#I know tipping culture is a thing but I don’t get paid minimum wage because of tips

[smiles-rambles]

Gosh it’s been so long since I’ve closed but everytime I’ve closed before we’re soooo busy and so it’s super slow rn but I feel like I’m on edge. 😭😭

[madrabbitsociety]

Sometimes, and I do not mean for this to sound malicious, which it will, I feel the need to defend hairdressers. 

Hairdressers and hair stylists are skilled technicians who go through thousands of hours of training in order to hone their craft. Some of us were lucky enough to go to a technical school while in high school and are not in debt. I, however, paid almost $25,000 to go to school. I had to go for 1500 solid hours. In my state, that meant Mon-Thurs evenings for 5 hours a night. In my opinion, people don’t give stylists enough credit for what they need to know to get licensed in their state. Specifically, my license is for cosmetology. I had to know skin disorders, chemical reactions, actual strand structure - and we still don’t get told enough because we don’t get proper training on different types of hair, but that’s a whole different post that a lot of other people have done better than me. 

The predominant way we are paid in the industry is via commission. So if we have no one scheduled, we don’t get paid. If we have a client cancel, we don’t get paid. At my first salon I was expected to stay as early as I could to as late as I could, unpaid, just in case someone came in. Of course, corporate places are mildly better in that they offer a minimum wage, but that’s usually somewhere between $7-9 an hour. In order to earn commission in that type of situation you have to do more in services than what you would have been paid for the hour. Again, probably an entire post in itself. 

I tried a lot of places. I paid a lot of money for a license I was very proud to own. The final straw was a salon near my house. Personality-wise, I really felt like it would work out because I enjoyed the people I was around and I was disappointed when it didn’t work. When I first started, they insisted I do two unpaid apprenticeship days because I was (licensed for 6 months at that time) too new to work on their clients. They would provide models and charge the models a lower service fee than their usual service fee. I would then have two paid days at $10 an hour where I would basically follow the owner around, clean and do shampoos. On my days off, I was expected to want to come into the salon and continue to apprentice for free. There was a point in my apprenticeship phase where I was only being paid two days for 5-6 days worth of work. 

Again, this is not uncommon in the industry. Maybe not to this extreme, but certainly there’s a lot of free work being done. Does your stylist have someone help them blowdry? You might want to make sure that apprentice is being paid.

My skills did improve greatly during this period, but I maintain that was because I put a lot into it. The owner took all the credit- through his great teaching methods, I was becoming an ‘okay’ hairdresser. 

During the apprenticeship, unless you handed me a cash tip, he kept all of my credit card tips. So if you added a tip after service with your credit card, the salon kept them because they said I was using their electricity/taking up space in the salon and I needed to pay for that.

In addition to all of the time I listed above actually being in the salon, I was also expected to attend continuing education classes. In summary, and again this is not an uncommon culture in the industry, if you do not eat-sleep-breathe HAIR, you are told you’re not good and you won’t do well. The only exception seems to be if you have children, but if you’re single/without kids they will work you to the bone.

When I was finally promoted to a junior stylist, I stopped being paid hourly at all. I was told I would get 36% commission for services and I was specializing in color corrections/the blonding journey at the time, so I was doing $200-300 services quite often. Some of those services took 4-6 hours of my time, but if I had no one scheduled I was still expected to straighten up, do laundry, sweep the floors and help other stylists with color application and blowouts. Which is fine, kind of. The problem became that from the start of my journey at that specific salon, I would be expected to arrive when we opened at 10 AM and stay until the owner finished his clients- sometimes I didn’t leave until 11-12 PM, and was expected to come back the next day. 

So yes, one $300 color service could mean that I earned 14-16$ an hour, but… when you’re working 10-12 hour days that kind of knocks it down to minimum wage again.

Then there is the opinion that this is an easy job that so many people can do and you don’t need to be vaguely intelligent to do it. That the people who chose hair are stupid or unskilled. I was sitting on the steps of my school once, reading an Agatha Christie book and comparing certain passages to an ACD Sherlock Holmes story via text message with SpicyMags, when an older couple walked by. The man looked up at the school sign and scoffed, “These girls are getting suckered into a scam. This is nothing but a scam and they’re stupid enough to fall for it.” 

Well, in retrospect, he’s not wrong, but at the same time when you know the blood and sweat and tears- the thousands of hours and dollars that are poured into not only the initial licensing but the continued education classes- being a hairdresser is so much more than people give it credit for. It’s an abusive industry that exploits a lot of unpaid labor and even when you get to a point where you have skill, where you are an artist, you have people asking for a luxury service and then complaining when that unnecessary luxury costs them actual money. 

One last thing I’d love to point out- the 100% customer service guarantee. A lot of salons these days are trying to change, but a lot of them also still have a guarantee that if you don’t love your hair, you get a free redo or a refund. Do you know what that means? Your stylist doesn’t get paid.

So I can spend 6-8 hours on your hair after you tell me it’s been box dyed brown attempting to take you through the lightening journey to get it blond. I can tell you that because of the molecules and ingredients in the dye, the actual damaged structure of your hair, that it is not possible to do it all in one day but I can get you close. I can explain to you the entire process, waste all my time being completely honest with you about how golden it’s still going to look because it IS a journey/process, and at the end you can decide that because I didn’t get your hair to solid white in one go that you want a refund…

And I don’t get paid for the entire day that we spent together. 

That’s some fucking bullshit, but it’s - and this is a quote from several of the places I’ve worked- an “industry standard”. 

The cherry on this shituation cake is that we also don’t get any health benefits, life insurance, retirement- no freaking anything (corporate salons being a slight exception although having worked in the medical field I can tell you the benefits offered by corp. owned salons are not great.)

So please, next time you decide that it’s laughable that a salon quotes you $150 for a craft haircut that takes a certain level of knowledge and skill, remember that the salon gets most of that and if you don’t like it there’s a huge change your stylist isn’t getting paid.

Edit: Things that I did not mention but should have- the toll it takes on your body (repetitive motions and standing in heels on concrete floors cause back issues, neck and hip issues, knee issues, carpal tunnel and risk of cutting off your knuckle with your instruments). I had to sign a release that my school was not responsible for me cutting any part of my body with my shears (I’ve had bosses who lost toes and knuckles). You think that heels thing is a joke? I’ve worked in several salons where ‘female’ stylists were required to wear heels and at least three items of make-up because ‘this was the beauty industry and we had a standard to keep’. Say you gather a clientel and can rent your own chair or booth, you’re responsible for purchasing every single bit of supplies you might need to continue doing what you’re doing, so you’re still having business costs eat into your hourly wage. People need to give a fucking standing ovation to hairdressers, okay, because this industry is brutal.

I’m not saying I dislike doing hair, or that I’d never do hair again, but there are several reasons I’m not doing it right now. 

[simptasia]

re the tipping thing: it's expected in the US because servers can legally get paid below minimum wage because tips are supposed to factor into their income, whereas in most other countries that's part of their wage and that's just factored into the cost of the food & drink. so if waiters, bartenders etc. don't get tipped it can REALLY affect their livelihood bc again, below minimum wage. so that's why, just if u didn't know

oh i know why. i was nervous i’d come across as rude when i said that. because i totally know it’s cuz service people in america are paid garage

in australia, tipping will happen outta sheer laziness. i mean somebody’s hands are full so they’ll be like “keep the change” just so they can move on with their lives and eat their pizza. and the most you’re gonna get outta that is like

2 dollars

i know what tipping is for in america, it just has always felt bizarre to me because i’m thinking “i’ve already paid the price of thing Thing, why would i willingly pay more”, cuz like, i’m not rich. like tipping would make eating at restaurants even more expensive than it already is. gosh. basically if i was in america (gosh forbid) i’d avoid restaurants. either that or i’d overspend on everything because the american dollar is smaller than the australia dollar so everything would come across to me as Super Cheap. america has hella cheap fast food, which is neat!

but i digress. it’s hard to talk about this subject because i’m like “how do i phrase this without sounding uppity or like i look down on service people?”

because like, i don’t. the thing here is cultural differences

anyways tipping isn’t a (normal) thing here but i get why america does it

[stringed-dawas-blog]

Turns out, it’s even

Turns out, it’s even more work.But what is most important is that I do not have regrets because I know what I am.I have nothing against sex work, having worked in the industry three times now, but I don’t like the idea of say my boyfriend's brother or housemate or one of my own family members opening a webpage to a moving image of my face mid-­orgasm purely because well, I don’t think my family would support that decision.My chat room began to fill up and I started talking to a few guys in the group chat. "What can a member do to me? If he crosses a line or even if he is rude to me, I just click the mouse and stop it. The coach trained me on how to respond to different fetish requests, what to wear, how to do my makeup, how to pose, how to use the equipment, and just how to interact with clients in general. There is a wardrobe containing some of her clothes.Plenty are willing — particularly Americans, who for whatever reasons (Anna chalks it up to a sort of cultural shamelessness), are more "generous" than Europeans, and more likely to buy into the act — and pay for the privilege of watching something interactive.That's a tough stab at making a living, even with your clothes on.I also did yoga, live­painting with my back to the webcam in only a thong. It's easy enough to read up on pointers from veterans.Sometimes self-­regulation regarding finances is the best option for some people: Ive been treated better and more fairly as a Cam Girl and nude model than I was in my last retail job where I, no word of a lie, got fired for looking sad. But there's really nothing exotic about Anna. Their loved ones definitely know this is what they're doing for a living.

Why do you think some men, and probably women as well, prefer it to porn?Her conditions at the next studio were bare at best, and at times the most personal privacy she had, while performing for strangers on live camera, were a few hanging sheets separating her from the others walking in and out of some rundown flat. I also did yoga, live­painting with my back to the webcam in only a thong. The MFC ratings battle is ruthless, as tips beget more tips: if you're being paid well, you move up the totem pole, ensuring a snowball effect of even more attention and money.Lana is a graduate who worked in real estate until the global economic crash of 2008 plunged Romania into recession. What I found out was a self discovery as much as a way of sticking it to my friend. Granted, minimum wage in America is $7.25 per hour, which is a far cry from $10, but that's still a hell of a lot better than a 40-hour work week. These women are being forced to do something they don't want to do. Basically you get to be your sex-positive self to your full potential.But that also depends on what the webcam model is like and also what the person paying is like because everyone wants something different.She started in the German porn game at 17, and moved on to cam modelling years later in Bangkok. Another camgirl, Heidi, 23, has bright blue hair and once sat on a kitchen bench and painted herself while more than 40 men – paying customers - tuned in to watch. The next step is prostitution. I see that now.It's a massive catalogue of preening women of every variety: big, skeletal, black, white, Asian, American, Greek, Czech, etc.

There's not much point in digging, anyway — Domino is, for my purposes, more a brand and personality than a fragile and finite person like you or me. I've never felt like I had to do that, but then again, it's the same when people stay in the wrong job for so long because they're scared of leaving and losing that financial security. To investigate, I visited the biggest camming studio in the US, Studio 20 in Hollywood. She hopped from studio to studio, at times living with her employers (and their unwanted advances), still far enough from self-sufficiency that she had to depend on them for support. Maybe a friend suggested you try it out. She went on to work as a prostitute in Germany, until she found the courage to return to Bucharest and a new life. Inside the building, Studio 20 occupies the first and second floors. Maybe you're working in a brothel where web camming is just another expectation. But we sell our souls for money all the time, why not our body? Why wouldn't you have a bit of sexual fun at the same time?For my first show I applied some make­up, did my hair and put on a deep v-neck leotard. I had the opportunity to watch her cam, and I realized that she has a persona when she’s camming—in the same way that a lot of media people do. It's just personally what I want to do. As people have started watching and uploading porn on tube sites for free, the days of big-budget porn and making a lot of money as a porn star are fading away. Thats usually how these things go.

CONTINUED BELOW...

[wineanddinosaur]

Anchor Union, One Year In: Lessons Learned at the Legendary Brewery

“Yes… yes… yes… yes…”

On Dec. 20, 2019, workers at Anchor Brewing Company, a venerable Bay Area icon that brewed its first beer for thirsty San Franciscans nearly four decades before the Golden Gate Bridge was built, gathered in the brewery to ratify their first-ever collective bargaining agreement. It was a union contract years in the making — the product of methodical organizing that began in 2018, followed by a contentious public drive and negotiations that spanned the entire 2019 calendar.

