CHICAGO—Arelino Candelaro delivers pizzas to customers of Pizza Nova starting from its restaurant on West 26th Street, in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.
Sometimes it’s dangerous, he says. Once he got assaulted on a delivery, and the owner told him to call the police, and that’s all.
It’s responses like that, along with refusal to raise workers’ pay and violations of both U.S. labor law and a city “day of rest” ordinance for fast food workers, which led the Pizza Nova workers to try to unionize, helped by the Arise Chicago labor center. Lack of company protection from the robbers led to their organizing drive, which began last October. But that’s not all.
When workers wrote, twice, as a group to Pizza Nova’s owner, seeking raises from their current wages, they got a brush off, Candelaro said in Spanish through an interpreter.
“’We are not legally obligated to give you a raise or to cover your costs’ the owner told us. ‘Do you want us to feed your kids?’”
So now they’ve taken their drive to the National Labor Relations Board, saying Pizza Nova has broken labor law, twice, including an illegal firing, during their organizing drive. On August 1, they took their cause public, too, with an outdoor press conference and picket line.
But what really hurts, even beyond the legalities, is that Pizza Nova’s owner is a Latino whose Latino workers toil for a restaurant located in a Latino neighborhood.
“It’s sad to see restaurants in Latino neighborhoods and with Latino owners who are not meeting with Latino workers to discuss their needs,” said State Rep. Edgar Gonzalez, D-Chicago, whose parents are union members. His district includes Little Village and the surrounding area.
Illegal firing
Instead of meeting, Pizza Nova illegally fired one worker for trying to organize colleagues, the worker told an August 1 outdoor press conference and picket line. Passing drivers honked in solidarity.
But all the legalities fade besides the real problems the workers face, and danger on the job is one, Candelaro said. The store often closes while pizza deliverers are making late runs, leaving no one for them to call for help when they face robbers.
Another worker, who declined to give his name, said “My separation from the company was due to their unwillingness to let me take my accumulated time off” under federal law, or paid sick leave under a Chicago city ordinance. Pizza Nova forced him to keep delivering pizzas instead.
His firing forced the workers, with the labor center’s help, to file two labor law-breaking charges with the NLRB’s Chicago regional office and other complaints with the city’s Office of Labor Relations.
“When we can’t take a meal break, they don’t care,” the fired worker said. And Pizza Nova doesn’t pay its workers for the full cost of gas. The workers use their personal cars for pizza deliveries. The price of gasoline has gone up; the reimbursements haven’t.
“We’d like to send a message to all workers: It is not correct to take advantage of immigrants,” the fired worker added.
The Pizza Nova workers seek to unionize to protect themselves, just like millions of other exploited, low-paid, and oppressed workers, many of them workers of color, are doing from coast to coast. The Pizza Nova workers—with Arise Chicago taking the role of the workers’ representative in NLRB papers—thus join the underclass of workers that has had it up to here with corporate greed and won’t take it anymore.
That exploited class includes adjunct professors in Pittsburgh, dock workers in Los Angeles, and Starbucks baristas in more than 400 stores. Their mass actions finally forced the firm to a massive bargaining table via Zoom with worker reps from coast to coast and with the Service Employees branch that helps their from-the-ground-up organizing drive, Starbucks Workers United.
Other exploited workers include Amazon warehouse workers from coast to coast, farmworkers in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley and California fields, and school bus drivers in various communities. The exploited now include doctors and nurses, thanks to greedy insurers and honchos at hospital chains who force service cuts and denial of patient care in the name of higher insurer profits.
The response has been massive amounts of organizing drives. The NLRB reports worker petitions for union elections rose by more than a third in the last year, compared to the same months before. And they show no signs of slowing down.
The workers, through Arise Chicago, charged Pizza Nova in April and May with breaking federal labor law. Both complaints, to NLRB’s Chicago regional office, say the company illegally “threatened, surveilled, disciplined, retaliated and fired workers to prevent them from exercising their right to organize.”
And the city’s Office of Labor Standards is investigating Pizza Nova’s timekeeping practices and possible wage and hour violations. Arise Chicago told city officials that workers are paid only for standard eight-hour days, with no overtime for the actual, longer, time they work driving and delivering pizzas. Pizza Nova also doesn’t pay auto insurance for the drivers, who use their own cars for deliveries.
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