IT’S causing chaos for the city’s upper-end eateries – without apparent benefit to anyone except the folks wreaking the havoc. They say their goal is social justice, but some would say it looks more like a shakedown.
The group’s name is ROC, the Restaurant Opportunities Center, and it has targeted top restaurants (Redeye Grill, Daniel, Cité and more) for payments – allegedly in the name of restaurant workers.
With considerable success – for ROC and its chieftains, that is. Workers, it seems, haven’t benefited much.
How does it work? Ask Shelly Fireman, the patriarch of the Fireman Hospitality Group, which owns Redeye Grill, Shelly’s and other eateries. He’s been a ROC target for 15 months.
“In November ’05, ROC stormed our restaurant, Redeye Grill, in the middle of dinner service, armed with loudspeakers, noisemakers and cameras,” Fireman wrote in Restaurant News.
They handed him a letter accusing him of “subjecting our employees to wage and hour violations, sexual abuse, verbal abuse and racial discrimination . . . The letter demanded we send them $3 million and threatened that if we refused to pay, ROC would launch pickets, media attacks and lawsuits against us.”
FIREMAN contacted ROC im mediately – but the group’s chief, Saru Jayaraman, said she had no specific claims. Yet she still demanded to bargain collectively on behalf of all Redeye employees.
He declined – federal labor law prohibits employers from bargaining with any “representative” who hasn’t actually been chosen by his workers.
So ROC launched weekly protests at his restaurants. Then, after the National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2005 that ROC’s protests are not legal job actions, Jayaraman agreed to cease and desist – but instead ramped up the protests.
How? By claiming the protests were now “prayer vigils” – with help from Barbara Lundblad, a professor at Union Theological Seminary.
Months later, that pretense became unnecessary, when the NLRB ruled that it actually lacks jurisdiction, because ROC isn’t a labor union. But Lundblad also encouraged students in her “Preaching for Social Transformation” class to attend protests. Indeed, Jayaraman recruits protesters from a class she teaches at NYU, too.
IN fact, ROC protesters may be mostly students and the true- believers that New York protests always draw – with almost no actual restaurant workers.
Well, a few are; they work at Colors, the Greenwich Village restaurant that ROC owns – where doing 30 hours of ROC activism every six months is a condition of employment.
ROC chief Jayaraman, a Yale/Harvard-trained lawyer, says her goal is to organize “the 99 percent of the [restaurant] industry that’s non-union.” Yet her group hasn’t unionized anything – not even its own eatery.
Soon after Colors opened, its employees (who had invested money in what they believed was a cooperative enterprise) revolted, upset that ROC management was pocketing 40 percent of the earnings and giving seed investors another 40 percent, leaving just 20 percent to the staff.
How could a pro-labor group open a non-union shop? Well, ROC isn’t a union – it’s a charity.
Indeed, founded after 9/11 as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt charity, ROC’s official goal was to help dislocated workers from Windows on the World, the eatery that used to top the World Trade Center.
That worthy aim drew in $500,000 in start-up cash from Unite HERE Local 100, which represents hotel and restaurant workers. The Red Cross and the September 11th Fund also donated.
Based on what ROC’s “help” turned out to be, they should ask for their money back.
WINDOWS owner David Emil began his own recovery from 9/11 by opening Noche in Times Square. Since the new place was smaller, he couldn’t provide enough jobs for all of his former Windows workers.
Enter ROC, which hit him with a huge protest the night before his grand opening. The next day, Emil caved, agreeing to take on another 35 ROC members, and adding a catering operation to (he hoped) not lose money with his suddenly enlarged staff.
Noche went belly-up shortly thereafter – and all those former Windows employees were back out of work.
However, Jayaraman made out well – ROC got lots of friendly press attention, and a start on what’s now its regular “business.”
Jayaraman is a real radical – besides Malcom X and Che pictures, her office has featured a sign saying, “Capitalism is not healthy for children and other living things.” Essentially, she says she wants to eliminate capitalism from the restaurant industry.
“Our challenge to capitalism is not simply building alternative institutions,” she explains, “but actually, over time . . . developing new owners . . . who will infiltrate the New York State Restaurant Association and ultimately co-opt it for workers’ rights.”
Jayaraman explains: “While a union has to go in and organize the majority of a shop to get some kind of collective bargaining agreement, in our case we’ll have a group of workers come in . . . a small number from a restaurant, and we will ‘organize’ them to create a demand letter, eventually file litigation, protest in front of the restaurant and get press.”
She says she’s unfamilar with the word “shakedown,” but has heard the term “extortion” used. “We don’t engage in extortion,” she says. “What we do is call upon the public to see if they want to support a restaurant that’s violating the law. Once the restaurant is no longer violating the law, we encourage the public to eat there.”
OTHER restaurants that gave in to ROC’s demands have met fates similar to Noche’s. In early 2005, Smith & Wollensky Group paid ROC $164,000 to end protests at two of its eateries, Cité and Park Avenue Café. ROC boasts that it also got agreements from the management regarding overtime pay, lunch breaks and sick and vacation days.
Citing financial losses in ’05 and ’06, the company has since put both restaurants up for sale.
But some eateries fight back. Restaurant Daniel has sued ROC for harassing its customers with chants like “One, two, three, four! Don’t walk through that restaurant door! Five, six, seven, eight! Until they don’t discriminate!”
Some employees – angry at ROC’s bid to “represent” them without their consent – have begun staging counterprotests: “Two, four, six, eight! Daniel does not discriminate!”
ROC claims that Daniel re serves the highest-paid, front-of-the-restaurant positions for whites. But many of Daniel’s Hispanic workers say the only thing ROC protests do for them is steal their tips by scaring away business.
This all came to a head last month, when ROC protesters actually began booing Daniel’s Hispanic employees – the very people ROC claims to be fighting for.
“I’ve been working here for four years and a half,” said Javier Alcantarilla, who began as a busboy. “I’ve been promoted four times so far. I’ve never had problems. Never, never. I’ve never seen any discrimination.”
A visit to the restaurant supports that: Daniel De La Rosa, another Hispanic, serves as the maitre d’, and Caucasian employees are a clear minority.
Asked about the Daniel employees who joined ROC in making charges, workers describe them as “troublemakers” who “would give you an attitude when you ask[ed] them to do something.”
“They [Daniel’s management] helped me get my green card,” says Fausto Prado, a 9-year employee. “Everybody is friendly and working together.”
Had Daniel treated him fairly? “Believe me, I have two houses,” Prado said. “I live in North Bergen. I drive myself to work everyday.”
His salary? “This year, I only got $79,000,” Prado says. “But I took six weeks off.
Discrimination? Or shakedown?
The answer seems obvious, but this is New York City – where some people will buy anything if you call it “progressive.”
telliott@nypost.com