Now, it was up to the rest of the workforce — about 70 employees across the brewery’s production facilities, taproom, and tour guide corps — to sign off on the deal. A worker in white coveralls pulled ballots from a cardboard box jerry-rigged to purpose.

“Yes… yes… yes…”

All told, 94 percent of eligible Anchor workers voted in favor of the contract that day. The deal was done; Anchor Union had its first contract. It was a monumental moment for the American brewing industry, and particularly the craft beer business within it. After all, though Anchor had been acquired by the Japanese conglomerate Sapporo in 2017, it still holds a revered place in hagiographies of the American craft beer movement. That workers at Anchor had successfully organized a union, won their drive and election, and ratified a contract — and did it all without getting summarily laid off or unceremoniously abandoned for a cheaper labor market elsewhere — was a signal that it could be done in other craft-oriented businesses.

As one Anchor worker told me in the early stages of the 2019 drive: “Young working people will be able to see us and be like, ‘if these fucking drunk guys can do it, like anybody can.”

Can they? To be sure, in the year-plus since Anchor workers gathered in Potrero Hill to ink their inaugural deal, the craft food and beverage industries have seen a spate of organizing. Just a couple months later, in February 2020, 140 workers at San Francisco’s Tartine Bakery & Manufactory went public with their own union drive. As the pandemic took hold, organizing efforts popped up at craft food-service and -production shops across the continent: at Southern California’s Augie’s Coffee locations in June; in Colectivo Coffee’s Chicago locations in August; and at Vancouver’s Turning Point Brewery, owned by Labatt Brewing Company and better known for its Stanley Park brand, in October; and so on.

But while organized labor has made inroads this year with the baristas, distillers, and cheesemongers (et al) that produce the food and drink we love, it has stumbled on the path, too. For a showcase of labor organizing highs and lows in the craft F&B space, look no further than Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

Union drives at Minneapolis distilleries Tattersall (announced July 2020), and Stilheart and Lawless (September) yielded recognition from owners of those shops; as did the push at the city’s Fair State Brewing Cooperative that same month. But drives at Spyhouse Coffee Roasters and the Beer Hall at Surly Brewing Company (both organized with United HERE’s Local 17, which handled the other Twin Cities efforts mentioned here) came up short, victims of the turnover, apathy, and management pressure tactics that so often stop union campaigns in their tracks.

“I think I needed more knowledge,” lamented Taylor Roth, a former Spyhouse barista, speaking with me in November 2020, a few weeks after the drive at the twee chain had been defeated. “I knew what good the union would do, but I think if I had more specifics on what our jobs would look like after the vote, then maybe it would have been easier to talk to people about the benefits of the union.”

As Roth and other pro-union workers have discovered, that ambiguity can make it difficult to get buy-in from skeptical colleagues, most of whom have joined the workforce in a period of almost unmitigated decline in union density in America. In the hospitality sector, where language barriers, wage theft, and on-the-job harassment (from both customers and colleagues) have fostered a culture of transience, getting coworkers to see upside worth organizing for is especially challenging, with few positive examples to point to.

In December 2020, Anchor Brewing workers celebrated the one-year anniversary of their ratified contract. It’ll remain in force for another two, during which time they’ll begin bargaining for the one that’ll replace it. It’s an ideal moment for Anchor Union members to reflect on how the past year of unionized work went, strategize on what the future holds for organized labor at the storied San Francisco brewery, and evaluate what their union has done for them.

“I probably would be out of a job right now if we didn’t have our union contract,” Blake Dahlstrom, a brewery lab technician and one of Anchor Union’s four shop stewards, says. (Shop stewards are employees who have volunteered to represent the broader workforce to management when issues arise.)

VinePair asked Dahlstrom and her fellow stewards to share their experiences from Year One of Contract One, to learn what unions can — and just as importantly, can’t — do for the production and hospitality workers that produce consumable “craft culture” in this country.

Below are excerpted phone interviews with all four Anchor Union shop stewards. They have been edited, condensed, and organized thematically. Anchor Brewing Company did not respond to repeated requests for interviews with management to provide the company’s perspective for this piece.

1. What has your relationship with the company been like since ratifying the contract last December [2019]?

Blake Dahlstrom, lab technician, 2.5 years at Anchor: The company sees value in the unionization effort. Every single can and bottle that is being produced in 2021 says “Union-made in San Francisco.” Our job as shop stewards is to hold their feet to the fire. If they’re going to brag about the fact that they’re union-made, our job is to make sure that our workers are being treated [with as much care] as the marketing is.

At the end of the day, all I want is for workers to get compensated and treated fairly. I know it’s a hard balancing act on management’s part. … The people who are making decisions are not necessarily on the floor seeing what’s happening. So as shop stewards we have an opportunity to explain to them … that there are tangible solutions.

I’m proud of the fact that we have a positive working relationship with management. It’s not perfect, but it could be worse. But I’m not trying to sugarcoat it; I’m not trying to be friendly with management. I will bring out my fists when I need to bring out my fists. … It’s not there yet. We’re going down every single avenue we possibly can before we get to that option.

Alex Wilson, filtration worker, 5.5 years: As someone who has been at Anchor for a number of years and has seen the situations that led to the push to unionize, I thought that getting everyone voting in favor of the union, making it happen, and negotiating our contracts, was kind of going to be a clean break, and that moving forward, things would be different. Everyone would be able to express the issues we were facing as a workforce, and then we were going to move past that. So the fact that we’re not really past those issues at this point is surprising to me.

This upcoming year, it’s going to be really interesting to see where this relationship between management at Anchor and the union at Anchor goes. With Covid, everything got sidelined and crazy. It’s going to be really interesting to see how much our contract does for us this year.

2. Pay was an issue that you organized around at Anchor. How did you handle pay in the contract, and how has it played out since?

Patrick Machel, packager and bartender, 3 years: When we started [negotiating] the contract, we saw people getting paid really weird rates. So we were like, “Nah, we’re going to have something completely new, a tiered system.” The first tier is the entry tier, like packaging, tour guides, receptionists. … Second tier is a little more in-depth roles, like lab technicians, shift supervisors, specific machine operators. … Tier three is the lead brewers … and tier four is usually the warehouse [workers], like forklift drivers [and] maintenance workers.

There’s a minimum amount [of pay] that everybody in each tier is getting. That way, no one is getting less than that specific number. We wanted to make [pay] more uniform, because before there was no real way to show why [one worker was] getting paid this amount of money, compared to somebody right next to [them.]

Wilson: The raise structure in the contract is staggered, so we got part of our raise this year [2020], and part of it at the beginning of next year [2021]. Then it [will] continue to go up. So I think starting January, [average pay] will have gone up 20 to 25 percent [since the contract went into effect.]

[In a follow-up message, Machel provided more specific figures: The contract provides Anchor’s brewery workers with an across-the-board average raise of 21 percent over three years. For workers at the Public Taps, the bump is 28 percent.]

Robert Salgado, taproom supervisor, 3 years: In my position, I don’t receive tips. So I just get paid an hourly wage. Sometimes, that would be a little discouraging, watching [tipped employees] do less work and make more money. So for me it was more beneficial, because I got a pay raise. … I think it helped out a lot of my coworkers too, because a lot of them were making $15 to 16 an hour. [San Francisco’s minimum wage is $15.] Now they actually have a little bit more money in their pockets. I was making $22 [per hour, before the contract], and then it got raised to $23, and it will be ending at $25 by the end of the contract.

I think it helps. It’s on its way to being enough, With future contracts in the years to come, it will get to being enough. I can say [the pay increase] has made life easier, and more and more attainable.

3. What happened when the pandemic hit? Did the contract’s provisions have an affect on your day-to-day work at Anchor?

Machel: None of us would have a job, I’ll tell you that. We actually did layoffs, but way later [than many other companies in pandemic]. And we bargained with management over that, and actually [won] a pretty decent severance package for everybody [who’d been laid off]. Just having that kind of protection in there [allows us to say], “We’re not gonna back down, we’re gonna get our workers paid.”

Also, half of those people that [were] laid off are working there now because we have something called callback rights, where if you lose a job, and you’re in good standing, you have about two years to get back into that same position before they hire anybody else [if that worker wants to return]. So whenever things started opening back up again and more production was happening, they brought back people based on company seniority through those callback rights.

Dahlstrom: I probably would be out of a job right now if we didn’t have our union contract. It’s been a rough battle because, you know, nobody has a pandemic clause in their contracts. So we’ve had to roll with the punches, work with management, and push where we can push. Our No. 1 thing is we want to make sure our workers are safe, and that they don’t have an onerous workload.

I think the most fascinating news that can be reported is the fact that we had our first and only [pandemic-related] layoff in August: We laid off eight people, almost all of which have either been brought back, or have been offered to be brought back.

Wilson: I continued to work at reduced hours through most of the last number of months, and I recently returned to work full time. There are people who got laid off, for example, and for them, the union contract was a much, much bigger deal, because that situation was [governed] by the contract.

But I mean, there’s no question in my mind that having our contract has been a benefit in every way. There’s no drawback.

4. A typical critique of unions is that they’ll implement a layer of bureaucracy that will hamper innovation and communication. Have you seen that happen at Anchor?

Wilson: Management is now acknowledging that they are bound by the contract in certain ways so they can’t just do anything they want at any time. So in a sense that has improved communication. Now if there is something that’s not going the way it should be, [workers] have a venue to actually express that to management and expect to get a reply. Whereas before, you could complain, but that was gonna fall on deaf ears. That being said, I don’t think that communication has improved to the extent that I had expected that it would.

Having that third party [the ILWU] has only improved things. The company can say “that’s going to make it harder for us to get stuff done, we won’t be able to just come to agreement between the two sides because there’s going to have to be this extra barrier.” But if they were interested in fixing the problems that led to this situation they would have.

Dahlstrom: I think if you asked management, they would say [the union has hindered communication]. But I think the union has offered more solutions than problems for management. The reason why we unionized is because we had X amount of problems for X amount of years, and now with the union, we have a seat at the table. We meet with management every two weeks. There’s been a long-term disconnect between the fourth floor [management], and the first, second, and third floors [production]. That’s been an ongoing issue, and one of the reasons why we unionized. At the end of the day it’s all about communication. And that’s something that we’re fighting for every single day.

5. How much of the gains you’ve made this year do you attribute to your contract, as opposed to the company just being decent?

Machel: We were gearing up to actually open up the bar [when restrictions were lifted in San Francisco], and one of the questions I was bringing up to my manager was, “Are guys going to give us a little bit of backup if we get people that don’t want to wear masks and stuff like that?” She basically was like, “we would much rather our workplace be as strict as possible, so that nobody gets Covid and everybody’s safe, versus getting money from people.”

I want to say that [this] was out of the goodness of their hearts. But in my mind, the contract solidified that — [especially] because we also had a lot of vocal interactions with management. If I worked at another restaurant or another bar that wasn’t unionized, I highly doubt that they would [take those concerns seriously]. They’d be like, “Eh, this is how it is.”

Wilson: The “bureaucracy” that I’m involved in right now is trying to resolve an issue that, if we didn’t have this system in place, wouldn’t get resolved. So [the contract] is just an overall good thing from my perspective.

Salgado: Because we worked hard [on management], we were able to get hazard pay. Anchor wasn’t going to do that naturally, but because we were able to bring it up [to management through the union], we were able to get this because it was in our contract.

We still had to fight with them to get them to [re]hire people. They would try to have a skeleton crew do production on stuff that a normal crew [would be] doing. So because of that, we fought with them: “Look, you need to hire people back, we’re getting complaints from people who are getting way too much of a workload.”

It’s one of those things where they [might] have done it anyway, but we were able to bring it up several times, so they did it before it was too little, too late.

6. What would you tell workers at other craft breweries who are thinking about unionizing?

Dahlstrom: Open up your mind, and be imaginative. You can break the status quo, that’s what that’s what did it for me. If you imagine a world where you can solidify the benefits that you like from your job, whether it’s meal periods, shift beers, “safety doughnuts …” whatever you like about your job you can solidify, and whatever you don’t like you can bargain over and change.

