In the Red: Dirty Rotten Restaurants
Posted on 26. Oct, 2009 by Joe Richard in Politics
Going to work in a restaurant is like going to prison. You deal with snitches, scabs, backstabbers, dealers, narcs, dirty cops and crooked shitheads in positions of power. The knives, the drugs, the turf wars, the punishing of creative expression. The wages are low, and maybe because of this, cigarettes are worth more than money. It’s hard to know who you can trust or who’ll watch your back when things get bad.
I think about these things every day when I clock in at mi trabajo.
For students, restaurant work is usually a temporary excursion into what they see as a “fun” and shockingly unprofessional work environment.
But what isn’t seen is that these “fun” jobs take a tremendous toll on the people who work them. Some of these people who prepare, cook or serve your food have no recourse but to work for low pay and long hours without benefits. And others just get caught up in it, crushed by a dehumanizing routine that forces them to create a commodity they are alienated from and will not enjoy.
The most widely used language in American kitchens is Spanish, which is a result of the standard operating procedure of U.S. power players in Washington and on Wall Street to systematically destroy the working economies of Latin America. By forcing privatization of former public industries in exchange for World Bank and IMF loans (which then further destabilize these economies by placing them in a position of financial servitude to “el norte,” which causes waves of people to emigrate in search of work), the American ruling class has successfully created a massive amount of undocumented immigrant laborers who, out of necessity, compete for low wage jobs in the service industry.
Socialists call this the “reserve army of labor,” which is an appropriate metaphor, if you think about it.
There is a particularly sick irony in that globalization has created a permanent class of immigrant restaurant workers who are schooled in the production of food they’d never be able to afford: foie gras, coq au vin, lobster bisque. In the kitchens of large, famous restaurants in any major city, rest assured you will find Carlos or Juanito cooking your classic Mediterranean fare, rather than Matteo or Jacques.
In short, if a person defies international borders to find work to support themselves and their family, it’s a lot harder to stand up for themselves and their coworkers. When the spouse and kids live in Ciudad Juarez or Oaxaca and they’re waiting for Friday afternoon for you to go down to a Western Union office to wire money south of the border, it’s not easy to tell your boss to shove it and move on to the next job or organize a picket outside your work when you get screwed out of overtime. Bosses know this, and they love it.
In Gainesville, they also like student employees for very similar reasons. Students are notorious for moving from job to job and never demanding more for their work because they see restaurant work as a temporary cash fix. That is, until they graduate in the midst of the Great Recession and come to the ugly and expensive truth that most of their degrees aren’t worth more than $8 or $9 an hour at dead-end jobs.
Of course, students are also notorious for not knowing a damn thing about a real day’s work. They work for cheap, but you generally get what you pay for. The very presence of students in this town serves the function of driving down wages a few dollars below what the same job in a town like Ocala, Jacksonville or Panama City would pay.
It’s a simple principle: The larger the supply of labor, the lower the wages will go until they level off at the minimum to live (generally about $8 an hour). I’m not saying that student workers should feel guilty about the role they play in the labor market. Lots of people need paying work, and as a socialist, I would never argue that one group of workers deserves different treatment than another.
To the contrary, I think students should be in the forefront of the struggle for decent working conditions while using their beneficial position to take a stand when others can’t. But at the same time, adult workers in Gainesville usually make about the same as student workers because bosses know if they start causing trouble at work, there’s always another sheltered suburban kid looking for a few shifts a week to pay for a weed habit. What restaurant workers need is unity.
Many people in restaurants turn to drugs and booze to relax or escape reality. It’s probably one of the biggest obstacles to restaurant worker unity and the possibility of improved working conditions. But then again, it’s hard times right now. Real hard.
So the next time you’re sneaking a smoke while making a garbage run or cleaning out a grease barrel, think about who is really responsible for how and why your restaurant job sucks. Chances are it’s probably not the person next to you on the line who gives you a hard time or the servers (who you shit-talk) or the cooks (who you shit-talk). It’s probably the owners who understaff and overwork you. They pay you less for your work than you earn. They pit you against each other.
And ultimately, it’s this goddamn, dirty-rotten system known as capitalism.
Interesting and informative. But will you write about this one more?