Restaurant Opportunities Center - Minnesota

“The world we're fighting for is one where no decision about a worker’s material conditions is made without them."

Sheli Stein is the Lead Organizer of Restaurant Opportunities Center of Minnesota (ROC-MN), a worker center that advocates for fair, dignified wages and working conditions across the state of Minnesota.

ROC-MN is one of the only organizations in the Twin Cities metro area focused on organizing workers in the restaurant and food-service industries. Established in 2016 during the Minneapolis campaign for a $15 minimum wage, ROC-MN works to improve working and living conditions for low-wage restaurant workers in Minnesota by amplifying workers’ voices at every decision-making level.

Today, ROC-MN includes a core leadership team of 70 restaurant workers, and over 700 members from across the industry, including fast-food, quick service, and fine-dining full-service restaurants workers. Their remarkable wins for workers in an often-intractable field, combined with their innovative organizing structure elevated them as 2023 Bush Prize: Minnesota winners.

Our power is collective

“The work that we do is power-building work. That’s what encompasses everything,” says Stein.

ROC-MN builds power with restaurant workers using three core tactics: worker education, worker leadership development, and organizing community support for workers. Worker education (or co governance) is ROC-MN’s broadest program. It starts with canvassing restaurant workers across the Twin Cities to invite them to ROC’s “Know Our Rights” program.

“We know that when workers understand their rights and understand how to exercise them and feel backed up by a community of other workers, they feel a lot more powerful,” says Stein.

Through 16 trainings per year, led by a committee of restaurant workers, ROC-MN educates workers about basic workplace rights and their right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act.

Our power is collective

“The work that we do is power-building work. That’s what encompasses everything,” says Stein.

“We know that when workers understand their rights and understand how to exercise them and feel backed up by a community of other workers, they feel a lot more powerful,” says Stein.

Through 16 trainings per year, led by a committee of restaurant workers, ROC-MN educates workers about basic workplace rights and their right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act. This includes a right to unionization, but also other kinds of actions employees can take together to improve their working conditions.

Through these trainings, ROC-MN and its members not only support workers in understanding their legal rights, but also begin to help workers build a framework for understanding their collective power as united workers.

“The work that we do is power-building work. That’s what encompasses everything,” says Stein.

“We know that when workers understand their rights and understand how to exercise them and feel backed up by a community of other workers, they feel a lot more powerful,” says Stein.

Through 16 trainings per year, led by a committee of restaurant workers, ROC-MN educates workers about basic workplace rights and their right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act.

Sheli Stein, ROC-MN Lead Organizer

Photo courtesy of ROC-MN

This includes a right to unionization, but also other kinds of actions employees can take together to improve their working conditions.

This requires intentional consciousness-building work, as Stein describes: “In order to shift us towards the world we want, you’ve got to believe in certain things that actually are pretty contrary to the messaging that we've been given in our lives. The message for most of us as workers is that you ain't got power; that you will be rewarded for trying to resolve issues on your own, and that you should take what is given. If you believe those things, you've got no hope in organizing.”

Stein says that breaking down these common beliefs and taking a hard look at how power currently operates in their members workplaces is where their political education begins. ROC defines power as “the capacity to make the decisions that shape the conditions of our lives.” With this in mind, Stein says, “Our first step is to really look at power and acknowledge the heartbreaking truth that, currently in our world, workers in the restaurant industry as individuals have very little power. But also that our power does exist, and that it is inherently collective. When we are united we can demand things and make material changes and shift the power balance.”

With this grounding in place, ROC-MN supports workers across the restaurant industry to come together to fight for changes, collectively. For some workers, this means unionization, which ROC-MN supports in partnership with UNITE HERE Local 17. In other cases it means training workers on how to organize within their workplaces and their communities to fight for fairer, more dignified workplaces.

Explosive growth

Of the eight years Stein has worked at ROC-MN, four were spent as the sole staff member. A significant shift came for the organization in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruption for the restaurant industry and its workers.

“In 2020 our work really exploded,” says Stein, “COVID effectively shut down our entire industry all at once in ways that other industries didn't experience. We had a ton of workers navigating unemployment, and then a whole other swath of workers who were not eligible for unemployment and were still working, but with no safety measures.”

Despite still being the only full-time staff member, Stein says that ROC-MN was able to help organize a group of a committed group of worker-leaders in the industry to take on major campaigns for workers and win.

