SydSol fights sexist, exploitative cafe owner

UPDATE:

After our third picket yesterday Grounded Bean Cafe agreed to pay up all the $1,108 outstanding!

It was all quite a sudden turnaround. At the beginning of the day the boss threatened to break a picketer's arm and was saying that he'd never pay the money and would "take us down". An hour later some kind of high-powered boss from mall management came out (the cafe is part of a mall complex), told the cafe boss that he was costing the entire mall business and he needed to fix things up immediately, and then the he suddenly changed his tune and was quite accommodating. He agreed to process the money this Thursday, and we said we'd be back if he didn't. Then we marched down the street chanting "Who won? WE WON! Who won? WE WON!" over and over. Glorious stuff :D

And here's a lovely photo of the Grounded Bean boss, George, smooching Julie Bishop:

Hey MT, thanks for the questions.

Yeah, the money came through as promised on Thursday night. Down to the exact dollar. So a pretty clear victory. I don't think the cafe boss had much choice in the end to be honest. I'm pretty sure the cafe boss would have held out for much longer, but the mall management - who had the power to terminate the cafe's lease - just wanted to make the problem go away. It was an interesting example of disunity/conflicting interests between the different sections of the of the bosses.

The harassment issue is a tough problem, likewise for wage theft. They'll probably both continue, although possibly not quite as bad as before. It really depends on whether staff employed there decide to act and whether we make any effort to continue reaching out to other cafes owned by the same boss. Having said that, underpayment and sexual harassment are completely rampant across the whole hospitality industry. It'll really take some kind of base union for hospitality workers - a bit like what Brighton SolFed have - to make a lasting different there.

Sounds great! You'd be more than welcome to.

This is a longer write-up of the dispute that we just emailed out to supporters: http://us8.campaign-archive2.com/?u=4ae73997596ddc36bcd1c2275&id=a8134058b3

The decision was made by the café worker at the centre of the fight, and she said she didn't care either way. So then everyone at the picket voted on it, and the vote was to take the name down. Personally I was against taking out their name for the reasons above, and argued strongly that we keep it up on our website, but the vote was in favour of removing it.

On an amusing note, the café has now ceased to exist. It just closed down and is all boarded over. LOL.