the businesses and we do the day-to-day job to make those businesses run. So workers really have a much more intimate you know experience with running the business and the day-to-day operations so they have a better understanding of what needs to happen and what needs to change and what they need to do their jobs effectively. And you know, happy employees provide better service, they create better products because they're happy to be there and that, in turn, is good for the business. And that's how we feel about it.

Jen:

You know we are not anti-businesses. We feel about it. You know we are not anti-businesses, we're not anti-owner. We want to work with these business owners to ensure that our industry here, especially in Asheville, we're such a restaurant and brewery, you know based economy that we really want them to thrive, because if they thrive then we thrive and we love what we do. Most of us love being in this industry, so we don't want it to any, we don't want to cause any harm to the businesses. Basically, you know, I feel like we don't want to do anything that's going to really impact a business in such a way that they have to shut down because they're losing money.

Joel :

That's that's definitely not our aim yeah, of course that would be, that would be. Uh, that would be insane to try to shut down the place that you work for.

Joel :

Right, it seems much more of a long-term approach I've had on recently well, actually this is about a year ago now I had on a gentleman who's an executive coach and he has an entire consulting business and he talks with his executives that he works with about how understanding the group the name of his group is actually called People, prof business and he talks with his executives that he works with about how understanding the group the name of his group is actually called people, profit and he talks to them about how you know, through leadership, through through material things like wages and benefits, but through culture, through all of these different ways as a leader, that when you actually invest into your people, you are investing into your profits, because your people are your business and they're the things that actually generate, they're the things that keep the engine running right.

Joel :

The people are the thing that keeps the pistons going and keep things moving. And if you neglect your people, either with toxic workplace culture or with unsustainable living conditions or wages, if you don't actually ever invest into your people, then you're going to kind of rot from the inside, and so I think it just makes sense. It's more of like a long-term view. Is that kind of the way you look at it?

Jen:

Absolutely. I do look at it that way because I feel like, if you do as you were talking I was thinking about this local hotel it's a big chain I just recently found know. That saves them so much money in the long term because it costs an average of three months pay to train somebody. So every time you lose an employee, you're basically having to pay an extra three months worth of pay to train somebody new to replace them. So in the long term, it really saves you a lot of money to just take care of the workers that you have to treat them with respect and dignity and they, in turn, will help your business thrive because they're happy to be there and they're not resentful, you know. So it just yeah, that's a great way to look at it is. It's a long term investment to listen to your employees and to take care of them and address the concerns they might have.

Joel :

So I'm curious when it comes to organizing labor, it seems like this hasn't been something that's been done in the past with service workers in particular, and hospitality workers we hear a lot about. There was the big UAW strike. I'm from Michigan, so a lot of people that I knew were either in some type of union for manufacturing work, but why hasn't that ever been the case for service work from your perspective?

Jen:

From my perspective, I feel like the big established unions have just kind of not really paid any attention to us at all, and probably because there's not a lot of maybe there's not a lot of dues money that you can get from it. You know, I don't really I can't really speak for certain why they didn't try to organize this. I can only speculate in my mind what it could be to organize this. I can only speculate in my mind what it could be. But I feel like Starbucks really started this big chain reaction a couple years ago when they first started unionizing and also the workers at Starbucks. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, starbucks didn't unionize, the workers did, anyways.

Jen:

And I think that another reason that it's really difficult to organize um service workers is because the industry is so transient. You know, the jobs are difficult, they are usually low paying, and so people just move from job to job, you know, because you just can't stand it sometimes and you just have to move and hope that the next one is good. So it's really hard to unionize places like that. So that's why we've taken this unique approach to try to do an industry-wide sort of organizing effort.

Joel :

Yeah, why? I guess how you know those challenges have obviously existed in the past. How are you guys trying to tackle those?

Jen:

Well, we thought about it long and hard and decided that it would be really pointless to put in a lot of effort and time into organizing an individual restaurant at a time, but rather uniting everybody across the industry, especially in a town like this where there's a lot of solidarity in the service industry community, the workers community the workers, and it just seemed like a better way to do it just to say you know what?

Jen:

let's just no matter where you work, let's just all get together and fight for each other, because we all know what it's like. So I feel like that's been the key to our success is really just focusing on the community as a whole, and I feel like that's. You know, there's other places across the state that we're working with that are trying to do the same thing.

Joel :

And I feel like that's probably going to be the future of organizing service work. Yeah, it seems like there's been. You know, honestly, in the last 12 to 18 months I think I've seen more news, more reports and more examples of there being organizing activity. You know you mentioned Starbucks. There's also been this stuff happening. You know there's been a lot of reporting on what's going on with workers at Amazon and UPS recently won a big battle and the UAW won a big battle.

Joel :

And you know service workers out in Las Vegas are taking to the streets. You know people who work at casinos. I just saw one about the casino workers in Atlantic City. Why is all this happening right now in your mind?

