Described in 1930 as little more than “an association of coffin societies,” the labor movement confounded critics by its unprecedented expansion over the next two decades, adding fifteen million members by the early 1950s.2 Culinary workers were not immune to the union fever: HERE nearly doubled its membership in 1933, the first heady year of New Deal legislation favoring unionization. Membership spurted ahead during the sit-downs of 1936 and 1937, and again during the war years. By the end of the decade HERE membership topped four hundred thousand, with a quarter of all hotel and restaurant workers organized.3

As the International union matured into a substantial power within the hotel and restaurant industry, its membership became increasingly female. The percentage of women within the union doubled after 1930, climbing to 45 percent by 1950. Waitress locals aggressively reached out to unorganized waitresses in hotels, cafeterias, drugstores, and department stores; many waiters’ locals opened their doors to female servers for the first time; and the new industrial hotel locals swept in large numbers of waitresses, chambermaids, female cashiers, checkers, and kitchen workers. By the late 1940s, more than two hundred thousand female culinary workers were organized, with close to a quarter of these within separate waitress organizations.4

The NRA codes sparked organization in the culinary industry because they raised hopes of improved wages and working conditions, yet failed miserably in delivering on these promises. The problem was twofold: the codes themselves, largely determined by employers, were substandard; and employers violated even these barest of employee protections because the government gave little evidence of either having the will or the ability to uphold code standards. According to San Francisco waiter official Hugo Ernst, if employers in that city adopted the governmental standards, working conditions would be “as bad as those thirty years ago.”7

In San Francisco, waitresses enjoyed not only a long tradition of separate-sex organizing among workers and city residents, but also a solid union-consciousness that resurfaced with a vengeance in the 1930s.13 Waitresses’ Local 48 organized first in restaurants patronized by union clientele, spread its drives to restaurants outside working-class neighborhoods, swept up cafeteria, drugstore, and tea-room waitresses, and then embraced waitresses employed in the large downtown hotels and department stores. By 1941, waitresses in San Francisco had achieved almost complete organization of their trade, and Local 48 became the largest waitress local in the country. Their success resulted from a combination of factors: an exceptionally powerful local labor movement, sympathetic, fair-minded male co-workers within the LJEB, and the existence of a waitress organization committed first and foremost to organizing and representing female servers.

Employers who failed to recognize the good business sense of unionization were asked to justify their refusal before the united board of culinary crafts. If this interrogation proved fruitless, the employer was reprimanded to a higher body: the executive council of the SFLC or a conference of retail and service unions including the Bakery Drivers, Milk Wagon Drivers, Bakers, and other involved parties. When these oral persuasions went unheeded, the restaurant faced increasing pressure through the council's “We Don't Patronize” list. Few employers could withstand the business losses of withdrawn union patronage when approximately one-fifth of San Francisco's entire population belonged to a labor organization. The Duchess Sandwich Company, for instance, explained that they refused to “force unionism” on their employees and declined to recognize the culinary workers. After less than a month on the council's unfair list, the co-owners of the company wrote that “we have given further consideration to your request that we take the initiative in bringing our employees into the Culinary Workers Organization…. We will be glad…to work out ways of bringing our plant into complete union membership…[and] to get away from the penalties which have piled up on us as a result of your putting us on the unfair list.”

Yet as the sit-down fever spread through Detroit, Local 705 jumped in to organize women as well as men. In the fall and winter of 1936 and 1937, after nearly five years of bitter unemployment punctuated by marches, demonstrations, and clashes with police, Detroit's workplaces blazed up under the spark of this new confrontational tactic. In February and March of 1937, sit-down strikes in Detroit involved close to thirty-five thousand workers. “Sit-downs have replaced baseball as the national pastime,” one Detroit news reporter quipped. The eruption in the hotel and restaurant industry commenced when twenty-three-year-old organizer Wolfgang strode to the center of Detroit's main Woolworth store and blew her strike whistle, the union's prearranged signal for workers to sit-down. After Woolworth capitulated, signing an agreement covering 1,400 employees, the union toppled department stores, candy and soda shops, and eateries of every description “like nine pins in a bowling alley.” Union inroads into the hotel sector began with a “terrific uproar” at the Barlum Hotel: two days after serving the Woolworth strikers a victory dinner, the hotel's coffee shop waitresses occupied their own workplace. After union activists barricaded themselves inside other key hotels, the Detroit Hotel Association granted union recognition and raises of 10 to 15 percent.47

