Two employees of the Duck & the Peach were recently fired for tasting a wine during service. The restaurant says it was enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for drinking on the job, but the workers say there’s more to the story and allege that they were ultimately targeted because of their union involvement. Employees of the popular Capitol Hill restaurant—and its adjoining sister spots La Collina and the Wells—announced their intention to unionize in December, the latest in a string of high-profile unionization efforts in the DC restaurant industry.
Bartender HC—who requested to go by her initials to avoid further professional reprecussions—says it all started when she was pouring a customer a new wine. She offered server assistant Alice Rubino, who was behind the bar with her, a taste for “educational purposes.”
“I took a small sip and then spit it out,” says Rubino. She and HC say the practice is commonplace—and even encouraged—so that employees can get a better understanding of the products served to guests. “It happens nearly every day, and so I didn’t really think anything of it,” Rubino says.
At the end of the evening, both Rubino and HC were pulled into a manager’s office and fired. They were told they needed a manager’s permission to sample the wine. According to owner Hollis Silverman, the employees violated a zero-tolerance rule about alcohol consumption during service, and the firings had nothing to do with the union.
“The two part-time individuals were terminated for violating the restaurant’s long-held policy against consuming alcohol while working without permission from a manager. Their dismissals were unrelated to the union. We look forward to vigorously defending this matter,” Silverman says in an email statement.
Eastern Point Collective, the group behind Duck & the Peach, has handed out anti-union materials to employees, and the company has hired the same lawyer who is representing Stephen Starr and his restaurant group in its own divisive union battle. But in a publicly posted statement, Silverman wrote that while she was surprised by the unionization effort, “I fully support our employees’ right to organize – they deserve to have their voices heard through a free and fair election.”
Rubino and HC, however, allege their union involvement was a factor in their firings. Both have attended pickets outside the restaurant and joined efforts pushing Eastern Point Collective to agree to a fair process for them to decide on unionizing. They say they’d never seen the rule they were dismissed for being enforced previously. “I definitely felt targeted,” Rubino says. “The reality of the matter is that the first time they’ve seemingly enforced this rule, it coincidentally ended up with two pro-union leaders being fired.”
Rubino says she had never previously had any sort of write-up or disciplinary action. She claims that managers have been hyper-vigilant about mistakes in a way they weren’t before employees moved to unionize. “Before we went public with the union, management has never really had negative comments for me. But the last few weeks, it was reaching a point where almost every day a manager would critique something I was doing,” she says.
HC says she had been written up once for being late, but she felt management was looking for reasons to reprimand employees in the wake of the union effort. “There has been a huge shift in the restaurant in general. It very much has felt like they were trying to push us out or push me away,” she says.
Unite Here has filed an “unfair labor practice” violation with the National Labor Relations Board over the firings.
Meanwhile, a union election is set for March 6.
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind DC’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
