"The Workers are Hungry for More": Genwa BBQ Workers Form an Independent Union
By Max Belasco
Alexandra Suh, Executive Director of Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), announces wage and hour citations against Genwa Korean BBQ. Source: KIWA
Rebecca Nathan remembered receiving the letter in February 2019, because at the time she was preparing to leave Genwa BBQ, the Los Angeles Korean restaurant where she had been working as a hostess and bartender. The message came from the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), a worker center that had been helping some of Nathan’s coworkers file a claim against the restaurant for stealing tips. KIWA was interested in hearing about Nathan’s experiences and getting her involved with the campaign. Knowing the tip sharing arrangement management organized for staff to be at best “opaque,” Nathan conferred with her coworkers about whether to get involved.
“Even the ones who were close to management encouraged me to follow up,” recalled Nathan. “I remember thinking, ‘if the people who are staying—even the people who were close to those in charge—think I should do it,then maybe there is something here.’”
What followed was a year of difficult campaigning and organizing to expose rampant wage theft and unsafe working conditions that would bring current Genwa BBQ workers and former staff like Nathan together in seeking workplace justice. By the end of that campaign A 2020 investigation by the California Labor Commissioner’s office would find that Genwa had stolen over $2 million from its workers.
Committed to ensuring these conditions would never be experienced by Genwa BBQ staff again, Nathan and others took another unlikely step: they chose to form a completely independent union in the restaurant industry. Although an extremely difficult undertaking in the volatile restaurant industry—made only more difficult by mass layoffs during COVID-19 pandemic closures— workers involved in the wage theft campaign committed themselves to another year of organizing conversations and building union support throughout the restaurant. By July 2021, the California Restaurant and Retail Workers Union (CRRWU) had won recognition from Genwa BBQ, and they secured an unprecedented contract that October.
What started as a campaign to seek remuneration for a myriad of workplace grievances ended up being one of the most unexpected union victories of the pandemic years – a victory with far-reaching implications for restaurant organizing across the country.
Marinating Problems
Genwa Korean BBQ is a heavyweight in the crowded Los Angeles Korean BBQ scene, and a major competitor in the broader restaurant industry. Any serious list of the top Korean BBQ restaurants in Southern California will have Genwa on the list, and the establishment is often cited by some of the city's largest restaurateurs as their go-to spot for galbi or bi bim bap. With 325 staff on payroll and three locations (in Koreatown, Beverly Hills, and Downtown LA), the culinary media darling made giants out of its owners, Jin Won Kwon and Jay B. Kwon.
Some of the former staff recall Genwa BBQ having a “tight-knit, family vibe.” But even they noticed some cracks in the facade.
Steven Chung was one of the first employees to be hired when Genwa BBQ opened, a seniority that commanded some respect and trust from his coworkers. “Bussers would tell me, ‘I feel like I’m missing my hours,’” said Chung. “At first I thought it was just accounting errors but it kept happening and I knew it was more than that. I became convinced it was not a mistake. I believe they were intentionally cutting time off of people’s paychecks.”
Chung felt comfortable and close enough with the owners to approach one on the matter. When he approached Jin Won Kwon on the matter, she told Chung it was time to take a vacation. The next day Chung found that Kwon told his coworkers that she had fired Chung.
“I felt betrayed,” added Chung.
But stolen tips were not the only issues workers were experiencing. In addition to shaving time and not being able to take rest breaks, Nathan also recounts experiencing sexual harassment and discrimination based on her sexual orientation.
“When I would speak to my managers about harassment and request not to work with certain people, they would just say they would talk to that person and then still schedule them with me anyway.” Nathan adds that despite promises to speak to coworkers on her behalf, homophobic harassment would continue—with Nathan being outed herself. “Clearly those conversations were not comprehensive.”
By the time KIWA approached Nathan to join their campaign, they had been working with a group of staff from the Koreatown location. A worker center originally founded in 1992 to support immigrant workers in the Koreatown neighborhood, KIWA’s organizers had extensive experience organizing and advocating on behalf of the multilingual immigrant worker community of Koreatown. This also made them well-positioned to help the multilingual staff of Genwa BBQ, which according to KIWA organizers is 70% Latino and 30% Korean.
Despite being well-positioned to support these restaurant workers, forming a union seemed very far off. “Going into it, we never assumed that it would be possible,” says Alexandra Suh, Executive Director of KIWA. “We wanted to build power in any way we could.” This would involve filing claims with the Labor Commissioner related to tip theft and safety hazards. It also meant, as Nathan joined the organizing committee, bringing workplace harassment to light.
The year that followed would involve a number of direct actions taken by Genwa BBQ workers. Informational pickets would be held outside of the restaurants, and community delegations were organized with faith groups and organizations allied with KIWA to confront the ownership over the numerous workplace violations.
By March 2020, the California Labor Commission announced its findings that Genwa BBQ owners Jin Won Kwon and Jay B. Kwon were guilty of stealing $2,063,041.01 from their staff. In addition to forcing the owners to give back the stolen wages, Genwa BBQ workers also won wage parity across the restaurants, ventilation systems installed in the kitchens, and a transparent tip distribution system.