Would you like healthcare? Would you like higher wages? Would you like paid holidays? I mean, when you’re bargaining, you’re gonna have to give up some of those things, but just imagine a world where you could potentially have some of these things.

Salgado: People need to believe in the power of the contract. Believe in the power. For those who believe in it, it does change. If people work hard and they talk to each other, you know, things will change. I think it does work for people who are willing to give a union a shot.

Wilson: It was an unfamiliar situation and we went for it. It’s a learning experience for everyone. But, I mean, frankly, we’re better off now than we were before. I think it was worth it, for sure.

Machel: For a lot of people, this is their first-ever experience with the union, and with this specific union [ILWU Local 6], it’s a little bit hands-off. … It’s mostly based on the workers figuring out what to do next. That can be scary, and it was scary for a lot of us. But we’ve learned through mistakes and victories, and we’re getting better and better at this. And it’s created an even more prideful place of work. It’s created relationships with [coworkers] that would have never happened before. If we have an issue, let’s bring it up. Now, we can actually say something. Instead of just coming to work at a dope company, we’re coming to work at a dope company at a union that we created ourselves.

The article Anchor Union, One Year In: Lessons Learned at the Legendary Brewery appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/anchor-brewing-company-union/

[johnboothus]

Anchor Union One Year In: Lessons Learned at the Legendary Brewery

“Yes… yes… yes… yes…”

On Dec. 20, 2019, workers at Anchor Brewing Company, a venerable Bay Area icon that brewed its first beer for thirsty San Franciscans nearly four decades before the Golden Gate Bridge was built, gathered in the brewery to ratify their first-ever collective bargaining agreement. It was a union contract years in the making — the product of methodical organizing that began in 2018, followed by a contentious public drive and negotiations that spanned the entire 2019 calendar.

Now, it was up to the rest of the workforce — about 70 employees across the brewery’s production facilities, taproom, and tour guide corps — to sign off on the deal. A worker in white coveralls pulled ballots from a cardboard box jerry-rigged to purpose.

“Yes… yes… yes…”

All told, 94 percent of eligible Anchor workers voted in favor of the contract that day. The deal was done; Anchor Union had its first contract. It was a monumental moment for the American brewing industry, and particularly the craft beer business within it. After all, though Anchor had been acquired by the Japanese conglomerate Sapporo in 2017, it still holds a revered place in hagiographies of the American craft beer movement. That workers at Anchor had successfully organized a union, won their drive and election, and ratified a contract — and did it all without getting summarily laid off or unceremoniously abandoned for a cheaper labor market elsewhere — was a signal that it could be done in other craft-oriented businesses.

As one Anchor worker told me in the early stages of the 2019 drive: “Young working people will be able to see us and be like, ‘if these fucking drunk guys can do it, like anybody can.”

Can they? To be sure, in the year-plus since Anchor workers gathered in Potrero Hill to ink their inaugural deal, the craft food and beverage industries have seen a spate of organizing. Just a couple months later, in February 2020, 140 workers at San Francisco’s Tartine Bakery & Manufactory went public with their own union drive. As the pandemic took hold, organizing efforts popped up at craft food-service and -production shops across the continent: at Southern California’s Augie’s Coffee locations in June; in Colectivo Coffee’s Chicago locations in August; and at Vancouver’s Turning Point Brewery, owned by Labatt Brewing Company and better known for its Stanley Park brand, in October; and so on.

But while organized labor has made inroads this year with the baristas, distillers, and cheesemongers (et al) that produce the food and drink we love, it has stumbled on the path, too. For a showcase of labor organizing highs and lows in the craft F&B space, look no further than Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

Union drives at Minneapolis distilleries Tattersall (announced July 2020), and Stilheart and Lawless (September) yielded recognition from owners of those shops; as did the push at the city’s Fair State Brewing Cooperative that same month. But drives at Spyhouse Coffee Roasters and the Beer Hall at Surly Brewing Company (both organized with United HERE’s Local 17, which handled the other Twin Cities efforts mentioned here) came up short, victims of the turnover, apathy, and management pressure tactics that so often stop union campaigns in their tracks.

“I think I needed more knowledge,” lamented Taylor Roth, a former Spyhouse barista, speaking with me in November 2020, a few weeks after the drive at the twee chain had been defeated. “I knew what good the union would do, but I think if I had more specifics on what our jobs would look like after the vote, then maybe it would have been easier to talk to people about the benefits of the union.”

As Roth and other pro-union workers have discovered, that ambiguity can make it difficult to get buy-in from skeptical colleagues, most of whom have joined the workforce in a period of almost unmitigated decline in union density in America. In the hospitality sector, where language barriers, wage theft, and on-the-job harassment (from both customers and colleagues) have fostered a culture of transience, getting coworkers to see upside worth organizing for is especially challenging, with few positive examples to point to.

In December 2020, Anchor Brewing workers celebrated the one-year anniversary of their ratified contract. It’ll remain in force for another two, during which time they’ll begin bargaining for the one that’ll replace it. It’s an ideal moment for Anchor Union members to reflect on how the past year of unionized work went, strategize on what the future holds for organized labor at the storied San Francisco brewery, and evaluate what their union has done for them.

“I probably would be out of a job right now if we didn’t have our union contract,” Blake Dahlstrom, a brewery lab technician and one of Anchor Union’s four shop stewards, says. (Shop stewards are employees who have volunteered to represent the broader workforce to management when issues arise.)

VinePair asked Dahlstrom and her fellow stewards to share their experiences from Year One of Contract One, to learn what unions can — and just as importantly, can’t — do for the production and hospitality workers that produce consumable “craft culture” in this country.

Below are excerpted phone interviews with all four Anchor Union shop stewards. They have been edited, condensed, and organized thematically. Anchor Brewing Company did not respond to repeated requests for interviews with management to provide the company’s perspective for this piece.

1. What has your relationship with the company been like since ratifying the contract last December [2019]?

Blake Dahlstrom, lab technician, 2.5 years at Anchor: The company sees value in the unionization effort. Every single can and bottle that is being produced in 2021 says “Union-made in San Francisco.” Our job as shop stewards is to hold their feet to the fire. If they’re going to brag about the fact that they’re union-made, our job is to make sure that our workers are being treated [with as much care] as the marketing is.

At the end of the day, all I want is for workers to get compensated and treated fairly. I know it’s a hard balancing act on management’s part. … The people who are making decisions are not necessarily on the floor seeing what’s happening. So as shop stewards we have an opportunity to explain to them … that there are tangible solutions.

I’m proud of the fact that we have a positive working relationship with management. It’s not perfect, but it could be worse. But I’m not trying to sugarcoat it; I’m not trying to be friendly with management. I will bring out my fists when I need to bring out my fists. … It’s not there yet. We’re going down every single avenue we possibly can before we get to that option.

Alex Wilson, filtration worker, 5.5 years: As someone who has been at Anchor for a number of years and has seen the situations that led to the push to unionize, I thought that getting everyone voting in favor of the union, making it happen, and negotiating our contracts, was kind of going to be a clean break, and that moving forward, things would be different. Everyone would be able to express the issues we were facing as a workforce, and then we were going to move past that. So the fact that we’re not really past those issues at this point is surprising to me.

This upcoming year, it’s going to be really interesting to see where this relationship between management at Anchor and the union at Anchor goes. With Covid, everything got sidelined and crazy. It’s going to be really interesting to see how much our contract does for us this year.

2. Pay was an issue that you organized around at Anchor. How did you handle pay in the contract, and how has it played out since?

Patrick Machel, packager and bartender, 3 years: When we started [negotiating] the contract, we saw people getting paid really weird rates. So we were like, “Nah, we’re going to have something completely new, a tiered system.” The first tier is the entry tier, like packaging, tour guides, receptionists. … Second tier is a little more in-depth roles, like lab technicians, shift supervisors, specific machine operators. … Tier three is the lead brewers … and tier four is usually the warehouse [workers], like forklift drivers [and] maintenance workers.

There’s a minimum amount [of pay] that everybody in each tier is getting. That way, no one is getting less than that specific number. We wanted to make [pay] more uniform, because before there was no real way to show why [one worker was] getting paid this amount of money, compared to somebody right next to [them.]

Wilson: The raise structure in the contract is staggered, so we got part of our raise this year [2020], and part of it at the beginning of next year [2021]. Then it [will] continue to go up. So I think starting January, [average pay] will have gone up 20 to 25 percent [since the contract went into effect.]

[In a follow-up message, Machel provided more specific figures: The contract provides Anchor’s brewery workers with an across-the-board average raise of 21 percent over three years. For workers at the Public Taps, the bump is 28 percent.]

Robert Salgado, taproom supervisor, 3 years: In my position, I don’t receive tips. So I just get paid an hourly wage. Sometimes, that would be a little discouraging, watching [tipped employees] do less work and make more money. So for me it was more beneficial, because I got a pay raise. … I think it helped out a lot of my coworkers too, because a lot of them were making $15 to 16 an hour. [San Francisco’s minimum wage is $15.] Now they actually have a little bit more money in their pockets. I was making $22 [per hour, before the contract], and then it got raised to $23, and it will be ending at $25 by the end of the contract.

I think it helps. It’s on its way to being enough, With future contracts in the years to come, it will get to being enough. I can say [the pay increase] has made life easier, and more and more attainable.

3. What happened when the pandemic hit? Did the contract’s provisions have an affect on your day-to-day work at Anchor?

Machel: None of us would have a job, I’ll tell you that. We actually did layoffs, but way later [than many other companies in pandemic]. And we bargained with management over that, and actually [won] a pretty decent severance package for everybody [who’d been laid off]. Just having that kind of protection in there [allows us to say], “We’re not gonna back down, we’re gonna get our workers paid.”

Also, half of those people that [were] laid off are working there now because we have something called callback rights, where if you lose a job, and you’re in good standing, you have about two years to get back into that same position before they hire anybody else [if that worker wants to return]. So whenever things started opening back up again and more production was happening, they brought back people based on company seniority through those callback rights.

Dahlstrom: I probably would be out of a job right now if we didn’t have our union contract. It’s been a rough battle because, you know, nobody has a pandemic clause in their contracts. So we’ve had to roll with the punches, work with management, and push where we can push. Our No. 1 thing is we want to make sure our workers are safe, and that they don’t have an onerous workload.

I think the most fascinating news that can be reported is the fact that we had our first and only [pandemic-related] layoff in August: We laid off eight people, almost all of which have either been brought back, or have been offered to be brought back.

Wilson: I continued to work at reduced hours through most of the last number of months, and I recently returned to work full time. There are people who got laid off, for example, and for them, the union contract was a much, much bigger deal, because that situation was [governed] by the contract.

But I mean, there’s no question in my mind that having our contract has been a benefit in every way. There’s no drawback.

4. A typical critique of unions is that they’ll implement a layer of bureaucracy that will hamper innovation and communication. Have you seen that happen at Anchor?

Wilson: Management is now acknowledging that they are bound by the contract in certain ways so they can’t just do anything they want at any time. So in a sense that has improved communication. Now if there is something that’s not going the way it should be, [workers] have a venue to actually express that to management and expect to get a reply. Whereas before, you could complain, but that was gonna fall on deaf ears. That being said, I don’t think that communication has improved to the extent that I had expected that it would.

Having that third party [the ILWU] has only improved things. The company can say “that’s going to make it harder for us to get stuff done, we won’t be able to just come to agreement between the two sides because there’s going to have to be this extra barrier.” But if they were interested in fixing the problems that led to this situation they would have.

Dahlstrom: I think if you asked management, they would say [the union has hindered communication]. But I think the union has offered more solutions than problems for management. The reason why we unionized is because we had X amount of problems for X amount of years, and now with the union, we have a seat at the table. We meet with management every two weeks. There’s been a long-term disconnect between the fourth floor [management], and the first, second, and third floors [production]. That’s been an ongoing issue, and one of the reasons why we unionized. At the end of the day it’s all about communication. And that’s something that we’re fighting for every single day.

