What It’s Like Working For Tips
Restaurant work requires a reckoning with legal rights and America’s enduring absence of a social safety net.
Folks who have worked in the restaurant industry for 10+ years have likely developed one, two, or all three of the following things: 1) an innate cynicism toward the restaurant industry’s narrow, hierarchical business structure, 2) conflicting perspectives on how labor equity and capitalism can work in tandem (if ever!), and 3) very thick skin.
Whether all of us working in this industry — or those eating and drinking alongside us — recognize it, the humans that make restaurants and bars hum are an integral part of the community fabric: a place for people to gather, a place for us to connect and develop relationships with regulars. It can all be quite nourishing for the spirit.
It can also be bad money, long hours, and physically exhausting. Working in the restaurant industry requires a fair amount of cognitive dissonance and sometimes a daily reckoning with compromising our legal rights and with America’s enduring absence of a social safety net.
Currently, 70% of the restaurant industry is comprised of independently-owned, small businesses. Their profit margins are small and so are their margins of error.
When consumers “tighten their belts” and cut out luxuries like eating out, the first results are human collateral — shift cuts, slashed tips, and layoffs.
Unlike other lower-wage unionized jobs (union hotels, public education, health, or transit among others) most jobs in the restaurant industry are not unionized, and workers are not protected from financial fallout, health crises, or natural disasters. Instead, workers like myself — who clock in and out and earn the minimum or a low hourly wage plus tips — depend on our jobs to make ends meet.
We reluctantly rely on our employers and complex state laws (check out that positively overwhelming breakdown of paid leave options in CA) to weather financial storms, but the reality is that workers like me are unable to depend on either our employer or the law when we are unable to work through no fault of our own. (Like contracting Covid for example.)
This past October, I came close to quitting the industry altogether when I caught Covid for the first time. I was off work for two weeks, followed CDC isolation protocol, and was in regular communication with my employer about my health status. But I did not receive any pay for the days I was out.
As luck would have it, the California law requiring all businesses to pay for employees unable to work due to Covid had just expired. Small businesses with less than 25 employees were no longer required to pay for employees out sick with Covid.
On top of being ill and exhausted, I felt powerless and wondered if I would make next month’s rent.
At most restaurant jobs I’ve worked for the past two decades, there was no such thing as calling in sick or taking a vacation for paid time off. Oftentimes, if an employee did not show up to their scheduled shift, they were fired. The only acceptable reason for taking time off was for a true “medical emergency”: childbirth or a severed limb.
During the first phase of lockdown in Los Angeles and prior to the vaccine rollout, I was anxiety-ridden about my finances and my livelihood, like nearly all my peers working on the frontlines in retail and hospitality. Then, in the summer of 2020, at the height of Covid cases, communities across the country were finally putting the voices and realities of the working class at the center of public dialogue, I sensed that hope for a new era was upon us.
While Covid relief money was being deposited into people’s checking accounts and financial aid programs for struggling small businesses were implemented, there was a period of financial relief for the working-class. Though I was working part-time, I was able to keep myself afloat.
By the end of 2020, however, the political conversation at the national level changed again, with politicians blaming working-class folks for taking advantage of federal aid money and refusing to work. Instead of playing the blame game, these politicians should have seen how Covid threw into sharp relief just how little food service workers are paid.
Even given the arguably paltry Covid-boosted unemployment benefits, 68% of unemployed folks were making more than what they would have been paid while working. Not soon after, the federal aid ran out and most people were back to work earning less for more hours worked.
No wonder many of my colleagues were resigning in droves. As the most unprotected and underpaid industry, we lead the Great Resignation.
In 2020–2021, 52% of food service and hospitality workers walked off the job.
All this and still there’s been no serious reckoning around what led to this fallout in the first place: restaurant workers are severely underpaid and we have little to no legal protections ensuring any financial stability.
As I approach 20 years of working in this industry and the ripe age of 40, I’m reflecting on the reasons that have kept me in this often grueling line of work. And they’re the same reasons I believe independently-owned restaurants are around and always will be.
It’s the people. It’s the neighborhood. It’s sharing meals and celebrations. It’s the chance to work somewhere where I can be myself and not sacrifice how I move through the world — there is honesty in working in restaurants, a chance to wrangle daily challenges, to work as a team, to be resourceful and come out the other side. It’s not “the only thing I can do,” but it is the place where I feel most comfortable.
But every month, I live hand to mouth, earning an income as a tutor, restaurant consultant, and cook/barback at a neighborhood wine bar. I struggle to eke out my living — it’s emotionally and physically exhausting.
Much of what I am incensed with is the inequity of labor and pay, the unfair delegation of responsibilities, and the common perspective that working in the service industry is just transitory work–not a career path.
I once thought it was possible to realize the dream of business ownership in Los Angeles, my hometown, but I’ve been forced to reconsider. This year especially, I’m holding on to the dream by a thread.
Owning a small business is so volatile, the majority of owners I know come from generational wealth; it is nearly impossible to maintain a meaningful safety net without having been born with one to begin with.
With the average startup cost to open a small business at nearly $200k, the strict labor laws in California, high food costs, insurance, and the daily grind of operating with unpredictable risks, it is a miracle that any small business — particularly restaurants — is operating and surviving.
These days, I don’t know who to be mad at — my boss or the system — or if I should be mad at all.
As time passes, I have to look at my work as my education on how I want to live out the rest of my life. I’m putting myself in charge of creating the kind of warm, welcoming, and supportive environment we all deserve — just like going to my favorite cafe or bar makes me feel.
