The first hospitality industry union formed in 1866, just after the end of the Civil War, and went by the name of the Bartenders and Waiters Union, Chicago. Later dubbed Chicago’s Local 57, the organization was largely made up of recent German immigrants. With the end of the Civil War came the development of the cross-country railway system, which drastically changed the hospitality industry. Before, American hotels and restaurants had been patronized by the odd band of travelers; after railway construction, they were mandatory, for both railroad workers and people taking advantage of new interstate mobility. By the 1890s, roughly a quarter of a million people were working in kitchens, bars, and hotels, and many of them were attempting to organize and join the newly formed American Federation of Labor, which today is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S. In 1891, the Waiters and Bartenders National Union was approved and launched as a member of the AFL.
Later called the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union, and then, finally, HERE, or the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, the organization started with 450 members and grew slowly. In 1899, membership had not passed 1,000, but by World War I, HERE membership was over 65,000. Prohibition once again knocked membership down as the entire hospitality industry was torn apart, but HERE nearly doubled its membership in 1933 when the Volstead Act was repealed, and had over 400,000 members by 1940. That number climbed by 15 million in the mid-1950s.
The benefits of unionization were clear, and federally protected: The National Labor Relations Act was signed in 1935, codifying workers’ rights to organization, strikes, and collective bargaining. In an industry that is still often marked by 16-hour shifts, wage theft, and reports of sexual harassment, belonging to a union meant the possibility of having guaranteed minimum earnings, bargaining power, and protection. But, as historian Dorothy Sue Cobble wrote in her 1991 book Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century, in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, even as manufacturing workers gained protections, “the five-day, forty-hour work week remained a dream for most culinary workers.” Hospitality workers were explicitly excluded from the 1938 Federal Wage and Hour Law (it wasn’t until the early 1960s that a majority of restaurant workers were paid extra for anything over 40 hours). Even so, unionized bartenders and servers worked far fewer hours than those who were nonunion, and they had longer lunch breaks and received holiday pay. By 1960, nearly 100 percent of the 97,000 organized culinary workers in California received paid vacation.