NYC Waiters' Strike (1912)
Tue May 07, 1912
Image: New York City waiters' strike outside of Sherry's restaurant in Manhattan, 1912 [Wikipedia]
On this day in 1912, the first industry-wide strike of restaurant and hotel workers in New York City history began when 150 hotel workers, organized by the IWW, walked out to protest their poor working conditions.
At the height of the strike, there were 54 hotels and 30 restaurants and other establishments without their staff, amounting to approximately 2,500 waiters, 1,000 cooks, and 3,000 other striking hotel workers.
The strike was organized directly by Joe Ettor and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Before the IWW, the only union in place for hotel workers only had about 2,000 members and prohibitively high membership dues.
The workers demanded at least one day off a week, a higher minimum wage, and a prohibition of discrimination for being in a union. The strike continued through the rest of May but faced repression from the police. The strike officially ended on June 25th, 1912 without legal recognition for the IWW created Hotel Workers' International Union. Despite this failure, hotel workers would go on strike again in 1913, 1918, 1929, and 1934.
- Date: 1912-05-07
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, hotelworkers.org.
- Tags: #Labor, #IWW.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org