Workers Picket Hungry Charley's

Four employees of the Hungry Charley restaurant in New Haven picketed for eight hours yesterday in front of the Harvard Square branch, attempting to force the restaurant chain's management to recognize their union.

The demonstrators, carrying Hungry Charley posters with "Strike!" written at the bottom, assembled at noon. They passed out leaflets urging bystanders to join the picket line Five did.

The purpose of the demonstration was to persuade potential customers to boycott the restaurant. "I'd say about half the people have refused to cross the picket line," said Susan Cooper, a New Haven employee and organizer of the demonstration.

Michael Schweitzer, director of the Hungry Charley restaurants chain, estimated that business had fallen by five or ten per cent. "It's hurt us a little bit," he said. At 6:30 p.m., 22 people were eating dinner in the restaurant, which has a capacity of 138.

"Business was really affected," one Cambridge-branch employee said yesterday. Another explicitly contradicted Schweitzer's estimate. "Business was cut 60 to 75 per cent while I was there," he said. "We did absolutely no work.

There were not more than three or four customers during most of the afternoon."

Fourteen out of the fifteen New Haven employees voted to form a union several weeks ago because "management just couldn't be talked to" about theft and heroin traffic in the New Haven restaurant, Cooper said. The management locked up the building after a strike by all non-management employees and a boycott by the surrounding community.

Richard Ball, manager of the Harvard Square branch, said that the drug problems at his restaurant were "minimal."

In the leaflet passed out at the entrance of the restaurant, the demonstrators wrote they were not trying to encourage a strike by the Cambridge-branch employees. "The workers inside would get fired if they walked out," it said.

"All the employees have been working and continue to work," Ball said.