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At the October 2022 summit of the National Restaurant Association’s legal wing, union-busting lawyers shared their latest strategies for shutting down workplace democracy. Recent food service union successes, it seems, have worried industry executives.

by Julia Rock, Jacobin

“Comrades,” said Chappell Phillips, as he grabbed the microphone, “please do not leave the conference. It’s all better from here.”

Phillips, an executive at the buffet restaurant chain Golden Corral, stood at a podium in the front of a hotel ballroom in Atlanta, before some one hundred restaurant executives, managers, and union-avoidance lawyers mingling and sipping weak coffee.

Moral March on Washington and to the Polls, by the Poor People's Campaign - Starbuck Workers United

Minutes earlier, the government’s top labor watchdog had been standing at the same podium delivering the keynote speech here at the October 2022 summit of the Restaurant Law Center, the legal arm of the National Restaurant Association.

Lobbying groups often invite government officials to their conferences to curry favor or gain insight into regulatory developments. But America’s chief enforcer of federal labor law at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had not stuck to the proverbial script.

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Economic Justice