Gender violence and food-service workers: Bending toward justice

This chapter addresses gender injustice in the food-service industry through lenses of violence and intersectionality. Three forms of violence-direct, cultural, and structural-are perpetrated along lines of gender in food service. Gender cannot be seen as a unitary category, however, since injustice is intersectional with race-ethnicity and class. Food service global in scope in that it exists in nearly every nation and workers, management, ownership, and patrons transcend national boundaries. It is therefore a relevant locus for global organizing for social change through collective action. This collective action can include worker organizing through traditional labor unions, development of worker-support centers, and collaboration among unions and worker-support centers. In addition, society as a whole must address the direct, cultural, and structural violence that has created gender injustice and made labor struggle necessary in the first place. While this chapter draws on a US context, the conceptual and theoretical approaches of violence, intersectionality, and collective organizing are applicable globally.