Pizzeria Workers in Portland Face Union Busting
On January 9, 2025, workers at the Central Eastside location of Sizzle Pie, a Portland pizzeria chain, unanimously voted to unionize, choosing to join the Restaurant Workers United after convincing an overwhelming majority of their coworkers to sign union authorization cards. Their demands included liveable wages, predictable scheduling, safe working conditions, and stable employment – all things that every worker deserves. By unionizing, the workers exercised their collective power – in other words, the people whose labor makes Sizzle Pie run demanded a say in how the business is run.
In early February however, the elation of a successful union campaign was met with sobering news. The owners of Sizzle Pie announced that they would be closing down the Central Eastside location, just as they had done to the Eugene, Oregon location in 2022 when workers there began organizing. At Central Eastside, just as in Eugene, the owners were quick to deflect accusations of retaliation and union busting. They claimed to have a “lease issue” in Eugene and yet another “inability to reach a lease agreement” at Central Eastside.
It’s often said that “once is happenstance, and twice is coincidence” – yet when it comes to the interests of the bourgeoisie, such things are rarely coincidences. The logical conclusion is that the owner of Sizzle Pie closed both the Central Eastside and Eugene Sizzle Pie locations as both retaliation and damage control, viewing an organized workforce as a threat to their profits – because an organized workforce IS indeed a threat to bourgeois profit. The interests of workers and the interests of the bourgeoisie are fundamentally and irreconcilably antagonistic to each other. Although met with setbacks from ownership, the union drive at Sizzle Pie is objectively a win for workers, a step towards taking back the power that rightfully belongs to them.
A worker at the Central Eastside said the following about the union drive and the store’s subsequent closure:
“The acquisition of Sizzle Pie by private equity drove the store to closure, and is also what drove our store’s workers to unionize. Working conditions declined significantly over the last two years, and we know we had to fight back before we lost more of what we loved about working there. It is disappointing that our fears of store closure came true, but we don’t regret unionizing. We believe we are better positioned to fight back against the closure than we would be if we hadn’t organized.”
For the Sizzle Pie workers, winning an NLRB election is just the beginning, not the end. The union-busting tactics of Sizzle Pie’s owners prove the necessity for discipline, resolve, and continued support from the public for the brave actions of these workers. To smash the capitalist mode of production and liberate the working class, workers must follow others like those at Sizzle Pie in organizing their own workplaces. Workers vastly outnumber the bourgeoisie; workers perform all the labor to make society run; therefore, workers must run society.
Companies like Sizzle Pie can try and stop workers from organizing. But their efforts will not succeed forever; the contradiction between capital and labor will only continue to sharpen. Although the exact path of the war between workers and bourgeoisie cannot be mapped out ahead of time, we can plot a rough course. It goes as follows:
As workers organize for economic demands such as wages, scheduling, safe working conditions, and stable employment, they gain necessary experience on the front lines of the class struggle to retain surplus value.
With the help of dedicated Marxist-Leninist organizers, workers receive political education to understand the root causes of their exploitation, how capitalism works, and how to effectively organize and utilize their economic power as workers.
With experience and political education, workers will wield tactics such as sit-downs, work stoppages, walk-outs, and strikes to deny bosses their profits, the very source of their power.
Over time, organized workplaces link together, forming workers councils in neighborhoods and regions, with strikes for economic demands transforming into political ones. In this way, the working class not only gains increasing amounts of control over the economic functions of society, it also begins to exercise its rightful political authority.
One of the chief complaints of the Sizzle Pie Central Eastside workers was that the air conditioning was constantly broken, with staff forced to work in a dangerously hot store. The workers were the ones who felt the heat. Now, that blaze is being turned the other way – the hot, ferocious indignation and determination of the workers being directed at the bosses. For the Sizzle Pie workers, and for all the workers of the world, may that fire never be quenched.