ROC Gets Rolled

"A restaurant that claims to be owned by former Windows on the World workers is 'a hoax' -- because the former World Trade Center employees have been forced out, a lawsuit charges," The New York Post reports today.

In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, a group of former Windows workers said that despite promises, none of the 35 workers who invested hundreds of hours of work into opening the Greenwich Village restaurant Colors has any ownership interest.

Restaurant advocacy group ROC-NY and a group of Italian investors are the owners, and they've stiffed the workers the "cooperative restaurant" was built around, the suit says.

For more on this, I had a more in-depth look into ROC-NY back in March.

If you were thinking of reading today's New York Times to see how they report the story -- seeing as they've feted ROC/Colors with more than a dozen puff pieces over the years -- don't bother. The only mention of the suit comes in a one-'graf Metro Briefing by the AP.

ROC Lobster

What to do when the restaurant you've created starts collapsing thanks to its untenable, workers-exploiting business model? There's always hope you'll receive the same good fortune as the Noho eatery Colors, which The New York Times recently treated to an advertorial guised as hard news.

Pulling on New Yorkers' 9/11 heartstrings, Metro reporter Emily Vasquez retold Colors' faux-bio: Post-9/11, surviving Windows of the World workers banded together to create a restaurant that would set a new standard for workers -- ownership would take the form of a employee co-op, wages far surpassed the industry average and staffers' ethnic culinary traditions made up the menu.

But somehow, Vasquez reported, business failed to hold steady after the original media-generated fanfare died down. Workers are worried and confused, she said.

What the Times didn't report is that by month's end, former Colors workers are expected to sue its management, alleging this supposed model of workers' rights is actually, in one former co-op-board director's words, "one of the most abusive in the city."

In today's Post, I tell that story:

Colombia-born Orlando Godoy, 54, had been a floor captain at Windows. He joined up with ROC [which runs Colors] post-9/11, and stuck with it even after most other Windows workers left, because Jayaraman was offering a chance for him to realize his lifelong dream: to become a "co-owner" in a new restaurant venture.

Then came a demand to sign a contract in which workers/owners would agree to certain conditions: "paying monthly dues," "attending protests (at least one per campaign)," "supporting workers [at other restaurants] in any dispute with employers," "testifying in favor of worker legislation" and "holding my elected representatives accountable to his/her responsibilities."

Nonplussed - what did any of this have to do with running a restaurant? - Godoy refused to sign; he was subsequently forced out of ROC altogether.

The problem, he said in a recent interview, is that being a part of ROC and its offspring Colors requires a total embrace of Jayaraman's radicalism - even including trips to D.C. to protest the Iraq War.

"Saru thinks of herself as a workers' Che Guevara, but she's really a Stalin," says Behzad Pasdar.

Indeed, Pasdar charges, Jayaraman used ex-Windows staffers as a "golden goose." "She dragged them around town to [raise money from] foundations. But she wouldn't even pay them as promised."

Read it all.

Earlier: Restaurant Revolutionaries

UPDATE: The blog of Kreitzman Mortensen & Borden picks up on the story, adding its own example of labor-related hypocrisy.

Restaurant Revolutionaries

As a state that trails only Hawaii in the percentage of workforce that's unionized, New York is no stranger to the darker side of organized labor. Last year's crippling transit worker strike is but the latest notable example.

In a piece that ran in Sunday's Post, I describe the latest organization to turn the city's private-sector economy into its personal plaything. Using rather unconventional means, the Restaurant Opportunity Center-New York aims to remake the city's restaurant industry into something more to the liking of Karl Marx, all the while masquerading as a charity:

ROC chief Jayaraman, a Yale/Harvard-trained lawyer, says her goal is to organize "the 99 percent of the [restaurant] industry that's non-union." Yet her group hasn't unionized anything - not even its own eatery.

Soon after Colors opened, its employees (who had invested money in what they believed was a cooperative enterprise) revolted, upset that ROC management was pocketing 40 percent of the earnings and giving seed investors another 40 percent, leaving just 20 percent to the staff.

How could a pro-labor group open a non-union shop? Well, ROC isn't a union - it's a charity.

Indeed, founded after 9/11 as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt charity, ROC's official goal was to help dislocated workers from Windows on the World, the eatery that used to top the World Trade Center.

That worthy aim drew in $500,000 in start-up cash from Unite HERE Local 100, which represents hotel and restaurant workers. The Red Cross and the September 11th Fund also donated.

Based on what ROC's "help" turned out to be, they should ask for their money back.

Read the rest.

Update: Over at the Democracy Project, Phil Orenstein offers these thoughtful suggestions as to how to deal with ROC:

But we can and will fight back. One way is to dine and tip generously at the besieged Cite and Park Avenue Café and other restaurants targeted by NYU professor/activists and their disciples. Another way to end the political indoctrination in the classroom is to cut off funding to NYU. Most of NYU’s support comes from endowments, grants and donations from alumni. A small percentage comes from tuition. All alumni should call up and pledge not to donate another cent to NYU as long as such radical professors are indoctrinating and recruiting students in the classroom. As long as professor Saru Jayaraman is teaching students to fight for social justice in order to end capitalism in the restaurant industry, all alumni and donors should tell the president that they will withhold contributions until that professor is discharged and an academic environment is restored at NYU.

Another way is to lobby our state lawmakers to get them involved when we observe such professors using the classroom for their pet political causes. We should call our representatives and let them know that the abuses of higher education are a troubling phenomenon.