A career waiter explains:
As restaurants around the country reopen, they are finding workers aren’t necessarily eager to return. Photo: Gabriela Bhaskar/Bloomberg via Getty Images For most of the past 14 years, I’ve been a waiter. I’ve worked 70-hour weeks. I’ve left work at 3:00 a.m, only to show back up at 10:00 a.m., after getting robbed on my way home. I’ve ignored injuries to avoid the hassle of getting my shift covered.
Nobody chooses to live like this instead of going to a good-paying, reliable job. Instead, the industry was deeply flawed before COVID-19, and the pandemic only made things worse. Workers are staying away because the industry has never treated them with respect, and if restaurateurs expect to change nothing, and return to a time when they could count on a huge stack of résumés from highly skilled individuals who would put up with all manner of abuse for meager pay, they are mistaken.
Now, on top of all these issues, we’ve been asked to work throughout a global pandemic, one that has been particularly deadly for restaurant workers. Even though vaccines are widely available, only about half of American adults are vaccinated, and operators can’t be counted on to prioritize their own employees’ safety. This summer, I worked at a restaurant where the entire staff was exposed to someone with COVID. We closed for one day.
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