Austin restaurant owner, nonprofit leader helping businesses respond to deportation impacts
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Adam Orman has been in the food and beverage industry for around 30 years. For the last six of those, he’s worked with a local nonprofit to try to improve the equity and health of the industry’s landscape in Austin.
Orman is a co-owner of east Austin restaurants L’Oca d’Oro and Bambino. In 2017, he co-founded Good Work Austin, a bar and restaurant association that works toward “creating good jobs for all workers, ensuring a quality workplace, and supporting and amplifying the voices of like-minded businesses,” per its website.
It started as a group of businesses that worked with Austin City Council to create the city’s Paid Sick Leave ordinance, then it evolved into an organization that provides support, education, and resources to businesses and their employees. Think of it as a labor union for the restaurant/bar industry in which employers and employees work together as a collective to improve their work through a holistic and community-oriented approach.
“There was definitely a need for the organization, and it just kept growing, and we just kept seeing other things, other places where we could provide either resources for owners who needed them or for the community,” Orman said.
“We talk about it in three pillars,” he explained. “We talk about healthy employees, healthy workplaces, and healthy communities.”
The nonprofit has done things like a partnership with the Austin Independent School District to provide free meals to students in need, worked with the city to provide meals to people experiencing homelessness or food insecurity, coordinated about 60 restaurants to provide hundreds of thousands of meals to people during severe winter storms, and works with other nonprofits to provide trainings for free to people who face obstacles in getting hired, to hopefully help them get a job at one of Good Work Austin’s partner restaurants.
Most recently, Good Work Austin has been hosting “Know Your Rights” workshops about immigration policy changes and mass deportations under the Trump Administration, which Orman said drastically impact the culinary industry.
“That’s something where we feel like, regardless of what we’re doing… we really need to jump in here, because this is a crisis for our industry, for our owners, and for our employees.”
“We have very small teams. We have exactly the people on the floor every night that we need, and if one of them doesn’t show up, it’s really hard. It’s really hard on everybody,” Orman said.
“We’re also not able to use the service that we want to provide, and we’re not going to walk around to guests and say, ‘sorry, service isn’t great tonight, one of our employees was just detained.’ That’s not what anybody wants to hear when they come out to dinner, and that’s not an excuse that we’re going to give. So it affects everything. It affects the
morale… team… Everyone’s anxiety is heightened because we just don’t know from one day to the next who is going to show up for work.”
He said there have been two immigration-focused seminars so far — one in February and one this week — and both have had high attendance. Orman said those seminars discuss what life is like under current immigration policies, how restaurants can create safe and secure spaces for immigrant workers, what business owners can do to prepare for potential ICE raids, how to prepare for an I-9 audit, and more.
Orman said that while such trainings go a long way, there’s still only so much that business owners and their employees can do to prepare.
“Unfortunately, over the last couple of weeks, what we’ve seen is, as detentions have increased, folks aren’t getting picked up at work, and restaurants aren’t being raided,” Orman explained. “So when our team members are getting detained, it’s, it’s out on the street, it’s going to the store, it’s in parking, it’s at traffic stops.”
Orman said a couple of his employees have been detained over the last few months outside of work. He helped sponsor bail for one of them, when they finally got a bail hearing after two months of detainment and hearing delays, Orman said.
Those employees had resident alien numbers, were in the country legally and are on the path of getting Green Cards to eventually obtain permanent residency.
“But because that path is so slow,” Orman said, “they haven’t gotten there.”
Employment-based Green Card wait times can last for months, according to Boundless Immigration, a U.S. immigration services provider.
Orman said that for his restaurants, he works to guarantee employment to his workers who’ve been detained, once they’re allowed to work again. But there’s no set timeline for when that could happen. He also wants to be able to provide livable wages and benefits to all his employees, which isn’t an industry standard, but he said that is the main goal of Good Work Austin.
“There’s this amazing space for small business owners and employees in independent businesses to work together, to advocate for each other because we’ve both been suffering; small business and labor have both suffered over the last couple of decades,” Orman said. “I think small business owners and their employees working together is exactly what Good Work wants, it’s what we know is necessary for the landscape, and I think there’s really great opportunities there.”
“The hospitality industry can’t exist on that shaky of a foundation. We are the largest workforce — the largest private employer in the country, and we need our team members to be able to be secure, be stable, be able to have way more resilience than they currently have,” Orman said.
According to the most recent data from the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Employee Demographics, which was released in April, the restaurant and foodservice industry is the nation’s second-largest private sector employer, making up 10% of the workforce. Retail is the nation’s largest private-sector employer, making up 26% of the nation’s economy, according to March 2024 data from the National Retail Federation.
Twenty-two percent of restaurant and foodservice employees were born outside of the United States – compared to 20% of employees in the nation’s total employed labor force, per the National Restaurant Association.
