After negotiations for a contract between a Pacific Northwest-bred fast-food chain and the Burgerville Workers Union disintegrated Friday, union organizers wove a picket line around the chain’s popular Hawthorne Boulevard location Saturday afternoon.

“An injury to one is an injury to all,” read the signs carried by the 100 or so Burgerville workers and supporters who gathered under the Hawthorne Bridge at Tom McCall Waterfront Park in downtown Portland late Saturday morning.

The picketers marched from the waterfront over the bridge to the Burgerville on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, where they blocked all entrances for about two hours, turning away some vehicles seeking drive-thru access.

The Hawthorne location is one of five Burgerville restaurants that comprise the workers’ historic, federally recognized union.

The labor action comes after 16 months of negotiations for better pay and working conditions. Recently, the Vancouver-based company announced that it will bump base pay to $13.50 for all workers in Oregon and Washington beginning Dec. 30, saying that it took out a $3 million loan to create the pay raise for workers.

But this pay raise is much lower than what the union has persistently asked for: a $5-an-hour pay increase.

After 20 hours of bargaining over the last three days, Emmett Schlenz, a primary negotiator for the union, said the negotiations are over and hope of a contract is dead. Negotiators did make progress on other issues like protection for undocumented workers and shift scheduling, but the priority was always wage increases -- and that just didn’t happen, he said.

“Burgerville corporate is framing this as the union walking away from the table,” Schlenz said. “But that is extraordinarily misleading.”

The $1-an-hour raise Burgerville has offered would essentially be rendered moot for its Portland-area stores after the upcoming scheduled minimum wage rise, Schlenz said. In the Portland metro area, minimum wage will increase by 75 cents in July 2020, bringing it up to $13.25 per hour, while pay in Portland Burgervilles will be $13.50.

But Burgerville spokeswoman Hillary Barbour said the raise will accelerate the minimum wage increase and put the company’s Washington and Oregon locations “in step together" so wage increases will happen at the same time. Wages will be “well above” minimum wage outside the Portland metro area, Burgerville spokeswoman Natalie Bennon said.

“It’s clear there are a number of societal and cultural changes in our region,” Barbour said, including a rising cost of living. ”How we live and work and get around in our community has changed, and so I think for any employer, these are challenges we are grappling with."

Members of the Burgerville union were joined by other union groups and grassroots organizers like PopMob and the Industrial Workers of the World at the picket line in their call for better pay.

“There are so many people here," Schlenz said. "This is the biggest action we’ve done in a long time. Workers are ready to walk off the job this week. We’re ready to go fight this contract negotiation, to fight it out to the end.”

A strike will begin in the coming weeks, Schlenz said, but he wouldn’t say exactly when, in order to “maintain the element of surprise.”

Portland mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone joined the picket line and said she’d like to see Burgerville work more closely with the union and help meet its demands for higher wages because many workers just can’t afford the costs of rising rents.

In April 2018, Burgerville workers became the first in decades to organize a union drive at a fast-food establishment in the U.S.

“This is history-making. It’s ground zero in Portland for organized labor taking over fast food,” Mick Stiles, a member of union Local 1503, told The Oregonian/OregonLive at Saturday’s picket line.

Former Burgerville employee Chris Merkel said he quit his job after he and other workers were disciplined after signing a petition to unionize and describing the treatment as “inhumane.” Merkel said his pregnant coworker was two days away from her unpaid maternity leave when she was suspended for union organizing.

“I have never been as consistently disrespected as I was by corporate Burgerville and the local general manager,” he said. “If Burgerville wants war, we can give them war. We’ve got the whole community at our back. We’ve got the whole labor movement at our back.”

Burgerville, owned by Holland Inc., has about 1,500 employees across 41 locations in Oregon and southern Washington.