Vol. 71/No. 21      May 28, 2007

Working 12-hour days and 6-day weeks, Majestic Buffet servers are not paid wages. They take home only what customers give them in tips, minus a $15-$20 daily fee they have to fork over to the boss. The owners also impose fines, such as $10 for not setting a table or scrubbing a plate to the boss’s satisfaction.

Tony Tsai, a former Majestic Buffet worker, said he and another worker, Kenny Chen, were seen as “troublemakers” by the owners. On a busy night in December 2005, a boss threatened to fine all nine waiters $30 each because a shrimp was stuck to a plate Chen had put in the dishwasher. Instead of paying the fine, the workers walked out, Tsai said.

The workers have been picketing Majestic Buffet every Thursday at noon for the last several months. At the May 3 picket line, 12 people held signs outside the restaurant’s entrance saying, “Pay workers now!” and “Stop the retaliation!” Four workers from Saigon Grill in New York City and a garment worker from Newark, New Jersey, joined the picket. Many drivers honked and waved in solidarity as they passed by. One young person hung out the passenger-side window with his fist in the air and screamed, “Boycott Majestic!”

Meanwhile, delivery workers in Manhattan, almost all immigrants from China, have been fighting for better wages and conditions at several restaurants, including Saigon Grill, Ollie’s, and Our Place. Their struggle is backed by a coalition of groups, including the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, in a campaign called Justice Will Be Served!

Delivery workers at the two Saigon Grill restaurants in Manhattan were locked out March 2 after refusing to sign a contract stipulating they were paid adequately and would not sue the boss. The workers started picketing March 7, demanding their jobs back with overtime and back pay.

The conditions at Saigon Grill are similar to those at Majestic. Wages are $1.60 an hour with no breaks, overtime pay, or health benefits, workers said. Aside from the purchase and maintenance of bikes, delivery workers face risk of injury on the job. But if they take time off to see a doctor, or for any other reason, they have to pay a $15 fine for each day they miss.

About 130 college students and workers from other restaurants joined a May 4 picket line outside the restaurant chain’s Greenwich Village location.

“We’re helping out here,” said Jerry Weng, who works at Ollie’s, another Chinese restaurant where a similar fight is going on. “A lot of Ollie’s workers have come out to support this fight.”

“We’re in the middle of finals, but I came because I think that this fight gives me a chance to help people who really need it,” Paul Lee, a senior at New York University, told the Militant.

Many immigrant workers from China are exploited by employment agencies in addition to restaurant bosses, said Tsai.

Such agencies often charge workers 15 percent of their first month’s wages for referring them to prospective employers all over the country. During a May 3 visit to Ming Du Employment Agency in New York’s Chinatown, jobs were posted not only for New York, but also for southwest Georgia, northeast Pennsylvania, and western Kentucky.

“We kept working under these unfair conditions, because it’s like this everywhere, though Saigon Grill is particularly bad,” Yu Guan Ke, a Saigon Grill worker, said at a March 9 picket line outside the chain’s Upper West Side location. “But then we heard about other workers who fought for better conditions.”

“These fights have always taken place,” Peter Kwong, a professor of Asian American Studies and Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College in Manhattan, told the Militant. “Wherever workers face this type of exploitation, there is a fightback. But they rarely get coverage in the mainstream media or support from the labor movement.” Kwong is also the author of several books on Chinese immigrant workers in the United States, including Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community.

Many immigrant workers from China have been impacted by the movement demanding legalization of the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, Kwong said.

At the May Day march in New York, a spirited contingent of about 200 organized by the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association came from Chinatown and joined some 10,000 protesters, mostly workers from Latin America, demanding legalization and an end to raids and deportations.

Olga Rodríguez and Paul Pederson contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Electronics strikers in Scotland rally support
Two N.Y. transit workers killed on job in one week  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home