Lessons in Solidarity from the Service Industry
Today Mel Buer writes about lessons learned over the years working in the restaurant industry and how those can apply to fostering a general sense of solidarity among workers everywhere. It's a great piece and also kind of gave me PTSD. Working in restaurants for so many years was certainly a radicalizing experience for me as well. Such an eye opening thing to have people from vastly different classes all working what is ostensibly the same job in close proximity: Single mothers who could never miss a shift, back of the house undocumented people working three different jobs a day, older service industry professional lifers who took their craft seriously, fancy college kids who did not need the job and other college kids who very much did, and all kinds of other people doing it as a stopgap on the way to something else if they could get there.
This piece was included in today's larger full Hell World which is about the dangers of traveling to the US right now including a bunch of reader responses as to why they're not planning on coming any time soon.
Luke O’Neil
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Lessons in Solidarity from the Service Industry
by Mel Buer
Wage work is simultaneously dull and dangerous, boring and tragic. Long before I ended up working in journalism, I was a put-upon counter girl standing for hours and hours on my feet, taking orders for takeout at an ancient Mom & Pop in Omaha, Nebraska. I stood behind that counter every night after school and on the weekends, rushing my way through the shift without so much as a thought about a meal, or a break. The back kitchen was full of undocumented immigrants grinding away their days for cash that they sent home to family or put away in a shoebox under the bed to pay for the absurdly expensive and humiliating path to citizenship that this country offers.
At least twice a week, the waitress on shift would count her tips at the end of the night and find herself in a standoff with the manager, reminding him aggressively that he needed to pay her minimum wage (the tips never added up to a decent take-home, it wasn't that kind of place) or he'd be breaking the law. He would hem and haw until he reduced her to tears, and then with a small smile of satisfaction at her smeared makeup, acquiesce. Roll the tape back, play again, week after week.
After high school, I made the jump out of fast food and into the bar industry. It was in those successive gauntlets that I learned to keep your cash in your jeans under the apron lest someone with sticky fingers pass by, and a swift kick to the back of the knee can drop a handsy, drunk man faster than calling for security. I learned how to wash the puke of some poor, drunken 20-something out of the upholstery of the booth, to navigate 30-pound trays through throngs of inebriates without sloshing pint glasses, to demurely accept compliments from grotesquely drunk men without angering them and still get them to come back to spend more of their money on the watered-down shots I carried from table to table every Friday night. After the night was over and the cash counted, the tables cleared and the popcorn swept up (why, why do dive bars always feel the need to have a popcorn machine in the corner?), I would walk with the biggest door guy the place had to offer out to my car and head home in the wintry darkness, a wad of tips shoved haphazardly in my back pocket.
I scraped by like this for years and became increasingly convinced that by and large, managers and owners at small businesses are the worst bosses in the hierarchy of horrible bosses. They put their employees through hell for the sheer fun of it; a sadistic, Machiavellian exercise in who amongst their cult of owners can make their employees cry, or quit, the fastest. They preach up and down about how those chosen few who are allowed to enter the hallowed gates of their shitty establishment to work are a family, we take care of each other around here. As if working the line at a Surf-&-Skate-Style burrito shop was the pinnacle of a young cook's career. They elevate certain sycophants to assistant manager positions and sit back as coworkers turn against each other. When you're too busy squabbling with a former-friend-turned-boss about trading shifts, you're not paying attention to the way Mr. Owner steals your wages.
Not everyone is like this, but those establishments feel more like the exception than the rule. You can always tell when you meet someone whether they’ve spent any number of years in the food and beverage industry–the look of knowing when you casually mention the bar you used to work at, the extra tip percentage they add to the bill at the end of the night, the wellspring of patience when interacting with the harried waitress, the war stories of ‘clopens,’ skeleton crews, dangerously drunk patrons, and days-long rushes during city celebrations and events. If you’ve never trauma-bonded with your coworkers after a particular horrible weekend working doubles, did you even work at the local dive? All the while, these owners are raking in the cash and stealing your tips.
Every time I left one of those horrendous, soul-sucking positions, where every day was a chore for every one of us, where we all sucked it up to hang onto the benefits, or the meager paycheck, or the tips, or whatever, I felt this implacable guilt--like I was at fault somehow. I felt shame when I chose to walk away from a position that objectively brought me nothing but misery. I felt I was abandoning my coworkers to fend for themselves against the ruinous scheduling, wage theft, coldhearted bosses, and all the rest. It took me a while to realize that the affinity I was feeling for my fellow workers wasn’t just a trauma bond, but a real sense of shared purpose with the people I worked with as we were forced to navigate the chaos engendered by the petty tyrants who ran our establishments.
I say this often, but working in these places is a masterclass in solidarity, whether you’re aware of it or not. You know that feeling when you really click with the folks you’re scheduled with, when you can glide through a busy shift without many bottlenecks–when the rush doesn’t feel like a rush because everyone’s where they need to be and the GM is staying out of your way? There’s an unspoken sense of–I’m here for you, and you’re here for me, and we’ll get through this together–that, to me, is what solidarity feels like. Even if you’ve never organized before, you know that feeling, and the satisfaction that comes with it. Imagine, for a moment, if you could feel that all the time.
We live in a society ruled by ‘rugged individualism’ and an ass-backwards bootstraps ethos, trapped in a churning capitalist system that loves nothing more than to reduce the vitality of our human experience to nil; we become numbers on a spreadsheet that mercurial bosses and corporate peons can slash and cut through the moment they want to line their already deep pockets with even more of the profits that we generated. The brutality of such a system has been starkly illustrated in the daily firings of the federal workforce for the last few months, but we’ve seen this borne out over and over again in every industry for our entire working lives. The failure to stay employed somehow becomes our fault; we didn’t work hard enough, didn’t make ourselves irreplaceable fast enough. The lesson here is that no matter what we do, the company doesn’t give a fuck about us. We are always replaceable to the ones signing our checks, and they can and will find ways to pull the rug out from under us the second they want to stuff a bit more cash into their already bulging pockets.
The impulse to pull away from your fellow workers, to step on their heads as you climb haltingly to the top, becomes all the more alluring when you're trying to dig yourself out of a hole that you've been shoved into by the same people who made you dig it, when your bills pile up and your kids need to be fed, when your husband is in the hospital, when your parents need to be cared for. People made desperate by their circumstances will do some surprising things in order to try to escape those circumstances. Perhaps that's an explanation, but I would hope that folks don't make it their excuse. I certainly don't.
Engaging in actions of solidarity with one another in the workplace need not be the bogeyman that the boss makes it out to be. By and large we’re already doing it: picking up shifts for the mom of two who wants a night off to see her eldest’s choir recital, washing that sink of dishes when the back of house is too slammed to clean up, protecting the hostess from the creep who comes in every Thursday to get shitfaced and flirt aggressively with her. We share in each others’ lives in a separate group chat from the one that the morning managers like to complain in; we attend each others’ industry nights and commiserate over a whiskey about last week’s bullshit.
All of these actions and more are the building blocks for an ironclad solidarity, and if you’re brave enough, collectively organizing. These businesses can’t run without their workers, and the lies they’ve shoved down your throats that we’re all family here is just a slick way to tell you that they’re gonna keep throwing you under the bus the second they turn a profit. Imagine a world where whole entertainment districts across the country collectively organized and joined unions like Restaurant Workers United, and finally had a say in the running of their workplaces? It’s possible. It’s worth it. What have you got to lose?
Mel Buer is a multimedia journalist who covers movements, labor and community for The Real News Network. She currently lives in Chicago.