What does a “delicious life” mean to you? For CHAAD —the Chicago Hospitality Accountability & Advocacy Database—, it is a life where hospitality workers have their basic needs met and live a joyous existence, can be curious and implement new learnings, abolish the status quo and live in the future they imagine.
In June 2020, a spreadsheet was created by Chicago hospitality workers to be used as a tool to identify businesses that stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, adhere to COVID-19 guidelines, carry multiple employee complaints, have business owners who are white supremacists, and more. The spreadsheet is now retired. However, the CHAAD Project continues to collect data, advance accountability, and support workers. They now use the bilingual ShiftChange database platform. They work extensively through local, national, and transnational partnerships and provide education tools and resources. Together, the CHAAD community seeks to shift industry culture through activities and programs focused on harm reduction and future-building in order to create a sustainable and thriving hospitality industry that is rooted in cooperation, mutual aid, and democratic structures.
CHAAD’s Director of Community Engagement and Strategic Partnerships, Molly Pachay, notes that hospitality is one of the most diverse industries. It is also one of the fastest growing. Yet, with a 75% or higher turnover rate, the industry workforce has been diminishing in skill and population at alarming rates. This is due in part to pervasive sexual harassment, stagnant wages and wage theft, discrimination, and an endemic culture of abuse and toxicity. Using the information collected, CHAAD seeks to “upend the culture” with work that is for and informed by those who can best imagine a new way forward, hospitality workers themselves.
Empowering Hospitality Workers with Knowledge and Resources
CHAAD defines hospitality workers broadly – not only front and back of house workers (servers, bartenders, cooks and dishwashers) but also agricultural workers and housekeepers, recognizing that all of these roles are important in hospitality. Understanding that knowledge is power, CHAAD goes beyond data collection by providing resources in Spanish and English that directly address issues that those in the industry are facing. For example, downloadables and zines include information on boundaries, changing workplace culture, de-escalation skills, oppression, wage theft, what to do if immigration officers come to the workplace, and more.
While CHAAD’s main focus is the Chicagoland area, it reaches far beyond through its social media channels (a recent post reached half a million people!), participation with the Movement to Organize Restaurants for Equality (MORE) coalition, transnational research on labor conditions, and partnerships with a Mexican organization, RestauranteraFeminista. Whether it is fighting for a safe and just workplace or centering worker mental health, CHAAD’s success comes when workers have the information they need to fight for change themselves.
Looking into the future, Raeghn Draper, CHAAD co-founder and Director of Communications, envisions a world where “every hospitality worker is a badass and is informed; That they can say, ‘ I am empowered by what I know and I can share what I know and work with my coworkers for change.’ ”
How can the Mary’s Pence community support the work? By sharing the resources CHAAD has available with the hospitality workers in their lives and following along as CHAAD prepares to launch new resources and initiatives, including a soon-to-be-released Safety Planning Toolkit and “Radish Dinner,” an experimental project to model a new hospitality system that is not a hierarchy.