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

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

That's really a callback to the time I said the exact same thing in the actual "New Jersey" thread and let me tell you, the fite happened and I fot alone

what's the frequency, eephus

my withdrawal from the "New Jersey" thread in defeat was not the same as apathy

is that an REM lyric?

it was before I got to it

oh wait it's from Slacker! but now my brain thinks everything is an REM lyric

It's a quote from Slacker repurposed by R.E.M. into a lyric

I drive past where they filmed that scene all the time, where 13th Street hits I-35 on the East Side. Amazingly enough after 30 years it looks exactly the same!

my worst restaurant job-working experience

someone gave me free Foreigner tickets

to the Gramm-less, hired gun Foreigner.

still haven't recovered.

wow, that's cold as ice

Gramm booted, now we're real bad
Got a singer from a classified ad

Those dirty white boys playin' head games with u need an urgent kick in the head til they have double vision imo

Why has Victoria/Melbourne been having all the covid problems?

80% of Australia's 910 covid deaths have been in aged care homes in Melbourne. 40% of Melbourne's aged-care deaths last year were in just 10 homes. There have been 174 separate outbreaks in aged care homes in the state of Victoria; in 146 of those, a staff member was the index case.

The government set a target of vaccinating aged care residents and workers ahead of any other class, and promised to have them fully vaccinated before April.

The federal Aged Care Minister has repeatedly insisted this week that he is "comfortable" with the amount of vaccinations achieved against this target, while also stating that he literally has no idea how many of them have been dispensed. The Health Department followed up yesterday, when people kept asking the minister and he declined to bother to find out, with an announcement that they estimated (via phoning some facilities that morning) 8.7% of staff have been vaccinated.

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Thursday, June 3, 2021 9:12 AM (three days ago)

More today from the Guardian:

The four private companies responsible for vaccinating the aged care sector have given conflicting accounts about whether the government ever contracted them to inoculate staff, prompting further criticism about the confusing and delayed rollout.

The federal government, in the early stages of the rollout, said it would rely on private contractors to vaccinate 183,000 aged care residents and 339,000 staff, using in-reach teams that would attend each facility.

But the government’s in-reach teams focussed overwhelmingly on vaccinating residents, and data this week showed just 32,833 staff – less than 10% – were given the jab by in-reach teams, largely using leftovers from residents in accordance with the government’s excess dose policy.

The government’s panel of surge vaccination workforce providers – Aspen Medical, Healthcare Australia, International SOS and Sonic Clinical Services – have since given differing accounts on whether they were contracted to vaccinate staff.

Earlier this week, the Age reported that Aspen Medical was never contracted to vaccinate staff, quoting a company spokesman.

The company told the Guardian on Thursday that, in fact, it was contractually obliged to vaccinate staff.

“Aspen Medical has vaccination of aged care staff as part of its contractual obligations, and in that context has already vaccinated over 20,000 staff,” a spokesman said.

Healthcare Australia initially told the Guardian it was “contracted to provide vaccinations for aged care residents only”.

But it subsequently clarified it was “contracted to provide vaccinations to both the aged care residents and the workforce but was instructed by the department to prioritise the residents”.

Sonic Clinical Services, brought on after Aspen and HCA, said it was not contracted to do staff vaccinations.

“We have not been contracted to provide in-reach vaccination services to Residential Age Care staff in Victoria (or elsewhere) and have not been involved in a tender process to do so,” chief executive, Dr Ged Foley, said.

The fourth company, International SOS, refused to answer questions about what it was being paid by taxpayers to do, instead referring the Guardian to the health department.

These private contractors have so far been paid $76 million to not vaccinate the primary vectors of transmission in Australia's COVID deaths.