5. How much of the gains you’ve made this year do you attribute to your contract, as opposed to the company just being decent?

Machel: We were gearing up to actually open up the bar [when restrictions were lifted in San Francisco], and one of the questions I was bringing up to my manager was, “Are guys going to give us a little bit of backup if we get people that don’t want to wear masks and stuff like that?” She basically was like, “we would much rather our workplace be as strict as possible, so that nobody gets Covid and everybody’s safe, versus getting money from people.”

I want to say that [this] was out of the goodness of their hearts. But in my mind, the contract solidified that — [especially] because we also had a lot of vocal interactions with management. If I worked at another restaurant or another bar that wasn’t unionized, I highly doubt that they would [take those concerns seriously]. They’d be like, “Eh, this is how it is.”

Wilson: The “bureaucracy” that I’m involved in right now is trying to resolve an issue that, if we didn’t have this system in place, wouldn’t get resolved. So [the contract] is just an overall good thing from my perspective.

Salgado: Because we worked hard [on management], we were able to get hazard pay. Anchor wasn’t going to do that naturally, but because we were able to bring it up [to management through the union], we were able to get this because it was in our contract.

We still had to fight with them to get them to [re]hire people. They would try to have a skeleton crew do production on stuff that a normal crew [would be] doing. So because of that, we fought with them: “Look, you need to hire people back, we’re getting complaints from people who are getting way too much of a workload.”

It’s one of those things where they [might] have done it anyway, but we were able to bring it up several times, so they did it before it was too little, too late.

6. What would you tell workers at other craft breweries who are thinking about unionizing?

Dahlstrom: Open up your mind, and be imaginative. You can break the status quo, that’s what that’s what did it for me. If you imagine a world where you can solidify the benefits that you like from your job, whether it’s meal periods, shift beers, “safety doughnuts …” whatever you like about your job you can solidify, and whatever you don’t like you can bargain over and change.

Would you like healthcare? Would you like higher wages? Would you like paid holidays? I mean, when you’re bargaining, you’re gonna have to give up some of those things, but just imagine a world where you could potentially have some of these things.

Salgado: People need to believe in the power of the contract. Believe in the power. For those who believe in it, it does change. If people work hard and they talk to each other, you know, things will change. I think it does work for people who are willing to give a union a shot.

Wilson: It was an unfamiliar situation and we went for it. It’s a learning experience for everyone. But, I mean, frankly, we’re better off now than we were before. I think it was worth it, for sure.

Machel: For a lot of people, this is their first-ever experience with the union, and with this specific union [ILWU Local 6], it’s a little bit hands-off. … It’s mostly based on the workers figuring out what to do next. That can be scary, and it was scary for a lot of us. But we’ve learned through mistakes and victories, and we’re getting better and better at this. And it’s created an even more prideful place of work. It’s created relationships with [coworkers] that would have never happened before. If we have an issue, let’s bring it up. Now, we can actually say something. Instead of just coming to work at a dope company, we’re coming to work at a dope company at a union that we created ourselves.

The article Anchor Union, One Year In: Lessons Learned at the Legendary Brewery appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/anchor-brewing-company-union/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/anchor-union-one-year-in-lessons-learned-at-the-legendary-brewery

[maydei]

sociopolitical facebook rant on the 1% as requested you cannot compare the harmfulness of “stereotyping” the corporate elite and the 1% against the systematic harm and oppression of the lower class because of the corporation-protecting structure put in place by our “democratic” government, which serves the highest corporate bidder. you cannot compare poor people commenting on inequality and entitlement of super-rich people interacting with those in service-providing jobs to the inequality of those very same hiring practices, the increased taxation on minimum wage compared to the tax-breaks on those making billions. you cannot compare the shared experience of thousands of poor people commenting on the unfairness they’ve faced to the same sort of prejudices as racism and sexism, which benefit those who ALREADY IN POWER (see: Hollywood, and how sexism contributes to the rape culture that is obviously pervasive there), compared to the social commentary of those already oppressed by the system. those denied living wages and sick days. those employed only at part time so their employers do not have to provide health insurance or benefits. those whose part time jobs are so unpredictable with their scheduling that it’s almost impossible to find a second job to work just to make end’s meet, but if they just quit their job and looked for something else, they’d be out on the street. whose schedules are so demanding there’s no way in hell they could ever find time for an interview, and who haven’t had a day off between their multiple jobs in weeks, months, years. playing the devil’s advocate in favor of those who are in a position of power only shows how much they’ve manipulated the american public into thinking they deserve their wealth through hard work, when in reality it’s a combination of outsourcing labor to the cheapest bidder, destroying excess product that could otherwise be donated, and using tax shelters. by cutting taxes on the rich, we’re furthering the gap between the rich and the poor. those billions of dollars stay in their pockets instead of funding infrastructure, public education, and increased wages for the very people working for the CEOs who are getting a pay raise. i’m not talking about doctors who drive a nice car, who worked for a hospital for 30 years and made a million dollars doing it, who have a six bedroom house and a comfortable life that they worked hard to earn. i’m not even talking about those who make $500,000 a year in an urban area WORKING for a corporation. i’m talking about billionaires. people who make more money than we can even conceptualize, who have more money than they could literally ever possibly spend. people who, by existing and delegating their responsibilities to others, sit in an office and make in excess of $3000 per hour to culminate in their yearly salary.  people who could buy a yacht and a private jet and a mansion in one day and shrug, because they have that much more left to spare. people to whom five million dollars is a vacation home, not five thousand times more money than my entire life is worth and then some (and i’m lucky enough to have a semi-comfortable existence where i can live by myself and work a single job). the kind of people who don’t pay taxes because their NAME is a corporation and everything is a write-off, the kind of people who are getting enough of a tax break that they could fund free public college tuition for the country several times over with the money they’ll all be saving. what most of america conceptualizes as rich is actually upper-middle class. that’s how much of a disparity there is between the well-off and the 1%. those are the people i am talking about. those are the people who believe service people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a real job, like the service they provide to society isn’t one that’s simultaneously being demanded by the public, and therefore categorically NOT worthless. those are the people who outsource their labor jobs to a place where they won’t even HAVE to pay minimum wage to the people who would desperately and happily stand in line for a chance at a job to work 40 hours a week. the fact that some of our own coworkers work multiple jobs should be proof enough that there is something fundamentally broken in our system. (from google)

“The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any week, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. Many waiters and waitresses are paid less than the federal minimum wage by their employers and rely primarily on tips to earn a living. Including both tips and wages, the average hourly rate of pay for a server in the United States was $10.05 as of May 2011. This is the equivalent of about $20,890 per year.“ “US companies are allowed to pay tipped employees pittance because customers are expected to tip well enough to surpass at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25, and, if they don’t, companies have to chip in the rest. But that’s not how things always work in the real world. “The servers who make ‘good money’ are in the minority,” says Maria Myotte, a spokesperson for Restaurant Opportunities Center United, which aims to improve conditions for workers in the industry. She notes that tipped workers are hit especially hard by “wage theft,” whereby restaurants don’t make up the difference when the tips aren’t rolling in. Between 2010 and 2012, the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor conducted nearly 9,000 investigations in the restaurant industry, and discovered that 83.8 percent had some kind of wage and hour violation.” “Like millions of Americans across the United States, 23-year-old Anna Hovland worked a waitressing job earlier this year to make ends meet. Her restaurant in Washington, DC, paid her the local minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.77 an hour, which meant that after taxes, her paycheck was usually zero. Her tips, never dependable, ranged from $20 to $200 a shift. “In a city as expensive as DC, I’ve been able to make ends meet by the skin of my teeth,” Hovland says. “Sometimes it will only be in the last week or two of a month that I’ll realize I’ve made enough to pay all my bills.” source one additional source one more for the books i’m lucky. i know i’m lucky. last year i was below the federal poverty level, and this year i’ll be above it. but because of being below the federal poverty level, i qualified for medical bill forgiveness through UVM. i still received a $400 bill for a procedure to find a problem with me that can’t be treated or made better. without that bill forgiveness, my bill would have been $3000. my deductible through my insurance provided by my job is $5000, which means i would have to pay that full $3000 by myself plus another $2000 before my insurance company would cover anything. $400 right before christmas still stung. $3000 would have been unimaginable. and in my current situation, i have no option to get better medical coverage through work. i get what i get, that’s my only option, take it or leave it, and without health insurance, i would be penalized on my taxes. i pay more then $200 a month to have the privilege of only having to shell out $5k in case of emergency, not covering my monthly medications, doctor’s appointments, blood panels (most of which is not covered! surprise), etc. and i am one of the lucky ones. i have a full time job. i have a car that rarely needs repairs. i can afford my rent (though i take a loss during the winter months because of my pay structure) and i can feed myself and my pets without having to ask for help. i don’t have to crowdfund insulin or hospital bills, because i’m fortunate enough to have some savings to mitigate my expenses. i certainly don't die because of it. i’m lucky. and it’s my duty as someone who is lucky to speak up for those who are not lucky. the people who work multiple part time jobs to make end’s meet and still don't have insurance. the people who end up with five-digit hospital bills that will bankrupt them. the people who come out of school with a four year degree and hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt who can’t find a job making anything more then $8 an hour, and who get slapped with $800 bills they have to pay back per month because they’ve graduated. this is to say nothing of those who are not able to be hired because of age, disability, or other outlying factors—the people whose medicaid and entitlements are about to be cut, who already live in low-income housing and rely on the assistance of the state to survive, and whose benefits are about to be hacked in half. is this meme about pizza drivers and bad tippers? yeah, it is. does it generalize that rich people are bad tippers? sure. but that’s not exactly news. if you were to mention it to someone else, they’d say “well that’s how the rich stay rich!” and we'd all laugh it off and go our separate ways. but we’re not talking about the people who live in a cul-de-sac or a gated community, we’re talking about a symptom of a much larger problem, which is the growing gap between the ultra rich and the ultra poor in america. and it’s not only college-aged kids. it’s single parents, it’s people who are laid off from their jobs of 30 years, it’s people who lose their jobs to outsourcing, it’s everyone. i haven’t even gotten into the systematic prejudice against POC. i'll leave that for another time. even though you and i are sitting here thinking “hey we have it pretty good”, the point stands that things are less than ideal in america right now, and having it pretty good is actually an incredible privilege. i have strong opinions that can be stereotyped pretty easily by saying “eat the rich”, but you should know which “rich” i’m talking about. and no, i don’t actually want to eat them. but i think it would be pretty nice if everyone could afford groceries (even with food stamps or SNAP cards, which don’t cover diapers, soap, vitamins, toilet paper, or any hygiene products), and if service workers could make end’s meet for a modest life on a single full-time job. if health insurance covered dental work and optical needs, because we’ll never need glasses any less. if public education funding didn’t depend entirely on the value of the property in the neighborhood, which presents a disadvantage to poor neighborhoods. if grad students wouldn’t now have to pay taxes on the tuition allowances they get from teaching as part of their degree, which was never actually cash they had in the first place--and undergrads wouldn’t now have to pay taxes on scholarships (see above). our financial system in a nutshell is highway robbery, and if we all had each others’ backs on a social scale, a lot of these problems wouldn’t even be problems we have yet to solve, they would be completely moot. assuming you’ve gotten to the end of my sociopolitical rant that’s gone wildly off-topic, here’s a youtube video.  it’s a really good one to watch. a bit old, yeah, but the figures he’s talking about certainly haven’t gotten any better. and here’s a newer one, just to be fair, that’s incredibly relevant to our current situation.  i guess that’s my contribution to the “thought experiment”.

[easyfoodnetwork]

There Really Is No Ethical Restaurant Under Capitalism

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to.

We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run.

Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions.

It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood.

But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that?

Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.”

Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative.

A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.”

Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.”

“What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June.

Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession.

Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere.

Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city.

La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.”

In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything.

“The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent.

The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry).

“We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.”

Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it.

The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing.

The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says.

For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan.

What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.”

It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants.

There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.”

Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic.

Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine.

Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all.

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Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to.

We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run.

Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions.

It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood.

But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that?

Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.”

Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative.

A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.”

Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.”

“What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June.

Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession.

Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere.

Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city.

La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.”

In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything.

