BOYCOTT DARDEN RESTAURANTS

Recently, Darden Restaurants, who bill themselves as "the world's largest full service restaurant company", a national chain with over 2,000 outlets including Red Lobster and Olive Garden, decided to take from the hard working servers and give to themselves.

The company unilaterally gutted the server's health coverage by declaring them all part-timers and instituted a tip pool, where the servers subsidize the restaurant by giving most of the other employees a cut of their tips and saving Darden approximately $5 per hour per employee (with 180.000 employees - their own figures - @ 30 hours per week that works out to approximately $3,000,000,000 a year)...

Three Billion Dollars a year will buy a whole heap of health care coverage (but they aren't buying any health coverage), the reason they initially gave for this horrendous attack on the right of hard working servers to support themselves and their families.

Could there be more to it than this, like a mountain of enormous, unmitigated greed?

That means they get away with paying the employees a whopping $2.18 per hour, instead of the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Like Wal-Mart, they are passing on their responsibilities to the community, instead of shouldering their fair share.

Their web site pays appropriate lip service to how they treat their customers, diversity & inclusion, foundation & community affairs & sustainability (blah, blah, blah) but just take a look at how they treat the hardest working employees, the very people who made their vast empire possible...

I went through this crap maybe 15 years ago when Chevys Mexican Restaurants did the same thing. I had supported my family as a server for most of my life, working 2 jobs just to get by and now, they've taken that option off of the table for all future servers if this nonsense isn't immediately forced to a grinding halt.

This needs to be stopped NOW!

We call on all hard working servers, former servers and future servers to boycott ALL Darden Restaurants.

Tell your friends, family & co-workers...

Darden's holdings:
Red Lobster
Olive Garden
LongHorn Steakhouse
The Capital Grille
Bahama Breeze
Seasons 52
Eddie V's

If you have stock in this company, please think about unloading it as soon as possible. If this boycott has any teeth, the prices will fall soon so take advantage of knowing what you know and get out now.

Their symbol on the New York Stock Exchange is DRI


Darla J Webster