Restaurant workers fired days after filing for union

Less than a week after front of house staff at the Rose Lane bar and restaurant inside the Park Lane Hotel filed to unionize with the Restaurant Workers Union, hotel management fired every worker in the nascent union’s bargaining unit, an RWU official said. 

Workers with scheduled shifts on Monday at the boutique hotel on Central Park South received phone calls from managers hours before their shifts began telling them not to come in. They were also told that the contract with the staffing agency that employed the workers, The Good Kind Group, had been terminated.

Later in the day, workers received an email from a recruiter at Good Kind confirming that the agreement had been cancelled and that their work assignments “have ended effective immediately.” The recruiter wrote that workers will be paid for the hours they were supposed to work this week, and the company was “committed to doing everything we can to place you with a different client and are actively reviewing new opportunities.”

In total, 21 workers are in the bargaining unit with RWU.

"This morning, Park Lane Hotel, located on ‘Billionaires' Row’ in Manhattan and owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, fired ALL of the workers of the Rose Lane bar and restaurant who last week announced their intention to unionize and filed a recognition petition with the NLRB,” the RWU said in a statement. “In response to the workers' demands for basic dignity, such as consistent scheduling, the Park Lane management has responded with an outrageous and illegal attack on the labor rights of the Rose Lane workers and of every worker who is in a union or wants to be in a union. The use of a staffing agency in this case is only a diversion and a pretext for violating the labor rights of the Rose Lane workers, something that has been experienced by more precarious workers everywhere.”

More than 80 percent of front of house workers at Rose Lane signed union authorization cards and publicized their unionization on Aug 21 in an open letter to management. Workers gave management until Aug. 23 to respond and potentially voluntarily recognize the union. They later said they heard nothing from management until Monday morning’s calls informing them about the layoffs.

Emails sent to several Park Lane Hotel email addresses requesting comment on the firings did not receive a reply. The Qatar Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund directly controlled by the Qatari government, purchased the hotel in August 2023 for $623 million.

An email to The Good Kind Group seeking comment also did not receive a response.

‘Demeaning and disrespectful'

Jenn S., a full-time bartender at Rose Lane who was among the workers fired on Monday, told The Chief on Sunday that a predominant factor in workers' desire to unionize was management’s cancellation in the last six months of 15-minute breaks and free staff meals with each shift. Organizing had begun before those changes with the goal of raising wages and curtailing overstaffing that resulted in workers receiving fewer tips, but she said the cuts to breaks and meals were the “last straw.”

"I've never worked in a restaurant where you can't get a 15-minute break,” said Jenn S., who asked to withhold her last name, fearing future retaliation. "If management sees us sitting down for a minute or snacking on something that we find, we get in trouble for that, and I just think that is incredibly demeaning and disrespectful."

The bartender added that it was an easy decision to sign a union card, and that over half of the workers at the restaurant had worked there for over two years. “Everyone works really well, is strong together, treats each other well, and we deserve something better,” she said.

The workers who unionized with RWU were some of the only non-union workers in the hotel.

RWU started initially as a mutual aid project in 2020 looking to help undocumented workers who were unemployed and struggling during the pandemic. It officially became a union in 2021 and in January 2023 workers at the Italian-style cafe Lodi in Rockefeller Center became the first to join the independent union.

"We were formed to fill a gap because bigger unions are not interested in organizing smaller shops, so we have to do it ourselves,” Eric Schmidt, a co-founder of RWU and server at Lodi, the Rockefeller Center restaurant, who led the organizing work there, said on Sunday. Lodi owner Ignacio Mattos declined to recognize the union and a month later workers voted against joining the union, after what workers told The Guardian was a coordinated union-busting campaign.

Management denied those claims and earlier this year an administrative law judge dismissed the charges that the NLRB had brought against Lodi management. The judge didn’t order a new election or compel management to bargain with workers, Documented reported.

In July, Mattos announced that Lodi will close in the fall.

Other workers at the Park Lane Hotel, including the kitchen staff at Rose Lane, are unionized with the Hotel Trades and Gaming Council. A spokesperson for the HTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the firings.

Jenn S. said Sunday that she and her coworkers were inspired by their unionized colleagues and hoped that unionizing would bring them similar benefits.

“Everybody in the hotel is unionized but us,” she said a day before the firings. “It's our time."

hfreeman@thechiefleader.com