“The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent.

The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry).

“We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.”

Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it.

The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing.

The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says.

For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan.

What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.”

It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants.

There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.”

Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic.

Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine.

Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all.

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[tamboradventure]

Travel is a Privilege

Updated: 1/16/2020 | January 16th, 2020

Let’s face it: not everyone is going to able to travel. Whether it’s money, family obligations, or circumstance, travel is out of reach for a large percentage of the world’s population.

In the “quit your job to travel the world” cheerleading that happens so often on travel websites (including this one), we often forget that it’s not so easy for everyone.

Years on the road have shown me that, for many of us, our inability to travel is part a mindset issue (since we believe travel is expensive, we don’t look for ways to make it cheaper) and part a spending issue (we spend money on things we don’t need).

Those that go shopping often, have decent jobs, spend a lot on avocado toast, or whatever it is they spend money on are more often than not prioritizing travel.

Additionally, our culture says travel is expensive and, without a frame of reference to know that is wrong, people just assume it’s right.

But there are those for whom no mindset change, spending cuts, or budget tips will help them travel — those who are too sick, have parents or children to care for, face great debt, or work three jobs just to pay their rent.

After all, 2.8 billion people — nearly 40% of the world’s population — survive on less than $2 USD a day! In my home country of the United States, 14% of the population is below the poverty line, 46 million people are on food stamps, many have to work two jobs to get by, and we have a trillion dollars in student debt dragging people down.

No tips found any website will magically make travel a reality for those people.

Those of us who do travel are a privileged few.

Whether we quit our jobs to travel the world, spend two months in Europe, or take our kids on a short vacation to Disney World, we get to experience something most people of the world will never get a chance to do.

We overlook that too much. We overlook lucky we are. As I’ve started building FLYTE — a foundation to help high schools take economically disadvantaged students on educational trips overseas, I’ve thought a lot about privilege.

I grew up in a predominately white, middle-class town with parents who paid my college tuition. I had a job after college that allowed me to live on my own, take vacations, and still save for my first trip around the world. And, because I speak English, I easily found work teaching English in Thailand, where I could save to extend my travels.

That’s not to say that hard work doesn’t count. But hard work doesn’t exist in a bubble and the circumstances that create the opportunities for hard work to bear fruit are often more important.

I’ve met people of all ages, incomes, abilities, and nationalities on the road. Folks like Don and Alison, who are backpacking the world at 70; Michael, who worked 60-hour weeks at a minimum-wage job; Cory, who travels the world in a wheelchair; Ishwinder, who didn’t let visa restrictions stop him; and countless others.

But even they had circumstances that allowed them to travel — support from family and friends, jobs that allowed for overtime, or other skills. They weren’t barely getting by or on social assistance. They didn’t wonder if they could afford their next meal.

I worked hard to where I am. I’m sure you’ve worked hard too. One’s work isn’t less because of opportunity. But I think it’s important to remember that the circumstances around you make your work easier to bear fruit than others. It’s easier to succeed when you don’t have to worry about housing or your next meal. It’s easier to succeed if you’re educated or can get a full night’s sleep in a safe community.

We are some of the lucky ones.

We get to do something that others will never be able to do.

We are privileged.

Even if you’ve hitchhiked around the world with no money, worked overseas, cut costs to travel around the world on $10 USD a day, or travel-hacked your way to a first-class ticket, you have the opportunity to do something most people go to sleep only dreaming about. You have the freedom and choice to move about the world in a way most people don’t.

That’s a form of privilege.

As we go into this new year, I think it’s important that we never forget or be ungrateful for the opportunity. Let’s not take it for granted. Let’s be humble. Let’s give back. Let’s be more respectful.

And let’s not squander the opportunity.

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld as they have the largest inventory. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and cheap hotels. I use them all the time.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those over 70)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all the ones I use to save money when I travel – and that will save you time and money too!

The post Travel is a Privilege appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

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[ultrabritishlitposts-blog]

Analysis Of The Text

Take it or Leave it 

By Zadie Smith

The first time I ordered takeout in New York, two things confounded me: the terrific speed with which the food arrived, and the fact that, after I’d paid for it, the man from the Chinese restaurant and I stood on either side of the threshold staring at each other, though only one of us understood why. After a minute of this, I closed the door. An American friend sat on the sofa, openmouthed:

“Wait—did you just close the door?”

In London, you don’t tip for delivery. A man on a motorbike arrives and hands over an oil-soaked bag, or a box. You give him the exact amount of money it costs or wait and look at your shoes while he hunts for change. Then you close the door. Sometimes all this is achieved without even the removal of his motorcycle helmet. The dream (an especially British dream) is that the whole awkward exchange pass wordlessly.

Every New Yorker has heard a newly arrived British person grumble about tipping. The high-minded Brits add a lecture: food-industry workers shouldn’t need to scrabble for the scraps thrown from high table—they should be paid a decent wage (although the idea that the delivery boys of Britain are paid a decent wage is generally an untested assumption). Now when I’m in London I find myself tipping all kinds of people, most of whom express a sort of unfeigned amazement, even if the tip is tiny. What they never, ever do, however, is tell me to have a nice day. “Have a good one”—intoned with a slightly melancholy air, as if warding off the far greater likelihood of an evil “one”—is the most you tend to hear.

But I’m not going to complain about Britain’s “lack of a service culture”—it’s one of the things I cherish about the place. I don’t think any nation should elevate service to the status of culture. At best, it’s a practicality, to be enacted politely and decently by both parties, but no one should be asked to pretend that the intimate satisfaction of her existence is servicing you, the “guest,” with a shrimp sandwich wrapped in plastic. If the choice is between the antic all-singing, all-dancing employees in New York’s Astor Place Pret-A-Manger and the stony-faced contempt of just about everybody behind a food counter in London (including all the Prets), I wholeheartedly opt for the latter. We are subject to enough delusions in this life without adding to them the belief that the girl with the name tag is secretly in love with us.

In London, I know where I stand. The corner shop at the end of my road is about as likely to “bag up” a few samosas, some milk, a packet of fags, and a melon and bring them to my home or office as pop round and write my novel for me. (Its slogan, printed on the awning, is “Whatever, whenever.” Not in the perky American sense.)

In New York, a restaurant makes some “takeout” food, which it fully intends to take out and deliver to someone. In England, the term is “takeaway,” a subtle difference that places the onus on the eater. And it is surprisingly common for London restaurants to request that you come and take away your own bloody food, thank you very much. Or to inform you imperiously that they will deliver only if you spend twenty quid or more. In New York, a boy will bring a single burrito to your door. That must be why so many writers live here—the only other place you get food delivery like that is at MacDowell.

Another treasurable thing about London’s delivery service is its frankly metaphysical attitude toward time (minicabs are equally creative on this front). They say, “He’ll be with you in fifteen minutes.” Thirty minutes pass. You call. They say, “He’s turning onto the corner of your road, one minute, one minute!” Five minutes pass. You call. “He’s outside your door! Open your door!” You open your door. He is not outside your door. You call. He is now five minutes away. He “went to the wrong house.” You sit on the doorstep. Ten minutes later, your food arrives. My most extreme encounter with this uniquely British form of torture was when, a few years back, I ordered from an Indian restaurant four minutes from my house as the crow flies. I was still being told he was on the corner of my road when I walked through the restaurant’s door, cell phone in hand, to find the delivery boy sitting on a bench, texting. As was his God-given right. It’s not as if anyone were going to tip him. 

 INTERPRETATION

Her article in general is mostly a comparison of take-out food in New York and in London or generally, the U.S. and England.

Clearly, some cultural differences were shown in the text. in Britain, delivery is still limited to Chinese takeaway and pizza, whereas in the U.S. you can press a few buttons on your computer and a boy will bring a single burrito to your door.

She tells of her experience when she first ordered Chinese food in New York. She wondered why the delivery guy just stood there after getting paid. She closed the door on him. Her companion was shocked. They just don’t tip delivery people in England. It was just a cultural difference, and as stated from a source “British people grumble when they come here (U.S.) and have to tip”. It’s because they just don’t do that and they are not used to such practices.  

Zadie Smith shows us a different perspective, a different take on the whole service-industry kerfuffle. Namely: “Life already blows, and paying people to pretend to be nice isn’t going to change that.” They say that people must be fairly compensated for their work and effort. Zadie Smith notes that no one actually says if delivery boys are fairly paid in England.

There was a distinction in the text: “In New York, a restaurant makes some ‘takeout’ food, which it intends to take out and deliver to someone. In England, the term is ‘takeaway,’ a subtle difference that places the onus on the eater.” And those few who do offer delivery, expect a minimum order.

Zadie Smith Ends the essay with a funny story about delivery guys in London and how they are never prompt. She says that if you call back and ask where your food is, they always justify and reason out for a bit. They would say “just fifteen minutes” or “he’s turning onto your street” or some other reason. One-time Zadie Smith walked to the location or pick up point of her food delivery while talking to the restaurant on the phone. They said he was turning onto her road as she walked in to find the delivery guy sitting on the bench and was on his phone, texting.

As we can assume, the guy wasn’t going to receive a tip, right?

[allisonperryart]

The Business of Art w/ Jeremy Cranford (Blizzard Entertainment) @ The Art Institute of California Inland Empire (7/29/17)

Special thanks to Jeremy Cranford and Thomas Brilliante for making this event possible. For more updates on future events like this in the southern California area, please consider following Inland Arts on FaceBook. (Text-only version of this document available on FaceBook)

James Cranford’s life

Humble beginnings: migrant parents, food stamps, etc.

Attending college was difficult because of finances, but he ended up studying graphic design because he got a scholarship

After doing graphic design for years, he got an art directing job with "Magic the Gathering” and working in games/illustration since 1996

Worked on “Metal World” style guide for “Mirrodin” set (2002)

What would environments look like on a metal planet? Rust, things hovering with magnetism, rolling silver plane, big metal spikes, mercury seas, retina green forests

Environments help you solve what the humanoids/creatures will look like in the environment

The humanoids/creatures? Enamel/scabs is replaced with metal, big metal bracers on humanoids

Also worked on "Spirit World” style guide for "Kamigawa” set (2003)

Started with the desire to help MtG sell better in Japan, which was a challenge because traditionally MtG is based on Arthurian lore/visuals

Unsure about just having American/Western artists riff on Japanese imagery, so he hired some Japanese artists to create more authentic content, which resulted in a very different feel

Example of a brief he didn’t like that he turned around into an engaging project

Also worked on “Ravnica” style guide

Brief: “overdeveloped urban fantasy setting”

Mountains = smelting buildings

Lead was very against having buildings on land cards, but this is an example of Jeremy challenging convention… why could land cards have buildings!?

Risked his job on this point because he really believed in it, and it ended up being a great decision

The creative solution may be an uphill battle, but it will always win out

Plains = created by the tops of buildings, inspired from looking out at the city from the World Trade Center

Swamps = city sewers, obviously

Forest = where they grew their food

First set when they started mixing colors (which are like “cultures” in MtG lore), which was an awesome opportunity to expand and develop new ideas

Blue/green = technology elves

Black/green = voodoo elves (inspired by New Orleans)

Black/red = fire demons, obviously

White/black = basically Catholicism

Red/white = military

Blue/red = mage + technology

First set to have a promo video (inspired by game cinematic trailers, intended to introduce the world)

Began working on World of Warcraft at Blizzard when they released a trading card game

Style was a bit of a learning curve (less realistic, more stylized)

Soon after, started working on miniatures game, which taught him a lot about manufacturing and allowed him to travel to China, etc.