Men outside the culinary industry, however, saw female servers in a different light. Men from many different well-organized trades—longshoremen, logging, and mining—for example, frequented local cafes and restaurants, knew the waitresses personally, and saw the unionization of the eating establishments they patronized as a logical extension of the organizing of their own workplaces. Others, like the teamsters, delivered such daily necessities as fresh bread, milk, and vegetables to restaurants. These men—men for whom the enhanced power of waitresses would threaten neither their male privilege at the workplace nor in the union—proved reliable and quite effective allies, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. In short, the cross-craft, cross-sex ties between waitresses and male workers in other trades provided more crucial organizing support than did either same-sex or same-craft bonds.99

Calls for eliminating tips and demanding a compensatory raise in cash wages issued forth frequently from culinary union spokespersons, especially during the Progressive Era.29 Food servers themselves, however, were divided over the issue, with the ranks of those interested in reforming the system thinning as tip income increased and public condemnation of tipping diminished. By 1945, according to the national union journal, most culinary workers did “not like the tipping system and freely complain[ed] about it…but many would not say a word lest it should be replaced by another system that would mean a financial loss to them.”30

[...] Because women's work was often de-valued and its skills rendered invisible, waitresses had more trouble raising the societal estimation of their worth than did their male co-workers.38 Nevertheless, through unionization, waitresses gained many of the privileges reserved for “skilled” workers. Their achievements demonstrate, as Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor have pointed out, that “skill” is a flexible concept and varies according to the balance of power between employers and labor organizations.3

Many waitresses had always assented to sexual display and flirtation as an integral aspect of their work. Their acceptance of the sexual character of their work was rooted in their distinctive mores, but it also derived from their situation as service workers in an occupation in which their livelihood depended on attractiveness and allure. Denial was largely foreclosed as an option because, for many, their work took place in an increasingly sexualized environment. Waitresses walked a fine line: unlike middle-class women, they wanted to express their sexuality, but they sought to do so without losing control over the uses of that sexuality. They wanted to determine by whom and for what ends it was to be used.

Waitresses saw attractiveness, in part, as an achievement and a confirmation of their femininity. The avid support among waitresses for beauty contests is one demonstration of this attitude. Detroit's local was typical: forty-two women competed for the title of Queen of Detroit's Waitresses for the first time in 1939; these union-sponsored contests continued unabated into the 1960s. Mae Stoneman, long-time business manager for Waitresses’ Local 639 in Los Angeles, frequently described her local as “the one with the most beautiful waitresses of any local in the International.” In an employee bathing beauty contest appropriately sponsored by the Rose Royal Cheese Cake Company, four of the six winners were Local 639 members. “Local 639 has always cooperated with community interests that afford some recreational benefits to our members,” Stoneman maintained. Cafeteria Local 302 Women's Committee devoted a number of columns in the union paper to bathing beauty contests. In announcing the contest for Queen of the Trade Unions at the New York World's Fair, the committee exhorted, “C'mon, let's show them some of our 302 beauties.” The Women's Committee savored the subsequent triumph of 302 members: “This will silence forever those who say that the only girls that get active in trade unions are cranks or old maids.”73

Waitresses wanted their unions to function as social organizations. Chicago's local held open house three times a week, providing light refreshments and entertainment. A New York City waitress, interviewed in 1907, volunteered that the best thing about her union were the “sociables. Sometimes they have lectures with magic lantern pictures and it gives a girl somewhere to go evenings.”110 Female locals instituted annual balls as soon as they were chartered. San Francisco waitresses held yearly dances into the 1950s and used the money they raised for their sick and death benefit funds. These affairs brought a “a better feeling among the girls,” a Los Angeles waitress organizer reported, and they forged ties between waitress locals and the local labor movement. One female organizer relied on the annual waitress dance as a wedge to gain entry into male union meetings and garner support for organizing. Social events also helped engage the uncommitted rank and file and attract unorganized waitresses.111