In August 2022, workers at a Chipotle in Lansing, Michigan, voted 11-3 to unionize, becoming the first and only employees at the chain to ever win union recognition. Three years later, they still don’t have a contract. After years of bargaining, the Chipotle corporation and Teamsters have indefinitely paused negotiations, and workers no longer anticipate a collective bargaining agreement at their store.
The Chipotle Union of Teamsters (CUT) is now winding down its campaign, but the organizers who built it don’t consider it a failure. Core members of the CUT organizing committee, Atuyla Dora-Laskey and Harper McNamara, are now looking back on their three-year campaign and its anticlimactic close and still finding reasons for optimism.
Despite the outcome in Lansing, Dora-Laskey told Jacobin, “I think it’s really possible. I know this is hopeslop but actually doing it and getting so close to it happening made it actually feel like way more possible than it was when it first started.” If workers are interested in organizing other locations or other restaurants altogether, she advises, “You should unionize.”
In 2022, before the Lansing effort was public, workers at a Chipotle location in Augusta, Maine, announced their campaign to unionize. Augusta workers formed an independent union called Chipotle United just weeks after organizing a walkout protesting unsafe working conditions in their store. The Chipotle corporation declined to voluntarily recognize the union, and Chipotle United never had the opportunity to hold an National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election. In a textbook anti-union move, the company temporarily closed the store just after the union went public and soon announced a permanent closure alleging that they were “unable to adequately staff” the location.
In New York City, workers had been organizing even longer and took a…
Auteur: Faith Bennett