He took a risk and left Blizzard to start a start-up with his friends called Solforge

It was fun for about 6 months, but he never regretted the experience because he learned a lot 

Goal was to push things more sic-fi (nuclear winter world) 

His philosophy over the years has been to take risks, embrace junctures in life, and have faith in the direction you’re going

Every time he took a risk, the pay off ended up being worth it 

The universe has a way of showing you the path that’s most right for you 

He says most of what he’s tried never works out, and he just ends up doing the next best thing - which turns out to be his career 

Doesn’t always know what he wants to do, but definitely knows what he doesn’t want to do 

Always wants to challenge convention 

“Don’t try to make the art you do what you think it should do, rather let the art take you where it wants to go.” - Ben Thompson 

“Leap, and build your wings while you’re falling.” - Ray Bradbury Finds inspiration from Borge Ousland (first human to go from Russia to Alaska)

Saw people’s discouragement as feedback/critique 

Constant failures for 10 years, but learned a little every step of the way that led to his eventual success 

Stick with it

Also finds inspiration from Richard MacDonald (inspirational sculptor, experienced a lot of misfortune, embodies the blind faith Jeremy talks about)

Advice for mastering your craft, building a portfolio, and being a professional

Being an art director is like being a coach - if the product isn’t performing well, the company looks to replace the art director 

It may take you longer to master your craft than 4 years in college (DaVinci took 7 years)… be patient with yourself! 

When he looks for an artist, he looks for a professional

Master your skills

Master drawing, anatomy, and rendering light onto form

Go to life drawing regularly… even if you’re not in school 

He oftentimes looks at the hands

Master design, not just drawing realistically

Creaturebox is a great example 

Large, medium, small shapes 

High density detail (busy) vs. low density detail (rest)

Master painting and color theory

Nathan Fowkes is a great example 

The best color is not always the most “realistic” colour

Master composition, eye flow, value groups, and negative shapes

Wayne Reynolds and Frazetta are great examples 

If you’re struggling, check out Edgar Payne’s book on composition 

Have a plan before you paint and add all your detail 

Jomaro adds “working in threes” is a good idea - working in twos becomes “equal” and too “balanced”

Master story, emphasis, mood, and point of view

Ian McQue's work in the “John Carpenter” art book is a great example 

Just because your rendering is perfect doesn’t mean people will care about what you’re drawing 

What are you trying to communicate? Write that down and make sure you execute it! 

Creating without a clear objective is a waste of time

Don’t cheat yourself - if you’re trying to hide your flaws… fix them!

Don’t use effects/tricks to hide your shortcomings

After you master your skills, target a market and advertise yourself (ArtStation, DeviantArt contests, etc.)

Send out cold-emails 

See if you can get current employees to refer you to art directors 

If you get rejected, evaluate your work and actually assign yourself tasks to improve on it

Pro life tips!!

Don’t be a drunk (why party when you can improve your skill?) 

Dedicate yourself to your career/something higher/something you love 

Have some range (in your portfolio) - never say “that’s not my style!”

Consider: reality vs. fantasy (in content), realism vs, abstraction (in style)

“I’m on it!” Never be an emotional tax on your team/leads - art directors will always go back to the artists that make things easy

This doesn’t mean be a pushover

"Show me the Money!” Think about how much you’re being paid and how many hours you’re putting in… are you even getting paid minimum wage?

If you’re being paid less than you’re worth/less than minimum wage, it’s not worth it… and you’re hurting the whole industry! 

You’re better off investing in yourself - work at Starbucks and build a strong portfolio at night/on the weekends

As your skills go up, the money goes up (you need to go from good to great if you’re going to make it) 

Do you know why you do what you do?

If it’s for the money… maybe you should just go into banking, because this isn’t really a path to make money 

Jeremy does it because he simply enjoys it, which takes the pressure off

"You’re okay, I’m okay”

Growing up, Jeremy had a lot of depression because he was seeking external approval 

If you get your approval from within, you aren’t giving the power to others to put you down 

You’re the final authority on how you fell about yourself, how you treat others, and what you love and want to do

There’s beauty in diversity - just be good to each other and celebrate your differences

Question time!

Where should I go to school?

Depends on what you want and how your learn best - really successful people have not gone anywhere and really unsuccessful people have gone to great schools 

Maybe consider non-traditional schooling like GumRoad and New Masters Academy 

At the end of the day, you need the skills, and however you get them doesn’t really matter

How do you manage your time to develop range and show that range in a portfolio?

When you email an AD/recruiter, consider attaching 3 images that highlight what that contact is looking for in the email… and then lead them to the rest of your work if they’re interested

That’s all you need for “portfolio geared to a company” - you don’t need a full portfolio geared to a portfolio if you have 3-5 images you can attach to an email

Keep your portfolio updated! Don’t leave up bad work from a long time ago! 

Even when you’re not asked to, following up on feedback from ADs/recruiters with new work is a great way to stay in contact and establish your worth 

If you gear your portfolio towards one company and you can’t get into that company, you might have trouble getting into other companies 

However, if you have a very rangey portfolio, sometimes all you need is an art test to prove you can execute the style 

Know your stylistic limitations, too - if you know you can’t do something, don’t waste your time and the AD/recruiter’s 

Having trouble focusing? Set an explicit goal for yourself/make an assignment for yourself… and set a deadline for it (or else you’ll never finish it)!

How do you connect with an AD without being annoying but also not getting ignored?

ADs are busy people, at the end of the day 

Consider joining a forum/contest… sometimes your peers are better critics for you than an AD 

Develop a circle of trust (people you trust to give you good feedback) 

When you do meet an AD, remember “everyone is people…” don’t be weird about it! 

Don’t be embarrassed/ashamed of negative feedback… own it and be fearless! 

Remember: it’s normal to ask ADs/recruiters to look at your work… just ask for permission, give them an opportunity to say “no,” and if they do say “no,” offer to follow-up or leave your email/card 

Also remember to maintain relationships with professionals, because they might be keeping an eye on you and hire you in the future… address their feedback, explain how you improved, etc.

How do you form a good narrative in a painting?

“Create a picture that has a gap for the viewer to fill in”/“Don’t answer/render everything” (Jomaro adds - “like a trailer!”) - Frazetta is a great example of this 

Engage the viewers curiosity and get them to want to know what’s happening 

Maybe look at storyboard artists/sequential artists 

Also maybe identify a feeling/single word/etc. that embodies your piece… and strive to communicate it fully! 

You can execute a complex idea in a very simple way

Do ADs judge you on your backlog/old work?

Always be producing work, or else you’re stagnant! 

Always update your work with your newest stuff 

ADs love seeing jumps in quality! 

ADs aren’t gonna judge you for old work they find in a deep-dive, but be sure to put your best foot forward and have that easiest to find

What can you do to stay in touch while you’re waiting for a response on an art test?

Once you submit the test, it’s out of your hands 

If it’s been a week, try following up with HR asking if there’s anything else you can do 

If you get radio silence, it’s not the end of the world - be positive about your experience and open to future opportunities

Do you need to master digital/PhotoShop/ZBrush/etc. just like you master anatomy/colour/etc.?

If you’re skills and design are good, they’ll show through in any medium, but at the same time, not knowing PhotoShop at all can get you dinged when working in-house

What was your favourite project to work on and what did you learn from it?

“Ravnica,” because he struggled with self-doubt and had to put his job on the line for something he believes in 

HearthStone has also been a blast

Is there anything outside of art that helps you as an artist?

Everything he’s told you not to do, he did himself, which is why he’s trying to help you avoid it 

Letting go of the idea that his self-worth was determined by how other people saw him… compete only against yourself 

It helped to stop taking himself so seriously and just have fun… eliminated the pressure and lets the creativity flow

Stop trying to get everyone to like you and your work! 

Don’t just be a theory expert… put things into practice! 

The biggest thing people are lacking is the mileage

Don’t get deflated by feedback… actually integrate it! 

Don’t get discouraged by people who are better than you that have been doing it for longer… that’s normal!

[understandingchaoss]

Im confused how youre able to afford to travel so much? I would love to but I cant afford it. Do you have any tips ?

Hi anon! I actually have a list full of pointers!!

First of all, in the long run, I think the fact that I’m able to travel like I do, comes down to the fact that my motivation is Europe. I HAVE to go. There’s something inside of me that can’t stay here and keep seeing the same stuff over and over again. Europe looks NOTHING like the states, and the culture is what I absolutely love. So I think I just have an insane amount of motivation. As a result of that motivation, I feel as if I’ve made some fairly smart choices in order to continue saving like I do.

Second of all, there are two ways to go about being able to afford traveling. There are ways to save in order to be able to travel, and there are ways to save while you’re traveling. 

In terms of what to do to prepare, here’s what I have done:

Join a credit union. Not only do they give you insanely low interest rates when your credit might not be the best, but they give you great deals on houses (when the time comes), cars, and personal loans. I joined mine when I was 18 and will be a lifetime member.

Build your credit. If you have a vehicle that you don’t make payments on, but know the one you have is going to take a dump soon, this is super important. I built my credit for about 8 months before I purchased my car. I got a credit card through my credit union and just put all of my purchases on that instead of using my debit card or cash. However, do not do so if you think that having a credit card means you can spend whatever you want. That money has to get paid off somehow, and as long as you’re smart about it, you can pay it off every month and never pay any interest, thus, building your credit.

Don’t buy a brand new car. This is a terrible idea altogether. The car loses value the second you drive it off the lot. Most people will sign the papers in a heartbeat, except they just signed for a $28,000 car with a 20% interest rate. If you’re smart about it and purchase a good vehicle for a good price, your monthly payments could be as low as $100 a month.

Try to find a job that’s willing to pay you above minimum wage, even if it’s only 25 cents more; or find a job that will eventually give you raise, such as an annual. My job is basically the reason I am able to afford what I do. I serve tables in California, which is not one of the states that is allowed to pay servers as low as $2.00 an hour. California requires tipped positions to be paid at least minimum wage. So I make $10.50 an hour plus my tips, which averages me out to about $18.00-$19.00 an hour. My job also does annual raises and Christmas bonuses, which help a lot. As much as serving tables kind of sucks sometimes, the money is fantastic, and I highly suggest it for anyone in college trying to save money to travel. 

Don’t have your savings account linked to your checking account. Banks couldn’t have made things any easier to not save money. Having the two linked if you’re not the best with money, is an awful idea. When I made the decision to travel, I wanted to spend as little as possible, but it was hard when all I had to do was transfer something from my savings to my checking when I needed more money. I opened up a savings account with a completely different bank. The only way I can take money out, is to go in and take it out, and then I would have to drive another 15 minutes to my other bank just to put it in. You’re more likely to save money when you make things difficult for yourself to actually spend money.

Have an emergency savings account. Life happens, and sometimes you’re short on money, but your car breaks down. Even if you have to only put $5.00 away every month, it all adds up. Make it a completely separate account from everything else, and pretend the money doesn’t exist. 

Get yourself a flyer miles credit card. I only suggest doing this once you’ve had a normal rewards credit card and are comfortable opening another credit account. But boy, does it come in handy! I now use my credit card from my credit union as my emergency card. I hardly use it anymore. I put any and all purchases I make on my miles card. If you’re planning on traveling all over, I suggest a Discover It miles card, or a Capital One Venture card. Discover gives you a mile and a half for each dollar you spend, and Capital One gives you two miles for each dollar you spend. Neither limit you to just one airline, like an Alaskan miles card would, as an example. I will be using my miles to buy my ticket to Alaska this summer, and won’t pay hardly anything out of pocket. I racked up the miles with my every day purchases like groceries, eating out here and there, and gas.

Try to put away a set amount into savings each month, or every pay period. This is not something I particularly do, just because living off of tips isn’t always predictable. I pretty much just look at what I made for the week, divide everything up according to which bills need to be paid, and put the rest in savings. But for some people, doing a set amount can help a lot. Most employers that do direct deposit, will do it for several accounts, so you can even have a set amount from each paycheck go straight into your savings.

In terms of how to save while you travel, here’s what I have found:

Find a cheap airline. Sometimes I feel like this is just a given, but some people will legitimately spend thousands of dollars on an international ticket. I have found that the cheapest airline flying to Europe during most times of the year, is Norwegian Air. Every now and then you can find a cheaper ticket through Virgin Airways. Here’s why I would still pay a little extra for Norwegian. These planes are absolutely enormous because the flights are so long. The sucker is called the Dream Liner for a reason. I have so much leg room, I feel like I’m in first class. Their meals are actual meals served hot, whereas most airlines serve sandwiches, or hot food that looks more like plastic. For not much extra, you can get a ticket one step up that includes meals, choosing your seats, and includes your bags. I like Norwegian because they fly straight from California to Europe. The curvature of the earth matters, and each time you touch down and take off, you add more flight time. I always fly to Poland as my destination, so I stop in Norway, and then go to Poland. It’s a LONG flight if you go from the west coast, but it’s worth it. 