Jen:

I think, I really think that it all stems from the pandemic, because you know a couple. I think there's two key things that happened in the pandemic. One is that the restaurants closed down and we started to realize how much people started to realize how much they really wanted servers and, you know, to go to the bar and to go out to eat. And another thing that happened is, since we weren't working, we were able to connect. Especially here in Asheville, we were able to connect over a private Facebook group just for food service workers, and being able to connect like that really made everybody aware about the systemic issues and people started paying attention to what other people were doing to organize in service industries and started realizing, oh wow, we can do that. You know, and I feel like that's been the big change is just people seeing that yeah, we have the same issues and look at what these other people are doing, we can do that too, and so it's just kind of lit a fire and it's just growing and growing and growing and it's inspirational really.

Joel :

Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that connection between people and that kind of hearing from each other and understanding each other, because it sounds like there's a big link between that connection. You've used the word solidarity a bunch so far. What's the connection between that connection and empowerment?

Jen:

Oh, that's a great question, because that's exactly how my story went.

Jen:

I was, you know, really just feeling bad about my position in life, I guess, as a service worker in my 40s, and, like you know, what am I supposed to do when I can't do this work anymore Because I don't have any experience doing anything else and, you know, just kind of internalizing everything, basically. And then when I discovered the Facebook group, the F&B Tribe, and started, you know, interacting with other service workers and realizing that I think I said this before the things I had internalized were not actually my fault, I think other people started realizing that too. And for me personally, helping other people gives me a sense of empowerment, you know, it kind of makes me stand up a little taller, like, okay, well, we can do some stuff because I've got some people behind me and I've got a community that understands and has the same problems and also has the same hopes and dreams for making change. And I feel like that's just so empowering and it's a driving force for me for sure, that camaraderie, that awareness of community and the shared issues that we have.

Joel :

Yeah, I resonate a lot with what you're saying, because I do think that there's been this move towards kind of being a more individualistic society in general.

Joel :

Right, you could even say that when we moved out from neighborhood blocks where we all knew each other on our neighborhood, or we were in a small town and we all knew our neighbors, to kind of a more hey, we all live in a, you know, we got our um, our garage door openers and you know we don't even see our neighbors, and then we walk, we go inside and we got our own screen in our own room and we are very kind of isolated Right, um, and I'm sure that there's someone listening right now who is saying you know what, why that there's someone listening right now who is saying you know what, why are you doing all this? If you want better pay, just go ask for a raise, go get a better job, go do it on your own.

Jen:

How would you respond to that? Well, I personally grew up in a very small town of 800 people where I did know everybody's names and where everybody lived, and I feel like that. I really carried that through my life. You know, I feel like the best way to be is neighborly and to take care of each other, because if you're only taking care of yourself and you're not thinking about your fellow community members, is that really making anybody's life better? It's not making my life better If I'm just I mean, that's just how I personally feel is that if I'm doing well, but I see a fellow worker suffering, I don't feel good about that.

Jen:

You know, I want them to do well as well. You know, I told my previous boss at Ben's Tune Up, where I worked, when we started Asheville Food and Beverage United, you know, and I finally let her know what we were doing and I said I just want you to know that I'm not organizing this because I don't like my job. I'm organizing it because I want other people to have what I have here too, you know. So that's been my. My motivation is I want y'all to have this too. I don't want it just for me and my coworkers, because that doesn't make me feel good at all. You know, I want us all to be happy and healthy and living a good life.

Joel :

Yeah, and I think that we should. You know, we regular people who are working full time deserve to have that, and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't, and you, who are working full time, deserve to have that, and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. And you know, to me it also seems like there's a power dynamic right If you are isolated and you're trying to go up against a big institutional structure, especially, you know it's different when it's a small business and there's a relationship there.

Joel :

But when you're trying to go up against, you know, a multinational corporation, you know, alone you're going to be begging, but together, corporation, you know, alone you're going to be begging, but together you can actually bargain you can actually have some kind of voice, any kind of final words on that here with the last few minutes that we've got?

Jen:

Yeah, I think you put it very well United we bargain, and divided we fail. Because I keep thinking about this meme where there's a business owner standing on top of some bricks or something and it's got like lawyers and accountants and marketing and just so many things and then the worker is standing up together, you know, with all the other workers, kind of making a pyramid, and then they're at equal level and you know that just kind of illustrates that these big corporations, they've got so much power in the form of, you know, their assets, their money, their resources and that makes their voice really big.

Jen:

But then you've got just one single solitary worker down here and you know nobody cares what that one worker has to say. But when all the workers get together and use their voices collectively, that's a really big noise that they're making and people have to listen to that Because, like I said before, there is no profit without the workers and vice versa, there's no work if we don't take care of the businesses too. So I feel like it's really this joint effort that's going to have to happen between business owners and the workers to make it all work for everybody.

Joel :

Yeah, it sounds like what you're getting at is moving towards a relationship that's more of a partnership rather than a relationship that's one of a domination. It's been so good to have you here on the show today, Jen. I'm very excited. Where can people connect with you and the work you're doing?

Jen:

Well, if you want to contact me personally, you can email me at jenhampton74 at gmailcom. If you'd like to get involved with Asheville Food and Beverage United, you can visit avlfbuorg or check us out on Instagram at avlfbu Awesome.

Joel :

Thank you guys so much for tuning in today. Really hope you all have a great rest of your day and make sure to subscribe on YouTube, itunes, spotify, stitcher, iheartradio Budsprout, wherever it is you listen to podcasts and make sure to listen to all the other fantastic hosts here on bizradious. And until next time, remember we are each other.