eelhound:

“Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: ‘no one wants to work.’ A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed 'due to NO STAFF.’

Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.

A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year. They find that food and agricultural workers morbidity rates increased by the widest margins by far, much more so than medical professionals or other occupations generally considered to be on the 'front lines’ of the pandemic. Within the food industry, the morbidity rates of line cooks increased by 60 percent, making it the deadliest profession in America under coronavirus pandemic.

Line cooks are especially at risk because of notoriously bad ventilation systems in restaurant kitchens and preparation areas. Anyone who has ever worked a back-of-the-house job knows that it’s hot, smelly, and crowded back there, all of which indicate poor indoor air quality. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Environmental Protection Agency recommended increasing indoor ventilation to fight the virus, but such upgrades are costly and time consuming. There is no data available on how many restaurants chose not to upgrade their ventilation systems, but given how miserly franchise owners are with everything else, one could guess that many, if not most, made no upgrades at all.

Ventilation issues are deadliest for line cooks and other back-of-house jobs, but there are other reasons why food workers’ morbidity rates shot up. Food workers are much more likely to be poor and/or a racial or national minority, and poor people and black and Latino workers are much more likely to die of complications from the coronavirus.

Restaurants are often intentionally short staffed, making it difficult to take time off, so sick workers likely still came to work (and infected others in the process). Bars and restaurants are COVID-19 hotspots, and service workers and customers alike get sick after prolonged restaurant exposure. The difference is that many of those customers have health insurance and other safeguards to prevent them from dying of the illness; 69 percent of restaurants, on the other hand, offer their employees no health benefits at all.

When coronavirus is spread at restaurants, and restaurant workers make little money and rarely earn health benefits, it’s no wonder morbidity rates are so much higher for food service workers. But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers 'lazy.’

There are, of course, also living, breathing people who have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits. That is a perfectly rational decision for the homo economicus to make. Given how dangerous restaurant work is during a viral pandemic, if restaurant owners really wanted more workers, they would offer living wages, health benefits, and adequate personal protective equipment. But all the wage increases in the world won’t bring back the dead.

There aren’t enough people working in the service industry, and service bosses have somehow turned that into our problem, into something we ought to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t fall for it. Profits accumulate because of labor — without workers to exploit, the owning class can’t get richer. Capitalists cannot exploit the labor of the dead, so when large swathes of the working class die, they turn their ire on the living.

This is a barbaric response to mass tragedy. Workers across the country and the globe are dead or grieving. We shouldn’t risk further tragedies for a paltry minimum wage.”

- Sandy Barnard, “Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Just Don’t Want to Risk Dying for Minimum Wage.” Jacobin, 5 May 2021.

bethanyactually:

aromanticshaycormac:

h-oney-b-ones:

theannoyedserver:

solveitwithchocolate:

lumos5001:

megaparsecs:

i say this (and repeat it a lot. probably too much. sorry.) because i know a lot of younger people who are just starting to go places on their own do not know how much they should tip, and i know this because i have heard this dilemma come up sometimes w/ tables of teens i’ve waited on, cause they just don’t know. 

i’m here 4 u teens of america: it’s 20%, unless ur waiter is an asshole (like not bad day asshole but Premium Asshole Asshole) or creepy, in which case it is 15%, dropping appropriately to 10% as their Assholery or Creepiness climbs.

just multiply what your bill is by two and drop the second digit. for example: i spend 15 bux, 15x2 = 30, drop the second digit and the appropriate 20% tip is 3 bux.  or u spent 48 bux, thats like 96, that’s p close to 100 so just tip 10 bux to be Cool. 

if you stay at the table for a long time, also compensate accordingly – servers usually have a limited number of tables that they are given responsibility for (so these five or six tables in the corner are my section, anyone who sits there is my table to take care of) and if you camp out for a long time that can cut into yr servers ability to Make doll4rs and/or Leave Work.

if you know that you’re gonna be catching up w/ an old friend for two hours, you can, honestly, just go “hey i’m planning on chatting w/ my friend for a while, but I know we’re taking up this table, and I’m going to tip extra for your time” and that’ll work out for everyone in the long run. people like to know you’re trying to be respectful of their time + effort. everyone is nice, everyone has a nice good time. 

okay this is seriously really good info. like i didn’t know about the multiplying by two and dropping the second digit thing and i’m in my late 20′s. it’s going to make tipping a hell of a lot easier!!!

Another easy way to calculate 20% -

Take your total, move the decimal one place to the left, then multiply by two.

So if your total is $36.25, move the decimal to make it 3.625, multiply and you should be tipping $7.25

An even easier way to calculate a tip: $1 per every $5 your bill is…

So if your bill is $5 tip $1
$15 = $3
$25 = $4
$50 = $10

And so on

I legit just use my phone calculator to do it

And if you can afford it- please round up to the next dollar, or leave a 25% tip. You never know how many non-tippers, low-tippers, and outright assholes your server may be dealing with that day.

Also at some nicer places they have buskids who get a percentage of the tip, so if there’s a kid filling your water/coffee or asking you about bread or something like that, they also recieve tips. If you can spare a little extra for them, that would be fantastic

Any non-Americans reading this whose reaction is, ‘What!?’ please know that minimum wage for servers in most of the U.S. is just over $2/hr because they are expected to make up the rest in tips. We know it’s a crappy system, but it’s the one we have for now so please don’t take out your annoyance on the poorly-paid servers at the bottom of the pile by refusing to tip them. When you go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant in the U.S., tipping should be considered just part of the cost. (Fast-food restaurants, where you order the food at the counter, do not require tipping.)

naamahdarling:

gothicprep:

botesregias:

kinkshamer69:

not to sound too millennial here but it annoys me so much when I’m at a restaurant and someone I’m with will complain about the service being slow like buddy pal it’s fine it’s not that important

You didn’t waited 40 minutes for a dinner before haven’t you?

i have but i also have, like, real problems

I waited well over an hour for food once at IHOP, because it kept coming out inedible.

We finally asked what was going on, and it turns out that the ONLY cook had been working for 36 hours straight with only a short nap.

I ordered the easiest thing to make, tipped the waitress heavily, and sent her back to the cook with a $10 tip for them, too, AFTER watching the 24-hour restaurant close the doors so that they could send the cook home for some rest.

Yeah, I’ve waited 40 minutes for my dinner, and I didn’t ask for a discount, we tipped VERY well, and sent the cook our best wishes.

If something goes wrong with your restaurant experience, consider that there are real people back there, working under god knows what conditions.