Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

they announced our offices are going to reopen but will be optional and will require vaccination.

ours has been open but I feel like honestly the scarcity of seats in the building has our leaders not exactly WANTING everybody to come back. we have 6 floors, which used to all belong to our company, and they've sold the 4th, 6th, and part of the 2nd.

My wife goes back to the office for the first time next week, though just for three days, to meet a new team she's been working with for months but has never seen in person.

Heard a report on the local radio about the purported labor shortage in restaurants, and afaict (by way of the report) it *is* real. From the top down, executive chefs to dishwashers, many restaurants are down as much as 25% employees. Sure, those that are being hired can then leverage the demand for better pay and benefits, but it's not just a matter of money, and better pay etc. doesn't solve the underlying issue of folks not coming back to work, at least not yet, for a myriad of reasons. I think it's just a tough industry in general, and the pandemic gave folks a lot of time (and reasons) to consider other options.

and better pay etc. doesn't solve the underlying issue of folks not coming back to work,

I don't know, from people I know who left the industry since the pandemic, the shitty pay is usually cited as a very significant factor in that decision.

Employment in leisure and hospitality (l&h) grew by 292,000. Over the last two months, l&h has added 620,000 jobs, roughly three-quarters of the economy-wide jobs added over that period. Folks this is just not signaling a massive labor supply shortage. 5/

— Heidi Shierholz (@hshierholz) June 4, 2021

I'm just going by what my friend in the industry told me, and the piece on local NPR I just heard. All these places are hiring tons, because they've been dormant, they just aren't filing all their spots.

also no healthcare
unpredictable schedule
no vacation time
grueling work conditions
lots of harassment from colleagues and customers
i could go on but those were some other reasons people left the industry in addition to the dismal pay

horrible owners/bosses, who are now being interviewed for local news stories and blaming anything but themselves or the things on LL's list

NPR has been vaping for the Chamber of Commerce ghouls who got states to end enhanced UI, ignore anything they have to say on the issue.

I like eating at restaurants but it'd be no great shame if there were fewer of them because people got fed up working at them

there's also the issue of "shady bar managers doing illegal shit to underpay you and treat you like shit while they do it".

I'll give a recent example - one of my best friends just worked our local theatre festival as a bartender. she did this on top of her full-time job to make some side hustle. The bar was a disorganized mess - people signed up for their own shifts and there was nothing to stop people from changing what they signed up for up until the shift started, lots of people no-call/no-showed, there was no 'training' as to where all of the drink ingredients were, many were outright missing (so some common drinks couldn't be made). at one point, the staffing was so poor that they pulled volunteers to do parts of the job, including making signature drinks (to the extreme frustration of the volunteers), and despite it being a paid job, did not pay them for it.

i witnessed the bar manager yelling at my friend a few times, to the point where I had to stop myself from approaching him and accosting him (I opted instead to report him to the festival). eventually, they fired her and told her not to come back.

when they went to pay her, they paid her a rate that was $7 an hour less than everybody else was getting, and they wrote a two paragraph essay defending why she was getting that lower rate, and telling her what a bad bartender she was and how she should be happy she was getting even this.

she wrote the Executive Director of the festival, who in 5 minutes, told the managers to pay her the right rate. However, this was only possible because this bar was an extension of a much bigger festival, which is run by more liberalish, compassionate people than your average bar, and it also is nobody's full-time job, so it's easier to speak out. the average restaurant/bar does this bullshit all the time and nobody feels comfortable reporting their rule-breaking because they're afraid of retaliation in an at-will work state.

Caping

xpost - All very true. The friends I spoke to said some of those other things would be (slightly) easier to accept with better pay, but as it stands they can get more regular hours and less harassment in other jobs even if the pay is only marginally higher.

there were definitely times where I caught my managers changing my tipped wages during a particularly slow month to where I actually made less than minimum wage when combined with the 2.13 an hour, and they adjusted my report wages higher so they didn't have to pay me the 'difference'

at Steak 'n Shake (my first job), one of the managers was stealing to fund his coke habit, and yet all of the servers were the ones who got blamed until they discovered it

I’ve never even heard of a server getting the tipped wage difference made up.

Yeah, that definitely never happened when I was a server. We got our tips and our paychecks were laughable jokes that our manager often had to remind us to grab from her office.

xpost it's supposed to happen, but managers always just assume their servers undercounted tips and 'up' the count. though if you're working in a restaurant where they HAVE to up the tipped wage diff, it already sucks to begin with. I made $20 some nights at that shithole.

I don't think we are disagreeing here, there are lots of reasons not to work at these places. and indeed, people are choosing not to work there, hence a shortage of employees. And as I posted, it's not just the low paid workers, it's even people higher up, because it's just a tough industry in general, no matter what the pay.

i think caek's tweet suggests the data doesn't really indicate a shortage?

my experience rn:

1) lots of restaurants near me claim to have a shortage
2) all that do loudly and passive aggressively mention this, either on signage, or verbally
3) I go to plenty of other restaurants that don't seem to have this problem whatsoever

Josh, I don't think we are disagreeing in whole either but when you add things like, "no matter what the pay", it scans as dismissive of a rather large part of the issue in that restaurant workers are historically significantly underpaid.