There remained, however, a concern that more workplace issues would crop up later, and trudging through another long and onerous claim process with the Labor Commission would be too demoralizing to do again. “At that point, we talked with the workers and they wanted to make sure either these problems would remain solved or they would have a way to solve them,” explained Suh. “So we decided that’s it, we have to form a union.”
Off the Grill, Into the Fire
Forming an independent union in the United States is a difficult process, even in a state like California that is typically more friendly to labor. The high frequency of staff turnover in restaurants, coupled with a multilingual workforce made the task seem herculean. But with the COVID-19 closures, organizers at KIWA and the Genwa BBQ organizing committee felt that if there was ever a time to organize, it was now.
In response to the mandated restaurant closures during the pandemic, Genwa BBQ decided to lay off their entire workforce. Losing the entire organizing committee and union supporters would be devastating to any campaign, but Suh also saw the event as a mobilizing moment for the former staff. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence this union drive got off the ground during the pandemic,” said Suh when asked about the timing of the union campaign, “Every Genwa worker lost their job. With the pandemic workers had nothing to lose.”
With the Genwa staff being laid off and new staff unfamiliar with the problems in the workplace being added as the restaurant reopened, the workers had to think innovatively about how to maintain the “institutional memory” their campaign required.
Nathan and other former Genwa staff played a crucial role in educating new staff members on the problems that existed at the restaurant. Unlike the claim campaign, however, where organizing conversations happened during breaks at the restaurant, much of the union drive conversations happened over Zoom. “That was hard,” recounted Nathan. “With virtual meetings it’s all business—which can be good, but it’s hard to foster the community you also need that helps with keeping workers onboard.”
In this sense KIWA played a very important role in providing organizers and doing outreach to former Genwa staff like Nathan. The worker center became the meeting point for former Genwa staff to share their experiences and tie the problems new staff faced to the ongoing campaign. Organizing Director Jose-Roberto Hernandez characterized the process as a, “delicate balancing act.”
“When the restaurant reopened we were dealing with a whole different workforce,” explained Hernandez, “We had to play the bridge between ex-employees who fought hard for better working conditions and those newer staff who hadn’t heard about past workplace issues.”
Organizing conversation by organizing conversation, newer Genwa staff were recruited into the organizing committee, and reached out to their coworkers about the ongoing union drive. Over the next year the overwhelming majority of current Genwa BBQ staff signed cards authorizing the union, and by July 2021 the owners recognized CRRWU as the union representing Genwa BBQ workers.
The Next Course
Contract negotiations were relatively quick, with an agreed contract going into effect in November 2021. Hernandez, now the president of CRRWU, credits the swift process to finding common ground with ownership over rent. The union recognized that since Genwa BBQ was a restaurant with locations in high-rent areas, the business was susceptible to the same market pressures that make finding affordable housing extremely difficult for the workers. Struggling to come up with rent was enough of a shared problem that it became the bridge on which many substantive issues were resolved between CRRWU and Genwa BBQ.
“The reality of the situation is that the people making big money off of restaurants in LA are the landlords,” said Hernandez. “And that was something we could agree with the owners on. From there the conversation took the framing of how we could help the restaurant succeed while making sure the workers had safe, reliable jobs. It was not easy and I don’t think you could do it with Amazon or Starbucks, but with a smaller business that deals with rent issues I think you can find a lot of overlapping interests.”
The contract agreed upon contains provisions for workers that are virtually unheard of in the Los Angeles restaurant scene. It contains a floor for kitchen staff wages that is significantly higher than before, a CalSavers retirement plan, stipend contribution and reimbursement for healthcare, a fair tip distribution, paid vacation, and the requirement of rehiring all staff that were working at the restaurant in February 2020, prior to pandemic layoffs.
Hernandez credits the fair tip distribution and pay raises to also dealing with tension among staff that often fell across racial lines. “In the old system, you would have favorites among the management and staff, where Latino kitchen staff would be making different pay than Korean staff. Those tensions don’t go away immediately, but they are dealt with when there’s a process to apply them fairly to all staff.”
While Nathan no longer works at Genwa BBQ, she found the experience to be deeply affecting. “It’s given me more hope. It’s easy to fall into the jaded, dejected idea that no one cares—especially in the last six years, there feels like a lot of complacency. But what I’ve learned is that to effect change you need a group of people who are committed to following up and moving things forward.”
As for CRRWU, there are plans to organize more restaurants and retail stores in Los Angeles, using their multilingual model of bringing former and current employees together. Their hope is that the wins made with the Genwa BBQ contract can be built on and become a new standard for restaurant and retail workers across LA County. KIWA, according to Suh, will also continue to help wherever it can. “I’m proud of the role KIWA had in this campaign, and this is the beginning of much more organizing. We know the workers are hungry for more change.”
Max Belasco is a rank-and-file member of UPTE-CWA and a member of the Strikewave Editorial Collective.