“During that time, we took on some of our biggest campaigns until that point. We were doing some relief work, doing vaccine clinics, but also took on the Bartmann Group which is a series of eight restaurants in the Twin Cities,” explains Stein, “With those workers, we won, with the support of the Attorney General's Office, almost a quarter million dollars in back wages for Bartmann workers.”

During that same period, ROC-MN organized with Caribou Coffee workers who had been denied hazard pay and personal protective equipment by their employer. Thanks to their organizing and the community pressure that resulted, workers won both.

Stein credits an influx of community and financial support for grassroots organizing during 2020 for the growth and interest in ROC-MN’s work. This kind of community support for workers can be a key factor in advancing worker demands. Because of that, ROC is dedicated to organizing community members to understand and engage in workers’ struggles as one of their core strategies.

“Our workers are renters, our workers are people of faith, our workers are sports players, you name it,” says Stein, “We know that our power doesn't just exist as part of the labor movement. It exists as members of churches, as members of communities that surround our identities, and so we draw those communities into the fights that workers are taking on.”

Experts in their industry

Since 2020, ROC-MN’s staff has grown to four full-time organizers, all of whom come from the restaurant industry.

“I started as a member and was recruited into this work as a server in a restaurant,” shares Stein, “I worked in restaurants for 15 years and have worked in every part of a restaurant - in the back and the front, dishwasher, cook, server, bar – everything.”

Stein believes that ROC-MN’s staff’s shared background in restaurants goes beyond providing helpful context for their work.

“Our staff does not come out of professional organizing. We come out of restaurants, and our families are in restaurants and our friends are in restaurants,” says Stein. “So, for us, there's a real stake in it and a real understanding of the work.”

Photo courtesy of ROC-MN

Since 2020, ROC-MN’s staff has grown to four full-time organizers, all of whom come from the restaurant industry.

Stein believes that ROC-MN’s staff’s shared background in restaurants goes beyond providing helpful context for their work.

“Our staff does not come out of professional organizing. We come out of restaurants, and our families are in restaurants and our friends are in restaurants,” says Stein, “So, for us, there's a real stake in it and a real understanding of the work.”

Stein says that having years of experience in the industry they’re organizing allows ROC-MN staff to train workers in a deeper way than typical labor organizing, allowing their campaigns to be more successful. This depth of knowledge has led to breakthroughs in organizing restaurant workers in an industry long considered resistant – even impenetrable – to labor organizing.

Since 2020, ROC-MN’s staff has grown to four full-time organizers, all of whom come from the restaurant industry.

Stein believes that ROC-MN’s staff’s shared background in restaurants goes beyond providing helpful context for their work.

“Over the last year, we've seen our workers break ground in many different places and know they will continue to do so.” explains Stein, “That comes directly out of our leadership development trainings and rights-based education. From there, they're able to move and become members of unions and organize their workplaces.”

ROC-MN refers to their organizing structure as “the snowflake model,” composed of hubs of member organizers and spokes of the fellow workers they organize, radiating out to create a network of connected, organized workers throughout the industry. ROC-MN's 70 worker-leaders take on the role of mapping out their relationships and invite their coworkers to participate in ROC-MN's power-building programs. Most worker-leaders organize with between six to 15 other workers, allowing ROC-MN to scale its work to more and more workers and workplaces.

“With this model, we've been able to prove that workers can and will organize in an industry that has incredibly deep-rooted structural divisions of workers along racial and gender lines,” says Stein, “We've done that by winning back nearly half a million dollars in stolen wages. We've done that by showing that workers can win policy changes that materially benefit workers through hazard pay, through PPE provisions in a time of crisis. And we've shown that workers, when they're invested in their own leadership, can win unions. Those are all things that somewhere down the line a manager or an owner said were impossible.”

*A lot of power in the industry***

As Stein looks ahead to the future, they look forward to continued wins for the ROC-MN's members and restaurant workers throughout the Twin Cities. Alongside increased worker power, they believe increased community and financial support will help sustain their work, allowing for more robust wins as their work, networks, and strategies continue to grow.

“We've proven that there's a lot of power in our industry and we're all incredibly proud of that. And we've done that all under-resourced,” Stein says, “So I think the next four years will be about how to make it sustainable and how to scale it up. We're asking ourselves what kind of foundations those wins are laying for bigger and better things in the future.”