There is no shortage of employees, only shortages of employers willing to pay market rates.

the tip exemption in Seattle is down to a $1.69 discount off the minimum wage, and will be phased out entirely in 2025, the scale of wage theft can be staggering https://www.seattle.gov/laborstandards/investigations/resolved-investigations

Queen Mary Tea Room and Restaurant and owner Mary Greengo ("Queen Mary") settled allegations under the Wage Theft, Minimum Wage, and PSST ordinances. Queen Mary operates one location in Seattle and employs approximately 20-35 employees under normal conditions. OLS alleged Queen Mary impermissibly allowed the employer to participate in the tip pool, failed to pay minimum wage in some instances, and failed to have a fully compliant PSST policy. The total financial remedy was $24,405.59 to 66 affected workers.

off with their head

like

Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, OLS issued a determination of a violation against Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot and several other individuals acting as employers (collectively, “Little Sheep”) under the Paid Sick and Safe Time (PSST), Minimum Wage, Wage Theft, and Secure Scheduling Ordinances. OLS found that Little Sheep was a franchise subject to the Schedule 1 minimum wage; that Little Sheep failed to pay employees the minimum wage; that Little Sheep failed to provide employees with Paid Sick and Safe Time; that Little Sheep failed to pay employees overtime wages or provide sufficient meal and rest breaks; and that Little Sheep failed to provide employees with 14 days’ advance notice of work schedules, among other violations. The total financial remedy was $3,490,581.71 to 147 affected former employees, OLS’ largest financial remedy assessed to date.

these are just the people they catch, in one city.

off topic and all I'm just mad about wage theft

Went to a restaurant recently that has instituted a 10% surcharge on all checks, which is not a gratuity. There's some fine print on the menu that says it goes to "costs unseen by diners", and is also not related to the price of the ingredients, which is supposedly why the menu prices are the same. I get that it's a tough business and that everyone's been struggling, but also seems like some bullshit - they want to raise their prices without appearing to raise their prices, and it's just going to cause problems for servers when customers notice that their check is higher than expected.

xpost me too. and it's not shocking. most people don't know how to escalate the issues or are just afraid of getting shitcanned afterwards for farting or coughing.

my mother had a paycheck held at one place she quit, wish she'd filed a DOL complaint

3) I go to plenty of other restaurants that don't seem to have this problem whatsoever

Yeah I agree with this -- I see people in my city posting "had to wait an hour to get served because NO ONE WANTS TO WORK" and I'm like, I've been getting restaurant food two or three a week for months from a whole lot of different places and have never encountered anything out fo the ordinary, maybe just as a wild idea try going to the restaurants that don't have a NO ONE WANTS TO WORK banner hanging off their awning

"it's just laziness, everybody wants to freeload, nobody had problems before, now it's like, 'oh, you don't pay me enough', 'i need health benefits', 'i am getting evicted soon', 'you threw Bert through a plate-glass window for being $1 short on the register', bullshit like that"

NO ONE WANTS TO WORK (here)

I’ve only seen it at fast food places and duh, lots of people will take $1 less an hour to work some place only half as hellish as a McDonald’s.

o noes i can't get my Sonic

grew up always being a cook for my part time jobs and sometimes full time and - not saying there aren't good ones - but restaurant and bar owners as a group are some of the biggest psychopaths in the world

hopefully things are changing, i've been gone so long, but it was always this fucked up dynamic, owners berate and abuse the kitchen head cook, they berate the lower level cooks and they berate the dishwashers, completely fucked culture

lol things mighta changed but that was totally my experience too ums

also sexual harassment in the workplace was pretty much something that went unchecked, like....rampant and unpunished.

my first dishwashing job I was 14 and there was me and another guy dishwashing (he was in the same grade as me)...anyway, he had one of those BMX bikes with a plastic seat on it and the older cooks took a bunch of fryer grease and poured it over it to melt his seat so he had to bike home standing up the whole way, ultimate dick move

also sexual harassment in the workplace was pretty much something that went unchecked, like....rampant and unpunished.

― Feta Van Cheese (Neanderthal), Friday, June 4, 2021 1:00 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh god yeah, unreal bad

I got ready to leave a shift once and went to my car (in the pouring rain) to find my co-workers had *hilariously* covered my vehicle in police tape and wrapped it from top to bottom. i couldn't drive it until I took it all off, and was soaked when i got in the car.

oh man fuck what assholes

A friend worked at a place (The Oasis at Joe Pool) where one of the managers would let women leave early if they’d sit in his office topless while he counted out their money/tip-out/etc.. Her main goal for a couple of years was to ruin his life but he did that on his own with two DWIs in two months.

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/blog/examining_the_uneven_and_hard_to_predict_labor_market_recovery

this is pretty long and technical, and i get the feeling you can see what you want to see in the current job numbers, and while that is true they may not worth a lot more than anecdotal interviews with workers and business owners, but the section on "Changing composition of work" is relevant to this discussion.

maybe just as a wild idea try going to the restaurants that don't have a NO ONE WANTS TO WORK banner hanging off their awning

my dream is to start painting over these signs and banners when i see them, to: NO ONE WANTS TO WORK FOR WHAT WE PAY HERE

those signs should just get to the point and say "1. the owner is an asshole 2. we mistreat our current employees".

In high school when I was a dishwasher at a small town pizza place, the lead cook (also owner's failson) was a complete dick. One night he and a buddy "hilariously" filled my car door locks with Elmer's Glue (thankfully nothing worse, but still a pain in the ass to dig out), stole my gas cap (I had a 1981 Firebird so it was kind of a pain to track down a replacement) and let the air out of my tires.

but was the job fun?

It was infinitely more fun eight months later when I was "promoted" to pizza cook/delivery driver and spent 70% of my time driving around town, making significantly more in tips, driving an '83 Escort with R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People permanently stuck in the tape deck and a stick shift that had a tendency to pop out of place when shifting from third to fourth gear.

Their "New Jersey"

wha? RONG

Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and Up are potential New Jerseys but Automatic is surely safely in the classic period

i will fite u