Fly during the fall and winter, and avoid holidays. Sometimes this is inevitable. But if your schedule is pretty open, fly during the ‘off’ season. Prices tend to go down in price to most places around the end of September, shoot up for Thanksgiving week, then go back down until the week of Christmas. During Christmas, they shoot back up, but as soon as New Year’s is over, they go back down. Prices don’t usually go back up in price until about May. Summer is when everyone wants to do their traveling, thus tickets are most expensive so airlines can make money. But for example, I flew to Iceland round trip from California in the middle of January for less than $400. No one wants to go to Iceland in the dead of winter, so prices are cheaper. You could pay around $1,000 just to go to the same place, but during the summer. Prices to the rest of Europe work the same way.

Use public transportation. I always travel with my best friend, Emily. We both refuse to use taxi’s because that’s how men figure out where you’re staying, and that’s like, asking to get abducted. Emily is fantastic with directions and public transportation, so she’s always in charge of that. Just about any city you go to will have public transportation, because Europe thinks about the important things. Tickets to use the buses, trams, or trains are almost always super cheap. All of the major cities I’ve been to - Prague, Budapest, London, Salzburg, Zagreb - all have great systems and good prices. Sometimes you can buy a bulk amount of tickets all at once, instead of buying individual tickets each time you go from one place to the next. It’s cheaper to buy in bulk, so if they offer it, use it.

Stay in Airbnb’s, not hostels or hotels. Hotels are pointless because you can’t cook. Wasted money eating out all three meals right there. Hostels are pointless unless you plan to travel with a large group, otherwise you usually have to share amenities, and not all of them have kitchens. Airbnb’s are super cheap for just about any city or town. They are fully furnished apartments or houses, so you can cook. Not to mention, some of them are so cute and I want to cry when I sometimes find the cutest one for a good price.

If you’re planning on traveling within several countries close to each other geographically, don’t fly. Once you’re in Europe, flying from place to place is super cheap. But if you’re visiting small countries that are all close to each other, look into a rail pass. Emily and I bought two first class passes for just under $1,000. They got us from Czech to Austria, to Hungary, then to Croatia. We bought them through Eurail and it was a great deal. We could hop on any train in each country as long as it was within the countries on our itinerary, and got us from one country to the next when it was time to move on. It ended up being cheaper to do it by train than to fly from place to place. Plus, you get to see the backcountry of everything, and it’s so worth it.

Make friends as you go. Meet people. Get to know the culture. Make friends. Most European cultures are all super welcoming. The more people you meet and stay in contact with during your time at home, the more likely you are to have either a cheap, or free place to stay the next time you go back. I could basically go anywhere in Poland at this point and not have to pay for a place to stay anywhere.

Avoid using cash. Economies are constantly changing. Currencies gain and lose value overnight. Take cash with you, and exchange a little just so that you can come back with some of it. I love to collect all the different currencies. But for the most part, avoid exchanging cash. It loses value, because places gain commission off of it, even if their windows say 0% commission. Research exchange rates of each place you’re going to just in case you need to exchange. All exchanges places have different rates, find the best one. If you plan to use cash for everything, withdraw it from an ATM. Try to stick to ones that are inside of banks, because you’re much less likely to use one that has a scanner in order to steal your information. But all in all, use a credit card. Debit cards aren’t safe to use internationally. If for some reason your information gets stolen, the second the money is used by someone else from your account, your bank likely won’t be able to get the money back. Credit cards are great because if your information gets stolen, the company or credit union is almost always able to fix the problem and you won’t owe the money someone else spent. 

This is all I can think of as of right now, and I think I pretty much included everything. Feel free to ask more questions if you need to, and I can give you answers if I have them! Traveling is actually so cheap if you go about it in the right ways. Good luck!!

[pvstelheart]

Yeah not really. First of all tips+hourly wage MUST meet minimum wage and some states don’t even have a lower minimum wage. For example I make $10.50 an hour plus tips (anywhere from $10-60 a shift) as a hostess and food runner in California where $10.50 is minimum wage period no matter your job and is actually raising to $11 soon so that’ll be nice. But anyway tipping culture is far more complex, doesn’t have to do with underpaying people because the reducing minimum wage for waitresses was actually a side effect of toppings popularity, and also actually started in Europe so no it’s not a US system and now it’s mostly basically a hey I’m paying the restaurant not the person who actually directly served me so here’s a little extra that I know is going to my waitress, busser, hostess, and other front of the house staff who helped me. If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant you’d understand why it’s something that exist wait staff does a lot of customers especially when we’re busy as a hostess I run around seating people, telling our expo if someone wants something, telling a waitress someone is ready to pay, getting water, ect and only that first thing is actually my job. Tipping is considered part of eating out in the US and is a cost that should be considered when you want to. If you can’t afford to tip then don’t eat out here and regardless if tipping didn’t exist we would either make wayyyyyyyyyy less or have higher prices so wait staff could be paid more. Just because it’s not a practice you understand doesn’t mean you get to bash it especially when it’s literally hurting no one

how to tip

[ajayuikey]

Inspired by the work of Instacart shoppers over the last few years, a handful of workers at Target-owned Shipt, a grocery delivery service, are beginning to organize. With the help of two key Instacart shopper-activists, Vanessa Bain and Sarah Clarke, who goes by a pseudonym, Shipt workers are now demanding better wages and the elimination of what some describe as a culture of fear.

“We want to be the first responders,” Clarke tells TechCrunch. “Whenever gig workers find out there is a pay cut or some type of issue, they’ll feel comfortable coming to us.”

In January, Shipt started testing a new pay structure where, instead of basing it on cart size, Shipt takes into account the time it takes to complete and deliver an order. Shipt implemented these changes in Kalamazoo, Mich., San Antonio and Philadelphia. As Gizmodo reported earlier this month, there was some shopper backlash.

Prior to the changes, shoppers had received a $5 flat rate and 7.5% of the total store receipt, one shopper, who asked to remain anonymous, told TechCrunch.

“We are losing money as shoppers at a ridiculous rate,” a shopper from Kalamazoo tells TechCrunch. “A very good, close friend of mine told me in the three weeks since the new structure was implemented, she has lost the equivalent of a car payment. It is a lot of money. Our best guestimation is, we’re all losing about 30% or more. I did four orders this past weekend and I lost money on every single one.”

But Shipt says its goal is to maximize the earning potential for its shoppers and to make sure they get the most value for their time spent. That’s why Shipt is testing this new pay structure in certain markets to better account for time spent shopping and delivering orders, Shipt Director of Corporate Communications and Outreach Julie Coop told TechCrunch.

“In this structure, shoppers are guaranteed to make at least the minimum in the pay range shown at the time the order is offered to them,” Coop said. “That range is based on the estimated amount of time the order will take to complete. We’ve seen pay levels remain consistent overall, and in some markets slightly higher. As always, Shipt Shoppers receive 100% of their tips on top of order pay.”

Shipt connected me with Stacy Smith, who shops for Shipt in Kalamazoo, Mich. Smith tells TechCrunch she has no issue with the new policy, saying that she’s actually seen a slight increase in her pay. While it was more attractive and economical for her to get bigger orders in the old pay model, the size of the order now doesn’t matter.

“I’m now getting a little less pay in larger-size orders and a little bit increase in the middle or smaller orders, which is the abundance of them,” Smith says. “If we’re not getting paid a little bit more for those smaller to mid-sized orders, that makes sense to me. The big picture is we used to get upset because we had these small or mid-sized orders. But now we get paid a little more for those orders.”

At this point, it’s not clear how many of Shipt’s workers are for or against this new pay structure. Still, a number of workers reached out to Clarke and Bain once the pay structure started rolling out.

“Shipt has been pretty under the radar,” Clarke said. “No one is really paying attention to them — mostly because the workers are scared to speak out.”

Willy Solis, who shops for Shipt in the Dallas area, is one of the shoppers who reached out to Clarke.

“I’ve followed Sarah and Vanessa’s work and their efforts over on Instacart, because I’m on that platform as well,” Solis tells TechCrunch. “I’ve been seeing what they’ve been able to accomplish, so when Sarah asked in our group lounge if anyone is interested in talking, I jumped at it.”

Solis says he had been thinking about organizing for some time, but there had been no catalyst for him and other workers to do something. Now, Solis is working with Clarke and Bain through their Gig Workers Collective to figure out their strategy moving forward.

“While I am afraid of being deactivated due to speaking out, I am hopeful Shipt will hear the Shipt shopper community’s voice as a collective whole, rather than censoring and ignoring dissenting concerns,” he says.

There are two main Facebook groups where Shipt shoppers interact. One is Shipt Shoppers United, which one shopper from Iowa, who asked to remain anonymous, describes as being “a little more real.” The group strictly prohibits people from Shipt’s corporate team, but it’s much smaller in size. This group has just a little over 6,000 members.

The other group is the Shipt Shopper Lounge, which is administered by members from Shipt HQ. This group has more than 100,000 members. It’s in this group where Solis says Shipt has created a “cult-like environment” where the company deletes any negative comments in Facebook groups for shoppers and only lets shoppers see “feel-good stories in an attempt to keep up shopper moral.”

Solis said his comments have been deleted from the Shipt Shopper Lounge Facebook group and his local Shipt group. This culture of fear, Solis says, leaves some shoppers feeling like they have to take every order, or else they’ll be punished in some way, like getting sent low-paying orders or getting deactivated. Or, if they speak out against the company in Facebook groups, some say they fear they’ll be deactivated.

“Shopper feedback has been incredibly important to improving the experience we create for our shopper community, members and retail partners,” Coop said. “We encourage Shipt Shoppers to share their opinions and feedback about their journey with Shipt, and we offer multiple feedback channels where shoppers are encouraged to speak freely to Shipt about their shopper experience.”

But the Iowa-based shopper, for example, referred to the vibe of the group as brainwashing.

“It’s almost like it tries to brainwash you into thinking the company can’t do anything wrong,” the shopper from Iowa says. “They won’t let you post negative things about it. If you do there’s a good chance you’ll be deactivated.”

This Iowa shopper says she saw someone question the pay model Shipt is testing, only for that comment to be deleted. Shipt, however, says it only deactivates people based on things like performance issues.

“Shipt does not make deactivation decisions based on shopper feedback that may be critical of Shipt, but is respectful and falls within our guidelines of appropriate actions,” Coop said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We do have written agreements with all shoppers that outline possible causes for deactivation including consistent performance issues resulting in a poor customer experience or unlawful behavior.”

While the culture and pay practices at Shipt are concerning to Solis, he says what really gets at him is the amount of control he says Shipt tries to exert over him.

“I wake up in the middle of the night scared that I forgot an order and will get deactivated,” he said, “That’s the type of fear they instill into you. I like being an independent contractor but I am not an independent contractor with Shipt in any sense of the word. The exercise of control and them telling me how to do my work and deliveries — it is control.”

Shipt, for example, requires shoppers to take certain training classes, such as Late Delivery refresher, which is sent to shoppers who have been late 10% of the time on their last 50 orders. If shoppers don’t get a perfect score, they risk being disabled from the platform. Here’s what the course, which Shipt has designed to take about 15 to 20 minutes, looks like.

  Smith, on the other hand, says she feels like she can truly be independent on Shipt. Smith pointed to how she can make her own schedule determine which orders she wants to take.

“I know people look into things quite a bit and come up with theories,” Smith says. “But at the end of the day, there’s no way to say Shipt is trying to control this, that and the other. I’ve never felt controlled by them at all.”

Shipt is the latest company in the gig economy to find itself at odds with its workers. Last year marked a turning point among gig workers who deliver for Instacart and DoorDash, as well as people who drive for Uber and Lyft. Between the passage of gig worker protections bill AB 5 and workers at Spin unionizing, gone are the days where workers for these big tech companies can be silenced.

“We do have some headwinds in organizing,” Solis says. “The company is active in our groups. We have a lot of resistance from that standpoint so we need different strategies to let people know they can be anonymous and speak out and be heard.”

