The Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) recently announced that the new Seattle branch of the controversial Restaurant Opportunities Center would be holding an inaugural event this week to release the Seattle issue of its “Behind the Kitchen Door” report series.
In March 2014, the Freedom Foundation learned the labor group known for its aggressive shakedown campaigns against restauranteurs was partnering with SEIU Local 775 to open a Seattle office. A Freedom Foundation report released that month documented ROC’s troubled history and predicted the group would soon launch a Seattle office with one of its formulaic “Behind the Kitchen Door” reports. As it turns out, we were a little ahead of the curve.
The Facebook page for ROC-Seattle went live in February 2015 and the webpage for ROC-Seattle notes the chapter was founded in 2015.
ROC has built a reputation for aggressive tactics that led the former Attorney General of New York—ROC’s birthplace—to describe ROC as “a labor organization disguised as a nonprofit corporation” operating “on the fringes of traditional labor laws” and using “old-fashioned intimidation to shake down its targets.”
According to the WSLC, Thursday’s event—billed as a “Restaurant Industry Summit”—sought to “bring together” the “diverse stakeholders” of Seattle’s leftist echo-chamber, such as Socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, ROC founder Saru Jayaraman and progressive Seattle employers.
The Freedom Foundation predicted last year the ROC report would be called, “Behind the Kitchen Door: (Something about Inequality) in (Greater Seattle/King County’s) (Thriving/Growing) Restaurant Industry.”
As it turns out, the actual title is, “Behind the Kitchen Door: The Highs and Lows of Seattle’s Booming Restaurant Economy.” The paper’s conclusion is no less predictable:
Seattle has made tremendous strides toward improving working conditions for low-wage workers by enacting laws that require employers to offer paid leave, setting limits on the use of conviction and arrest records in hiring, and raising the minimum wage towards a living wage. However, there is clearly far more work to be done.
If there wasn’t work left to do, it would be difficult for ROC to justify its presence in Seattle.
The Freedom Foundation also seems to have accurately outlined ROC’s close ties with the so-called “SEIU Local 775.”
According to ROC-Seattle’s website, the “lead organizer” in Seattle is Rachel Dehn. Federal reports indicate Dehn was employed as an organizer for SEIU 775 in 2012 and 2013.
ROC’s Seattle report, released this week, contains a number of linguistic and methodological peculiarities used to bolster some of its questionable claims and rhetoric.
For example, ROC claims nearly half of surveyed restaurant employees report earning “poverty wages,” which ROC defines as anything less than enough money for a single worker to comfortably support a family of four. ROC uses as its benchmark the Department of Labor’s Lower Living Standard Income Level (LLSIL). The 2015 LLSIL estimate from DOL for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton, WA, metropolitan statistical area is $44,928. A single worker earning nearly $45,000 per year makes 365 percent of the poverty threshold as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Yet, under ROC’s definition, such a person is considered to be earning “poverty wages.”
Additionally, the DOL clearly states that its LLSIL estimates are meant for the sole purpose of determining eligibility for youths and adults for certain workforce development services under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, noting, “…these figures should not be used for any statistical purposes, and are valid only for those purposes under WIOA as defined in the law.”
Undeterred, ROC chose to use the LLSIL guideline anyway to inflate the number of workers appearing to earn “poverty wages.”
Rhetorically, the ROC report claims, “High road and low road are industry terms referring to opposing business strategies for achieving productivity and profitability” (emphasis in original). But a quick Google search of “high road restaurants” or “low road restaurants” indicates the phrases are associated with and used almost exclusively by ROC to describe employers it likes and those it doesn’t. It appears ROC is simply trying to mainstream as “industry terms” language it invented.
These are just a few observations gleaned from the first few pages of the report.
As the Freedom Foundation warned last year, “ROC’s history of aggressive shake-downs, legal trouble, hypocrisy and inaccuracy means any advocacy or research produced under the ROC banner needs to be approached with skepticism.”
For more information about ROC and its background, please refer to the Freedom Foundation’s report from last year.
