Little Big Union (LBU), a group of Little Big Burger employees who sought to unionize the Portland-born restaurant chain, lost its union election on Tuesday.
Update, July 25:
Little Big Union acknowledged the loss in a statement sent to reporters Wednesday, but vowed to keep fighting on behalf of workers.
“We knew what we were up against from the beginning,” said Ashley Reyes, a recently fired Little Big Burger employee, in the statement. “Little Big Burger has a track record of mistreating its employees, and we saw that in the election too, firing organizers, ripping down union posters, and rolling out a pretty sophisticated disinformation campaign with the help of their lawyers.”
Little Big Union is “weighing responses and options together” for how to move forward, according to the media release.
Original story:
LBU workers announced their intention to unionize back in March, citing low wages, unpredictable schedules, and a lack of transparency around decisions to fire employees as issues they’d work to fix using collective bargaining rights. They said they took inspiration from the Burgerville Workers Union, which became the first federally recognized fast food union in the country last year.
Chanticleer Holdings, Inc., Little Big Burger’s parent company, refused to voluntarily recognize the union, prompting the need for a vote among all Little Big Burger workers at Oregon’s 12 locations. That vote happened this week.
“As it stands currently, the union did not win the election,” an LBU spokesperson told the Mercury. Of 109 eligible voters, 70 people voted, with 29 votes in favor of unionizing and 41 votes against it. LBU’s spokesperson said 12 of the cast ballots are contested, meaning their validity has been called into question.
The lead-up to this vote was contentious. Little Big Burger employees alleged retaliation and even firings from their higher-ups after LBU’s plans were made public, and Chanticleer Holdings accused LBU of being “funded by outsiders and led by insurgents who bounce from employer to employer in order to create unrest.”
Chanticleer called for the unionization vote to happen in June. It’s an unusual move for an employer, rather than workers, to request a union vote, and LBU suspected Chanticleer was trying to control the terms of the vote and quash the union before it could get off the ground. Workers pushed back on Chanticleer’s suggested terms of having in-person elections at every store, which they said would make it difficult for some workers to vote because of timing. LBU negotiated for—and won—a mail-in election instead, which they said would ensure full participation.
Still, that wasn’t enough to gain a majority of votes in favor of unionizing.
It’s not clear what LBU’s next step will be now that Little Big Burger employees have voted against unionizing. LBU declined to comment further at this time, but we will update this post if we receive more information about the vote.
“Chanticleer Holdings, Inc., Little Big Burger’s parent company, refused to voluntarily recognize the union, prompting the need for a vote among all Little Big Burger workers at Oregon’s 12 locations.”
Looks like Chanticleer was the one looking out for the interests of the rank and file by resisting LBU’s desire to avoid a democratic vote. Good for them.
If the vote was 41-29, and twelve votes are in question, the whole outcome could be in question. So we don’t know for absolutely sure if then no side won this.
And despite the outcome, the two spiteful, vindictive antiunion(and therefore antiworker, because worker always lose when a unionization effort is rejected) need to remember that there was a large quantity of workers who did vote to unionize, and did so in a climate when it is almost impossible for unionization efforts to prevail, what with workers being FORCED to watch every speech and video presentation management presents to get them to vote “no” and are threatened with job losses and other forms of retribution if the unionization effort succeeds, so its bullshit for the posters above to act like it was silly to even try to organize.
There was and is good reason to try and organize these workers, and nobody who isn’t a fast food magnate has any real reason to oppose or sneer at effort to organize fast food workers.
And those who voted “no” did so largely out of fear of management retribution-nobody who works at a fast food place genuinely believes union representation would be a bad thing. Why the hell would they? If you have a fast food job, management treats you like shit. You have no chance-unless you live in one of the rare places with living wage laws-of earning enough to support yourself, and contrary to the “it’s just high school kids, so why should they get decent pay and decent conditions” canard, more and more people have to work fast food jobs as a long-time occupation just to survive at some level.
It was right to try and the fight will go on. Workers have no rights and no dignity in the workplace when they don’t have a union to stand with them and help them defend themselves against exploitation and abuse.
The real takeaway here is that, if management gets to control the terms of the vote, gets to threaten and intimidate workers, and gets to force the vote to extend to workplaces where the union hadn’t BEEN organizing, it’s probable that management will be able to rig the outcome. This was NOT the employees expressing their opposition to union representation-it was the employees being coerced into voting against their interests, and things like this have happened as long as the labor movement has existed.