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Shipt shoppers are the latest gig workers to organize – TechCrunch Inspired by the work of Instacart shoppers over the last few years, a handful of workers at Target-owned Shipt, a grocery delivery service, are beginning to organize.

[dizzedcom]

Inspired by the work of Instacart shoppers over the last few years, a handful of workers at Target-owned Shipt, a grocery delivery service, are beginning to organize. With the help of two key Instacart shopper-activists, Vanessa Bain and Sarah Clarke, who goes by a pseudonym, Shipt workers are now demanding better wages and the elimination of what some describe as a culture of fear.

“We want to be the first responders,” Clarke tells TechCrunch. “Whenever gig workers find out there is a pay cut or some type of issue, they’ll feel comfortable coming to us.”

In January, Shipt started testing a new pay structure where, instead of basing it on cart size, Shipt takes into account the time it takes to complete and deliver an order. Shipt implemented these changes in Kalamazoo, Mich., San Antonio and Philadelphia. As Gizmodo reported earlier this month, there was some shopper backlash.

Prior to the changes, shoppers had received a $5 flat rate and 7.5% of the total store receipt, one shopper, who asked to remain anonymous, told TechCrunch.

“We are losing money as shoppers at a ridiculous rate,” a shopper from Kalamazoo tells TechCrunch. “A very good, close friend of mine told me in the three weeks since the new structure was implemented, she has lost the equivalent of a car payment. It is a lot of money. Our best guestimation is, we’re all losing about 30% or more. I did four orders this past weekend and I lost money on every single one.”

But Shipt says its goal is to maximize the earning potential for its shoppers and to make sure they get the most value for their time spent. That’s why Shipt is testing this new pay structure in certain markets to better account for time spent shopping and delivering orders, Shipt Director of Corporate Communications and Outreach Julie Coop told TechCrunch.

“In this structure, shoppers are guaranteed to make at least the minimum in the pay range shown at the time the order is offered to them,” Coop said. “That range is based on the estimated amount of time the order will take to complete. We’ve seen pay levels remain consistent overall, and in some markets slightly higher. As always, Shipt Shoppers receive 100% of their tips on top of order pay.”

Shipt connected me with Stacy Smith, who shops for Shipt in Kalamazoo, Mich. Smith tells TechCrunch she has no issue with the new policy, saying that she’s actually seen a slight increase in her pay. While it was more attractive and economical for her to get bigger orders in the old pay model, the size of the order now doesn’t matter.

“I’m now getting a little less pay in larger-size orders and a little bit increase in the middle or smaller orders, which is the abundance of them,” Smith says. “If we’re not getting paid a little bit more for those smaller to mid-sized orders, that makes sense to me. The big picture is we used to get upset because we had these small or mid-sized orders. But now we get paid a little more for those orders.”

At this point, it’s not clear how many of Shipt’s workers are for or against this new pay structure. Still, a number of workers reached out to Clarke and Bain once the pay structure started rolling out.

“Shipt has been pretty under the radar,” Clarke said. “No one is really paying attention to them — mostly because the workers are scared to speak out.”

Willy Solis, who shops for Shipt in the Dallas area, is one of the shoppers who reached out to Clarke.

“I’ve followed Sarah and Vanessa’s work and their efforts over on Instacart, because I’m on that platform as well,” Solis tells TechCrunch. “I’ve been seeing what they’ve been able to accomplish, so when Sarah asked in our group lounge if anyone is interested in talking, I jumped at it.”

Solis says he had been thinking about organizing for some time, but there had been no catalyst for him and other workers to do something. Now, Solis is working with Clarke and Bain through their Gig Workers Collective to figure out their strategy moving forward.

“While I am afraid of being deactivated due to speaking out, I am hopeful Shipt will hear the Shipt shopper communities voice as a collective whole, rather than censoring and ignoring dissenting concerns,” he says.

There are two main Facebook groups where Shipt shoppers interact. One is Shipt Shoppers United, which one shopper from Iowa, who asked to remain anonymous, describes as being “a little more real.” The group strictly prohibits people from Shipt’s corporate team, but it’s much smaller in size. This group has just a little over 6,000 members.

The other group is the Shipt Shopper Lounge, which is administered by members from Shipt HQ. This group has more than 100,000 members. It’s in this group where Solis says Shipt has created a “cult-like environment” where the company deletes any negative comments in Facebook groups for shoppers and only lets shoppers see “feel-good stories in an attempt to keep up shopper moral.”

Solis said his comments have been deleted from the Shipt Shopper Lounge Facebook group and his local Shipt group. This culture of fear, Solis says, leaves some shoppers feeling like they have to take every order, or else they’ll be punished in some way, like getting sent low-paying orders or getting deactivated. Or, if they speak out against the company in Facebook groups, some say they fear they’ll be deactivated.

“Shopper feedback has been incredibly important to improving the experience we create for our shopper community, members and retail partners,” Coop said. “We encourage Shipt Shoppers to share their opinions and feedback about their journey with Shipt, and we offer multiple feedback channels where shoppers are encouraged to speak freely to Shipt about their shopper experience.”

But the Iowa-based shopper, for example, referred to the vibe of the group as brainwashing.

“It’s almost like it tries to brainwash you into thinking the company can’t do anything wrong,” the shopper from Iowa says. “They won’t let you post negative things about it. If you do there’s a good chance you’ll be deactivated.”

This Iowa shopper says she saw someone question the pay model Shipt is testing, only for that comment to be deleted. Shipt, however, says it only deactivates people based on things like performance issues.

“Shipt does not make deactivation decisions based on shopper feedback that may be critical of Shipt, but is respectful and falls within our guidelines of appropriate actions,” Coop said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We do have written agreements with all shoppers that outline possible causes for deactivation including consistent performance issues resulting in a poor customer experience or unlawful behavior.”

While the culture and pay practices at Shipt are concerning to Solis, he says what really gets at him is the amount of control he says Shipt tries to exert over him.

“I wake up in the middle of the night scared that I forgot an order and will get deactivated,” he said, “That’s the type of fear they instill into you. I like being an independent contractor but I am not an independent contractor with Shipt in any sense of the word. The exercise of control and them telling me how to do my work and deliveries — it is control.”

Shipt, for example, requires shoppers to take certain training classes, such as Late Delivery refresher, which is sent to shoppers who have been late 10% of the time on their last 50 orders. If shoppers don’t get a perfect score, they risk being disabled from the platform. Here’s what the course, which Shipt has designed to take about 15 to 20 minutes, looks like.

  Smith, on the other hand, says she feels like she can truly be independent on Shipt. Smith pointed to how she can make her own schedule determine which orders she wants to take.

“I know people look into things quite a bit and come up with theories,” Smith says. “But at the end of the day, there’s no way to say Shipt is trying to control this, that and the other. I’ve never felt controlled by them at all.”

Shipt is the latest company in the gig economy to find itself at odds with its workers. Last year marked a turning point among gig workers who deliver for Instacart and DoorDash, as well as people who drive for Uber and Lyft. Between the passage of gig worker protections bill AB 5 and workers at Spin unionizing, gone are the days where workers for these big tech companies can be silenced.

“We do have some headwinds in organizing,” Solis says. “The company is active in our groups. We have a lot of resistance from that standpoint so we need different strategies to let people know they can be anonymous and speak out and be heard.”

The year of the gig worker uprising

Shipt shoppers are the latest gig workers to organize Inspired by the work of Instacart shoppers over the last few years, a handful of workers at Target-owned…

[chestnutpost]

Celebrate 8 Badass Women Who Are Making The World A Better Place

This post was originally published on this site

This International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating amazing women doing incredible things, from a 16-year-old who sparked an international climate movement to a lawyer taking on the opioid epidemic.

Check out our selection below and let us know who would make it onto your “Women Life Goals” list by posting in the comments. You can also comment on our Facebook page here.

Greta Thunberg

TT News Agency / Reuters

Over the past year, straight-talking Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg has risen to fame as the face of the flourishing youth climate movement. “I don’t want your hope,” she told world leaders at Davos in January. “I want you to panic … And then I want you to act.” Since August 2018, Thunberg has staged school strikes every Friday outside the Swedish parliament, inspiring tens of thousands of students around the world to follow suit.

Saru Jayaraman

Kevork Djansezian/NBC via Getty Images

This American attorney has spent the last 20 years fighting for workers’ rights, including co-founding Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a national advocacy group to improve wages and working conditions for U.S. restaurant workers. “Fundamentally it’s an issue of fairness,” Jayaraman told HuffPost. “No one should be working full time – or more than full time – in this country and not be able to make ends meet.”

Much of Jayaraman’s work focuses on women and people of color, groups she says suffer the most when it comes to exploitation and economic inequality.

“When women’s wages are so low that they’re living off tips, they’ve got to tolerate however their customers treat them, including harassment,” she said. “That makes it not just an issue of sub-minimum wage but one of a terrible lack of physical safety, dignity and self-worth.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is getting a lot of attention right now for her progressive politics (and her impressive dance moves). The congresswoman has been driving for action on climate change. While Trump champions coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, Ocasio-Cortez is pushing for the implementation of a Green New Deal to curb climate breakdown and address worsening inequality in the process.

She’s also not afraid to question the patriarchy.

“The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with,” Ocasio-Cortez told The New Yorker in an interview published Monday. “But I am as powerful as a man, and it drives them crazy.” 

Emma González  

KENA BETANCUR via Getty Images

“We are going to be the kids that you read about in textbooks. Not because we are going to be another statistic about mass shootings in America but because … we are going to be the last mass shooting … We are going to change the law.”

These were the powerful words of Emma González, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, speaking at an anti-gun rally just three days after one of the deadliest high school shootings in U.S. history. In the weeks that followed, González was one of a group of survivors who launched a grassroots gun-reform movement that helped catalyze new gun legislation. She continues to speak publicly about the system that perpetrates gun violence and the organizations which profit from it, such as the NRA. 

Jacinda Ardern

Hannah Peters via Getty Images

While the U.S. president is doing everything he can to build walls, New Zealand’s prime minister has announced she will increase her country’s refugee quota by 50 percent in 2020.

Ardern’s “anti-Trump” style of politics doesn’t stop there, from increases to paid parental leave to the implementation of a well-being budget that recognizes that measuring a country’s success requires more than just monitoring its GDP. Ardern’s government is also taking on climate change, banning new offshore oil and gas exploration while putting forward plans to move to 100 percent renewable energy. 

Peggy Shepard

Roy Rochlin via Getty Images

As co-founder and executive director of WE ACT For Environmental Justice, Peggy Shepard has spent more than three decades fighting to improve the living conditions of those in low-income communities of color.

Testifying before a House of Representatives subcommittee last week, Shepard talked about groups on the frontline of poor environmental conditions, from New Yorkers living in deteriorating, moldy housing to farmworkers exposed to toxic chemicals. “These sacrifice zones are a moral outrage,” she said. “We must pledge to end this dichotomy of two Americas, of throwaway communities, of the acceptance that we will always have winners and losers.”

Maura Healey

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The U.S. is in the grip of an opioid epidemic and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is on a mission to bring those responsible to justice. Last June, Healey filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma – owned by the wealthy Sackler family – for misleading prescribers and the public about the addiction and health risks of their opioids, including OxyContin “to increase the companies’ profits.”

In response, Purdue accuses Healey of trying to publicly vilify the company. “Interestingly, I don’t hear a denial,” the attorney general told Boston’s NPR News Station in February. “Sure, companies are allowed to market their products, to sell their products and, in fact, to try to sell as much of their product as possible. What you cannot do is lie and mislead and deceive.”

Constance Wu

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

In accepting an American Civil Liberties Union award in 2018, Wu said she agreed to make a speech at the ceremony because she was no longer willing to go along with “the systemic culture that birthed my reluctance to speak” – a culture, she said, that encourages Asian-Americans to fit in, keep their heads down and become invisible in the process.

For more content and to be part of the ‘This New World’ community, follow our Facebook page. 

HuffPost’s ‘This New World’ series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com

The post Celebrate 8 Badass Women Who Are Making The World A Better Place appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/celebrate-8-badass-women-who-are-making-the-world-a-better-place/