Employees celebrate at Le Diplomate yesterday after informing managers of their intent to unionize. Photograph courtesy Unite Here Local 25. Employees across five restaurants owned by two of DC’s biggest restaurateurs announced plans to unionize this week. The restaurants include Le Diplomate, St. Anselm, and Pastis from Stephen Starr and Rasika Penn Quarter and Modena from Ashok Bajaj. Among the issues workers say they are fighting for: better pay, more predictable hours, and respect they say is lacking from management at both companies. “The status quo in restaurants is that anything goes as long as the guests are happy, and I’ve personally witnessed some unfair treatment, a little bit of cultural insensitivity,” says Pablo Zuniga, a server at Le Diplomate. “Having a union would place us in a better position to have mutual respect from management, no matter your background, no matter your race, your gender identity, or your language.” Neither Starr Restaurants nor Bajaj’s Knightsbridge Restaurant Group immediately said whether they would voluntarily recognize the unions. “Our day-to-day staff – the people in the kitchens, on the floor, and behind the bar – are the lifeblood of St. Anselm, Le Diplomate and Pastis. We recognize that it’s only with them and their incredible work ethic that we’ve been able to achieve such success. We take pride in the benefits, professional workplace, and growth opportunities our workers enjoy, and we believe that’s why we have a stellar reputation in the industry, with many of our employees staying with us for years and growing as we grow,” a representative for Starr Restaurants says in a written statement. The group did not comment further on specific anecdotes and allegations in this story. Bajaj declined to comment. Paul Schwalb, the executive secretary-treasurer of Unite Here Local 25, says workers from both restaurant groups approached the union around the same time last year, and interest in unionizing spread as they talked to others in their sister restaurants. In his decades-long career, Schwalb says he’s never seen this scale of restaurant workers attempting to unionize at the same time in the same city. If they’re successful, the unions would represent 500 front- and back-of-house workers across the five restaurants—many of them immigrants. “I think it has something to do with post-Covid America and post-Covid Washington, DC, where people felt—I think correctly—that they were expendable,” Schwalb says. “People who had worked for years or decades in the industry realized that from one day to the next, they could be out on the street without anything… Workers, when they opened their eyes, began to take stock of the conditions in a restaurant, which often are quite intolerable.” At Le Diplomate, Zuniga says he’s witnessed some discrepancies in how immigrants or those with accents are talked to and treated by management. One of his colleagues, Lorena Carrillo López, a line cook, says about six months ago her son and daughter, who’s pregnant, were in a car accident, and her daughter was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. (Carillo López spoke to Washingtonian via a Spanish translator with Unite Here Local 25.) She asked to leave as soon as she found out about the crash, but she says her manager told her she could not and that she needed to finish her work. Carrillo López says she was given the okay to leave two hours later only after she showed a photo of the accident scene and said, “Do you have family? This could be your family.” Zuniga and Carrillo López also both said they’d like to see increases in wages for kitchen staff. Carrillo López says she makes $21 per hour, up from an initial $17.50 as a prep cook, after working at the restaurant for four years. “It is not fair pay,” Carrillo López says. “I have to work two jobs to pay my bills, to have a good life.” Several employees for Starr Restaurants also complained about the instability in their schedules. Yesenia Delgado, a prep cook at St. Anselm for five years, says that after her hours were substantially cut early last year, she went to a manager to ask why. He told her she didn’t have the right to ask about the schedule, says Delgado, an immigrant from El Salvador who spoke to Washingtonian via a translator. The incident led to a panic attack at work so severe—her chest hurt and she fell to the ground—she ended up in the hospital. Ongoing anxiety about her hours and ability to pay medical bills for her mother, who had a brain tumor, led to a second panic attack and hospital visit several months later. “Me alone, they’re not going to listen to. But all together, they will,” Delgado says. Ary Hartmann, a server at Starr’s French bistro Pastis in Union Market, says she worries that unpredictable cuts and fluctuations in her hours could jeopardize her eligibility for the company’s healthcare going forward. Starr restaurants requires employees to maintain an average of at least 30 hours per week to qualify for its health insurance plan. “We don’t get definite answers as a staff about what our schedules are going to look like,” Hartmann says. “A lot of it is, so far, based off of what they need for demand. There have been weeks where I’ve been scheduled 48 hours, and then the next week, I’ll be scheduled 24 hours,” Hartmann says. She says she was told the hours would “average out,” but “I don’t know that. I can’t see the math for that. And I also don’t control my schedule.”  For Bajaj’s restaurants, a big part of the unionization effort has centered around changes to the way front-of-house staff are paid after the company implemented a 20 percent service charge model last summer. Instead of earning $10 an hour plus gratuities, servers are now paid on commission and bartenders and other front-of-house staff make $18 an hour plus payout from the service charge. Juan Zavala, who’s been a bartender at Rasika Penn Quarter for seven years, says the management told staff they’d be making more money under the new system, but he says that hasn’t been the case for a lot of employees. Zavala says his paycheck every two weeks now averages $300 to $400 less than what it used to be. He’s started driving Uber on the side to make ends meet. Zavala says the way he and his colleagues are treated was another factor driving their desire to unionize. He says he often acts as translator for the staff’s many Spanish speakers, and he recalls helping one colleague communicate that she couldn’t make it to work one day when she wasn’t able to find a babysitter. He says the manager told him to tell the employee that if she didn’t come into work, she’d be fired. (She ended coming in late.) Another time when he was cleaning behind the bar, Zavala says Bajaj came over to tell him something he’s didn’t quite hear. When he asked Bajaj to repeat himself, Zavala says Bajaj asked a manager why he hired people who don’t speak English. Bajaj declined to comment on both instances. “People who doesn’t speak English, they don’t get the respect they should be getting, and I see that a lot of times by the management,” Zavala says. Carlos Acosta, a line cook at downtown Italian restaurant Modena, says the unionization effort is the “best thing that’s happened since I came to this country” 20 years ago. He hopes that the effort will lead to a better healthcare plan that he can afford to join. “I’ve had to pay bills because of medical issues and [the union] will mean these bills are not catastrophic,” he says in a written statement. What’s next? The restaurants could opt to voluntarily recognize the unions or end up with a vote administered by the National Labor Relations Board. If a majority of employees who vote decide they want to unionize, the restaurants will be legally obligated to negotiate a contract with them in good faith. Schwalb also anticipates that this news will be a catalyst for more restaurant workers in DC to unionize and potentially a “sea change” for the city’s hospitality industry at large. “We’re hearing more and more calls from people in other restaurants,” Schwalb says. “This is the beginning of a movement to change how workers in restaurants are treated. And that I do think is long overdue.” This story has been updated to clarify how staff at Rasika are paid. The post Workers at Some of DC’s Best-Known Restaurants Move to Unionize first appeared on Washingtonian.