Le Diplomate is a bustling high-end spot, consistently making lists of the District’s top restaurants. The popular Logan Circle restaurant brings in about $26.7 million in revenue a year—but workers say that success doesn’t come through in the ways they’re treated and paid. So, Le Diplomate is among five high-end D.C. restaurants where workers launched a unionization effort last month.
“For a restaurant that generates almost $30 million in revenue yearly, they can afford to provide better conditions,” Pablo Zuniga, a server at Le Diplomate, said.
The restaurants—Le Diplomate, Pastis DC, St. Anselm, Rasika, and Modena—are all owned by either Starr Restaurants or Knightsbridge Restaurant Group and are some of the most lucrative in the region.
Employees at each of these restaurants are joining UNITE HERE Local 25, a union representing hotel, restaurant, and casino workers in the D.C. area. Workers at the five restaurants say they are pushing for better working conditions, higher wages, and less hostility from their management.
“[The workers] also understand that the only way to change that is with a union, by coming together with their coworkers and bargaining collectively for a contract that guarantees them all the rights, respect, and benefits that come with the Local 25 contract,” Benji Cannon, director of communications at Local 25, said to the Voice.
D.C. restaurant workers and their supporters rallied behind the union, leading several protests to advance their organizing effort. On Jan. 30, over 100 demonstrators gathered on K Street in downtown D.C. to support the union. A week later, on Feb. 6, over 50 workers and their supporters protested at Eastern Market, where employees delivered speeches detailing their work experience and demanding better treatment going forward.
Jamaal Jackson, a server at Pastis DC, said management repeatedly cut his hours without notifying him. Management retaliated against him for confronting them about the reduction, he said, by further reducing his hours to nine per week and writing him up for baseless violations.
“I had been written up multiple times for arbitrary issues, none of them related to the other, and when just simply asking for documentation of my write ups, they asserted that I had no rights to a copy of the right of documentation,” Jackson said in an interview with the Voice.
Immigrant workers also said their employers disrespected them. At the Jan. 30 protest, Yesenia Delgado, a prep cook at St. Anselm who immigrated from El Salvador, recalled an instance where her manager was giving her instructions on how to do food prep in English. When she asked a coworker to translate the directions into Spanish, her manager allegedly said, “Well you should have learned English then.”
Other workers said management assigned them work that fell outside of their job description.
“So you’ll come into the workplace and they’ll say, ‘Hey, here’s what you’re going to work today.’ But then after a while, they’ll move you around and they’ll have you do jobs that aren’t your job,” Juan Guevara, a dishwasher at St. Anselm, said in Spanish through a translator.
Since the workers announced the unionization plans, Starr and Knightsbridge denied claims of unfair treatment and have refused to voluntarily recognize the union.
The Starr and Knightsbridge restaurant groups did not respond to the Voice’s request for comment.
In a written statement to the Washingtonian, Starr Restaurants dismissed workers’ claims about labor law violations as “typical tactics of unions” that are filed “regardless of the legal merit.”
Despite the groups’ refusal to recognize the union, some workers said they have noticed a positive shift in their treatment and working conditions since their announcement to begin unionizing.
“Since we’ve been open about our efforts to unionize, managers are providing better food for family meals, providing us with longer breaks, when they could’ve done this all along,” Zuniga said.
However, other workers said they are facing increased scrutiny in response to the unionization effort.
“The owner tried to bribe me, he offered to give me money to reveal the names of my coworkers who were organizing the union and I said ‘No,’” Halis Rodriguez, a former busser at Rasika, said in Spanish through a translator at the Jan. 30 protest.
After she did not reveal the names of her coworkers, management fired her without giving her a reason, Rodriguez said.
According to Cannon, the issues that workers at the five restaurants have faced are disappointing, but ultimately unsurprising, as they reflect a larger phenomenon of unfavorable work standards being normalized in restaurant work as a whole.
“There is a status quo in the restaurant industry where people are not treated well,” Cannon said. “They are treated without respect, without dignity. They are yelled at. And they just had enough.”
Organizers hope that a union will push employers to recognize the value of restaurant workers, who work to ensure an enjoyable customer experience despite challenges they face at their workplaces.
“If they treat their workers better with respect, we’ll in turn create a better restaurant experience for our guests, which is the whole reason we’re doing this,” Zuniga said.
