Some people got more sense now. Back then they were a little different. A lot of people forgot where they came from when they got some money, I guess.How long did you stay at that company?
I was there for a couple years. My coworkers were good people. The chef I worked for, he taught me a lot. But after a couple years, I left and went to a restaurant. I like working in restaurants, but they don’t pay. You’re making really good food for really good people, and it’s a fun atmosphere. But you’re busting your ass doing a lot of work, and it doesn’t pay. After the restaurant, I went to a catering company. That was cool, too. But once again, it didn’t pay enough.
That’s why I left. I was like, I need health care. I got a son. He’s active. He’s an athlete. If I don’t have health care, with the price of health care what it is, I couldn’t even afford a single Tylenol in the ambulance. You don’t really have a choice: you’ve got to go back over there and work for the tech companies. It’s hard for restaurants and catering companies to keep cooks, because they can’t pay the money that the tech companies can pay. These companies can drop a new building or a new campus anywhere, and they’re gonna need people to come in there and cook. So I started working for a different big tech company, which is where I still work.It had been a few years since you last worked in tech by the time you went back. Had the mood changed? Did tech feel different?
Yeah, it did. The climate was different. At my current company, the tech workers are hella cool. They just chilling and getting their money, trying to have a good time. They work a lot. They bust their ass.Could you walk us through a normal day?
I get up early in the morning, usually at 5:00 a.m., and I get to work by 6:00 a.m. We prepare food. Then we take a break. Then we prepare more food. The service comes, and we serve the food. Then we clean up and get out at 3:00 p.m.
But everybody’s gotta have two jobs. Myself, I just started a new part-time gig. Most of my coworkers, when they get out at 3:00 p.m., they go to another job and work another shift. With the way traffic is, they have to go straight there. They have to be at their second job at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. to get that next eight hours in, so they can at least be home before midnight. Many of them live so far out: they’ve got to go drive all the way home to East San Jose or Gilroy or Morgan Hill. I heard some people are even coming from Vallejo. You know how far that is from here? With traffic, that’s like a two-hour trip.
So that’s the typical day for most people. Start at 6:00 a.m., get home by midnight. They’re busting their ass. They’re really busting their ass. But you have to. Especially if you got kids.Are a lot of the people you work with from the Bay Area originally?
A lot of people did grow up here. But they’re getting forced out. They’re moving further and further out. A lot of them are having to set down new roots when they still have their old roots here.As someone who grew up here, you must’ve seen a lot of change over the years.
Oh, yes, a lot of change. I went to my mother’s neighborhood in West Oakland recently, where I grew up. That neighborhood was notorious. It had a lot of negative activity. Now they have houses there going for a million plus. Like, nice houses. They put some work in them.
But the changes that were made, I don’t think they were the best ones for the people. Low-income cities like East Palo Alto could’ve invested in low-income housing instead of bringing in IKEA and Home Depot. Why we got a fucking PGA golf store in the middle of the hood? I mean, I get it: the rich cities around us need a place to come shop. But that all used to be housing. So you take the housing away, and now you put the problem on the people.
If you ride down El Camino you see nothing but hotels. Hotels, but no housing. They’re building those hotels for the tech industry, so all these people can come in and do big business here. But they ain’t let us—the people that’s living here—get no part of the big business. That’s wack.
A Really Good FeelingI know you were active in organizing a union in your workplace. How did you start getting involved in that?
Some homies that I work with pulled me aside and said, “We want to unionize.” And then they introduced me to the people from the union. They wanted to make power moves. They wanted to give the workers the power to actually have a voice and make some changes. I thought it made sense. So I started going to some meetings with my coworkers.When and where would you meet?
We met at people’s houses. Or after work we’d chop it up in the parking lot for a minute. We’d go have a beer or pizza or something like that.
It was cool. We heard each other’s stories. We heard about how hard it is for each of us to get by and raise a family. And once you get to know your coworkers, you start seeing things a lot differently. You want to help them out. You want to make it fair.As you started talking to your coworkers about organizing a union, did you have any challenging conversations? How did you try to convince people to support the effort?
It was hard. People are afraid they’ll lose their job. And they got a
