Restaurants and the pandemic
This Eater article is a good corrective to the current spin that people would rather just sit at home and collect unemployment; as many have pointed out, if people are making more on unemployment than they would at work, that points to a wage issue, not a laziness issue. But I also appreciate what it has to say about the restaurant industry culture, which has for ages been one that treats its workers as if they should just want to work nonstop and be happy for the job. It’s always been a bit weird because one of the benefits of working in restaurants should ideally be flexibility, yet a lot of managers view you as suspicious or lazy if you don’t want to constantly work.
A number of years ago, e.g., I had just started working at a place in the city while I was going to graduate school full-time, and I had just started seeing someone who didn’t have a lot of free time during the week. But, the manager got pissed at me when I would ask for the odd weekend off, accusing me of not wanting to work — the fact that I wanted to balance my life with work and school was somehow foreign. (This coming from someone who used to glorify his time working in NYC restaurants in the 80s in part because they were making so much money they could just hop on a plane for a random vacation whenever they wanted to — interestingly, that kind of taking off is considered to be okay; wanting a personal, but local life was not.)
Anyway — neither the relationship nor the job lasted (though the job lasted a lot longer than the relationship), and I eventually quit that job and restaurants all together to start teaching. (Another time, after that, I was chastised for not wearing a full suit while going restaurant to restaurant looking for work as a server — never mind that it was summer. Fortunately I got a summer class at the last minute.) But the thing is that restaurant work could be good work — it’s interesting, fast-paced, flexible (again, in theory), and in a lot of places you can do quite well. But the industry has grown more and more exploitative over the years, and it’s not surprising that for many in the industry, the pandemic was the last straw.
