Restaurants are not a particularly unionized industry, even today. But in 1979, the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association (CSWA) was created. Originally designed as a voluntary organization akin to an old-school mutual aid society, bound together by ethnicity or country of origin, it was initially a space for men working in a grueling industry to share their grievances and to bond. Over time, though, it grew into a potent and well-organized force.
Exploitation in the restaurant industry can include everything from wage theft to gruelingly long hours and unsafe working conditions. It was — and still is — rampant, particularly when workers are undocumented or have other reasons to fear an authority’s intervention. In the 1970s and 1980s in Chinatown, local political corruption, the influence of local gangs, and a lack of state oversight over restaurants combined to form an environment where abuses of power within restaurants went virtually unchecked. Jimmy Ong, one of the founders of CSWA, noted in a 2007 interview with amNY that at this time, the average restaurant worker was paid around $300/monthly for a 70-hour work week.
In February of 1980, CSWA faced its biggest test yet. Silver Palace, one of Chinatown’s largest banquet halls, was accused of stealing tips from its employees. Anyone who raised the issue to management was then summarily fired. For workers already making less than the minimum wage, having management skim their hard-earned tip money off the top was the last straw. Members of CSWA, many who worked at Silver Palace or other neighborhood restaurants, picketed outside daily. Eventually, their campaign of public pressure worked. The fired employees were rehired, and Silver Palace workers formed an independent restaurant workers’ union. Their work hours were standardized, and they even received a rare benefit: healthcare.
In the following years, the CSWA and Silver Palace would clash again over similar tip theft violations, but CSWA also made a name for themselves as a militant advocate for neighborhood causes. Not only focused on labor, they stepped in on other issues, too: gentrification and the creation of luxury housing in a working-class neighborhood, women’s working conditions in the garment sweatshops, and violence and public safety. By the 1990s, they were well established as a service organization run by workers, for workers.
In 1995, fresh off another battle with Silver Palace, CSWA picketed against Jing Fong, Chinatown’s largest banquet hall/restaurant at the time. Jing Fong management had violated labor laws by stealing workers’ tips — the same practice that had landed Silver Palace in hot water — and had fired a waiter for reporting it. Some Jing Fong workers opposed CSWA’s protests, worrying that declining profits and negative attention on the restaurant would lead to them losing their own jobs. But the protests only grew larger — and more theatrical. It upset many older Chinatown residents when CSWA picketers paraded a fake coffin in front of Jing Fong, and even more when they staged mock funerals for the business. Whether out of a sense of propriety or discomfort with a symbol of death being invoked in this context, many felt that it was not right for an intra-community struggle to be aired out so publicly in the streets. Others, led by CSWA organizers and Chinese American students, embraced a diversity of tactics as the best chance they had of winning this fight.