In Hurricane Ruins, North Carolina Food Workers Organize and Fight

Twenty-one days without running water. A week before any cell service or internet. Hospitals closed, and thousands of houses swept away.

Not long after developers started trumpeting the city of Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven” from coastal storms, the area experienced catastrophic flooding. Upland Tennessee and North Carolina were the hardest hit by Hurricane Helene on September 27.

For restaurant workers, the crisis is still getting worse, says Miranda Escalante, a hotel bartender and co-chair of Asheville Food & Beverage United, an organization of restaurant workers. At least three-quarters have been laid off since the storm, she said, in what would have been peak season. But their landlords are still demanding rent.

When a climate disaster hits, what can unions do? North Carolina’s service workers are demanding that recovery and rebuilding happen on their terms.

FOOD HUB UPSTARTS

“There is no economy in Asheville without hospitality—tourism is the backbone,” says Escalante, who has worked “every position in restaurants” over two decades.

Until the storm, the city had 55 breweries and a nationally celebrated restaurant scene. But food workers could barely afford the monthly rents, she said, typically $1,500 and up for a one-bedroom apartment.

Jen Hampton, a longtime restaurant worker and AFBU founder, said pandemic hardships (plus a Labor Notes Secrets of a Successful Organizer training) spurred her and a handful of other industry veterans to band together across shops in 2022.

“We started canvassing downtown to find food workers, especially immigrant workers from the back of house,” said Hampton. They found an issue they didn’t expect: parking downtown was costing workers $200 to $300 a month.

AFBU started a petition to the county for free parking for workers. Members mapped out where the restaurants were; “I went right in to talk to people,” Hampton said. “We got 2,300 signatures [from workers and customers] in a few weeks, rallied at the county board, and they gave in with free passes.”

That win helped build AFBU to its current 80 members, across 20 workplaces. The network has put on organizing trainings and helped members win a union election unanimously at Green Sage Cafe. But more often the group has used protest and pressure, as in campaigns that put an end to longstanding wage theft at two bars.

AFBU has an elected steering committee of workers. Don Baker, a founding member, said the few unionized restaurants around the country tend not to expand beyond single locations, leaving them vulnerable to turnover and business closures. AFBU has chosen a different approach: organizing across workplaces, taking inspiration from construction unions like the Electrical Workers (IBEW).

Though the union is not yet aiming to win a hiring hall or a master local agreement, AFBU hopes to build a network of workers who stay involved even as they rotate from one jobsite to another, pushing for shared demands like fair scheduling and paid time off.

The Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), an outgrowth of the Service Employees' Fight for $15 campaign and a partner with AFBU on hurricane relief efforts, has also built networks of workers around Asheville, at Waffle Houses and Energymart convenience stores. Members held a safety strike at an Energymart in July when the temperature inside the store rose to 103° F.

SEIZING RELIEF

When Helene dropped five months of rain in three days on Asheville, Escalante says, AFBU “moved into trying to organize in a deeper way than ever before. Priority number one was making sure we’re all safe, checking in on every member.”

A next step was organizing their own relief on the ground, including a joint solidarity fund with USSW. Government agencies have struggled to reach many of the people in need, and workers often find their landlords have already taken the $750 Federal Emergency Management Agency “Immediate Needs Assistance” grants for their addresses.

Restaurant workers threw themselves into cooking meals for thousands of displaced people with the local Mutual Aid Disaster Relief group. AFBU members helped workers apply for relief funds, while another crew drove water tubs around to help isolated seniors flush their toilets.

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After drawing an emergency $10,000 grant from the nearby Just Economics nonprofit, says Escalante, an AFBU member “got the largest U-Haul you can rent, went to Raleigh, and filled it to the brim” with food, water, and relief supplies to bring back to Asheville, focusing especially on the public housing complexes where many restaurant workers live.

USSW activists signed up members as “neighborhood captains” to receive supply drops from the union and redistribute them locally. Teamsters and IBEW members helped ferry supplies too.

“Everyone agrees this is the effect of climate change,” said Escalante. “I’ve lived here 20 years. Never have I ever thought a hurricane would hit Asheville.”

ROOF GONE, RENT DUE

Beyond offering aid, AFBU decided to go on offense. Just five days after the storm, “still a shitshow, no water, no electricity, skimpy cell service,” says Baker, “the public housing authority got their act together to print leaflets and post them on every door saying, ‘Tomorrow is rent day and rent is due.’ That was the only competent execution of something that day, and it was sadistic.”

Hampton and other AFBU members canvassed 300 units with information on how to get hardship waivers for rent, which the authority had neglected to mention.

When the local eviction judge opted to resume evictions two weeks into the disaster—three weeks before required by the state—the union organized a rally that drew 70 people to the courthouse, demanding a three-month moratorium on evictions.

Escalante says workers she knows are furious at being asked to pay rent “for a house they can’t stay in, with a tree through the roof.” Organizing for the hurricane eviction moratorium is gaining backing from tenant unions across the state.

Restaurant workers are also organizing to grab a chunk of Asheville’s tourism slush fund. “Our city has a $41 million budget for marketing for tourism,” says Hampton. “We said, ‘Hold up, this industry is on our backs. Seventy-five percent of service industry workers are out of work, they’re hurting.’”

The first time the county board that holds those purse-strings met after the storm, “we went guns blazing,” Escalante said, demanding that the tourism marketing money should go to workers.

That pressure has begun to bear fruit. The Asheville City Council, in its first post-storm meeting, at the end of October, opted to send $3.5 million to low-income tenants and homeowners.

WHOSE RECOVERY?

Disasters offer bosses and landlords the opportunity for a power grab. “Wealthy people come in and buy up land after disasters,” James Keenan of Tulane University told the Washington Post about Asheville’s hurricane recovery.

Layoffs and destroyed homes mean restaurant workers may struggle to stay in town, especially through the winter months, when their work typically slows down.

But Hampton says AFBU membership has grown since the storm. New restaurant workers joined rallies or jumped into volunteer food prep, and saw the benefits of the union’s cross-workplace organizing approach.

Before the hurricane, Asheville members were planning outreach to food and beverage workers in other cities to start unions on a similar model. They’re still aiming to start next year.

The storm raised the stakes, but the crisis has also opened a brief window for many food workers. “A bunch of us are furloughed—we’ve just got our disaster unemployment checks,” said Escalante. “What better time to organize as much as possible?”