The Giants are struggling — and so are ballpark workers

Cloudy skies over Oracle Park. | Marc Norton

The Giants have been having a tough year. So have the ballpark workers who serve you garlic fries and hot dogs at Oracle Park.

At the beginning of this baseball season, the Giants dumped their former food concession contractor, Bon Appetit, and put the infamous “hospitality management” company Aramark in charge. UNITE HERE Local 2 represents over 600 workers at Oracle Park who staff the stadium’s concession stands, clubs, and suites. I joined Local 2 in 1976, and have worked at Oracle Park as a cashier since 2013.

We do not know why the Giants brought in Aramark, but it certainly isn’t because of Aramark’s sterling reputation for providing good service or treating their workers well.

Earlier this year, for example, the National Park Service terminated Aramark’s contract to provide visitor services at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon as a result of “consistent failure to meet contract requirements.” Similar problems with Aramark have been reported at Yosemite National Park.

Aramark also provides food services to prisons, but has had their contracts terminated at prisons in Michigan and Maryland as a result of “unsanitary conditions,” including infestations of maggots, and serving food that had been thrown in the trash and “nibbled on by rats.”

Aramark ignores contract

Aramark took over the food concessions at Oracle Park in February. Despite the fact that the Giants have a “successorship agreement” with Local 2 and that the collective bargaining agreement must remain in place if and when the Giants change contractors, Aramark refused to even acknowledge the Local 2 contract until July.

From February until July, and even now, they instead picked and chose which parts of the agreement they recognized.

According to union documents and allegations shared by workers, Aramark has twice been late making their payments and has failed to make any medical payments at all for some, particularly those who also work for Aramark at the Coliseum in Oakland, where the A’s are playing their last games.

We were supposed to get a $1.50 per hour raise at the beginning of April. Aramark gave only 75 cents. A number of workers have also been paid less than the contracted rate for their classification of work. Some Bon Appetit workers were not allowed to work when Aramark took over until weeks into the season. In these times of rampant inflation, that hurts.

Many workers question whether or not the tip money that guests sign for with their credit and debit cards has been distributed correctly and in full. Aramark has so far ignored a union demand that they give us access to the raw tip data.

Aramark withheld Local 2 dues money from paychecks, in accordance with the Local 2 contract, but then held onto that dues money for several weeks before forwarding it to the union. That resulted in many workers getting letters from Local 2 saying that they were behind in their dues. Aramark also deducted dues money from workers who pay their dues directly to the union and had not authorized dues deductions.

The union has demanded an independent audit of Aramark’s payroll procedures, a demand which Aramark has so far ignored. But these money issues are just the tip of the iceberg.

What is really worrisome is that Aramark has also been seriously understaffing the concession stands, even on busy days, often causing a difficult and dangerous speedup. Yet many workers who are signed up for work have had their shifts canceled, sometimes only hours before their shift. Staffing out of seniority order has become a problem. Local 2 has a hiring hall, but Aramark rarely calls the hiring hall for workers.

Meanwhile, there has been a proliferation of non-union workers from various agencies showing up to fill empty slots.

Calls for a strike

On June 14, more than 250 ballpark workers, at the call of the Local 2 leadership, assembled at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) hall near the ballpark to talk about problems and a plan of action. The anger was palpable. Several workers demanded that the union organize a strike. The union officials in charge had some difficulty keeping order at the meeting. But in the end, they planned an action that they hoped would get the full attention of Aramark — and the Giants.

And so, on June 28, just before a Giants-Dodgers game, a standing-room-only crowd of over 150 Local 2 workers assembled in the break room and summoned Aramark’s human relations director. They then regaled the director for nearly an hour with grievances about Aramark’s disrespect. There were planned speeches, as well as spontaneous callouts from the ranks, including one worker fighting cancer who spoke passionately about what it has meant to her to have lost her medical coverage.

After this action, Aramark finally acknowledged the collective bargaining agreement and agreed in principle to pay the full raise due to workers. They received the full raise for the first time on their July 24 paychecks. Most workers—but not all—have now gotten retroactive payments for the missing raises.

But just four days after the action, Aramark sent out an email to the concession staff thanking them for all the “hard work so far” and said they were going to kick workers out of their regular concession stands and “start rotating staff to various stands” in order to “ensure everyone gets familiar with different locations and our diverse concepts.”

This was announced without any consultation with the union, despite the fact that federal law requires employers to make an attempt to negotiate over such changes in working conditions. Many workers also saw this as retaliation for the June 28 action.

Threatened to file charges

In response, the union threatened to file a legal challenge with the National Labor Relations Board. After some delay, Aramark started moving many workers around at the most recent homestand, like pawns on a chessboard, further stoking the fires that are already burning at the ballpark.

Many other contract violation issues and grievances remain unresolved.

Through all of this chaos, the Giants have remained mum. They certainly cannot have been ignorant of Aramark’s reputation for ignoring its contractual obligations nor of Oracle Park workers’ struggles with Aramark.

It has been widely publicized, for example, that Aramark’s Crater Lake National Park contract was terminated after Aramark was accused, among many other transgressions, of serving improperly cooked food, operating “unclean kitchens” and failing to properly train food service staff; allowing “major spills” of diesel fuel into Crater Lake and overflows of raw sewage in the park; failing to do routine maintenance of visitor and employee buildings; charging employees hundreds of dollars a month to live in “shabby” and unclean dorms, sometimes without heat or power; failing to report serious visitor injuries; and tolerating sexual assault and sexual harassment of employees. According to one worker, it was a place with “zero policies, zero rules, and regulations. It was something out of the Twilight Zone.”

Why would the Giants bring such a company to San Francisco? And why have the Giants remained silent through all the chaos this season?

It would be a safe bet that this is all about money, which is the lifeblood of Major League Baseball in America.

Local 2’s ballpark contract expires on April 1, 2025, at the beginning of the next baseball season. The last time the local negotiated a new contract, in 2021, it held a strike vote and was ready to strike during the playoffs. Bon Appetit,  then-employer, buckled and workers won a great contract.

Are the Giants looking to roll back our collective bargaining wins, and setting up Aramark to be the bad guy?

For many workers, the answer is yes.

In the past, Local 2 has allowed the ballpark contract to expire without a fight.  Workers then went several years without a contract, with no raises.  They tolerated that in those times of low inflation, but it is doubtful that ballpark workers will tolerate working for a disrespectful company like Aramark with no raises while inflation eats away at their livelihood.

Once upon a time, the watchword of the labor movement was “no contract no work.” These days the labor movement is showing more than a few signs of rising militancy and organization — and that includes ballpark workers.

Opening Day next season is April 4, 2025.

This article first appeared in 48 Hills.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Marc Norton

Marc Norton has been a member of UNITE HERE Local 2 since 1976. He has worked as a dishwasher, steward, cook, bellman, and cashier.