Unseen Clockwork: Restaurant Laborer Realities

As a laborer in the food industry, I have dedicated myself to my work in restaurant kitchens, in culinary research and development positions, in various aspects of food media and publishing, and even as an educator. I have acquired what feels like a lifetime’s worth of experience during my years in the food industry. Regardless of these “truths” I have learned, I acknowledge and attempt to check my own perspective of this reality as I have experienced it throughout my years as a component in the food industry clockwork. Throughout this piece I question this clockwork, as I navigate labor welfare matters in the contemporary foodservice industry. One overarching theme that I notice with increasing prevalence is how our society recognizes service workers only by the times in which they are available to provide back to society. As I unpack this assertion, I consider the 24 hours of human laborers (specifically foodservice workers like myself) who make so many of our lifestyles possible. There are countless services that consumers require, and somehow our society has chosen willful ignorance in our attempt to avoid confronting the dehumanization of service providers. For too many of us, these services have become expected or demanded. The laborers have become an invisible and dehumanized means to an end. This is the clockwork that I had come to know all too well, until eventually I could no longer be the battery powering a system which did not care for me in return.

Experiencing My First No-Time-for-Sleep Work Schedule

By the end of my first year at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) I had finally made it to the High-Volume Production course, a class in which a group of about 17 students prepared and served a few hundred meals in a matter of just a couple of hours. This class was divided into two separate portions: breakfast and lunch/dinner.  In order to stay true to industry standard, the classes began production at the appropriate hour to have meals ready for breakfast, lunch, and dinner time. The class that I was assigned to had begun with the dinner requirement for the course, where my fellow students and I pushed out hundreds of meals for nearly two weeks before switching into our breakfast portion of the High-Volume Production course. On my last day of my dinner component of the class, I began my class day around noon and ended at about 11:00 P.M., by the time that I made it home from class. I remember feeling gracious to my chef for trying to get us out earlier than usual because he knew we each had an early morning ahead. My class was scheduled to begin the next day at 3:00 A.M (at least 2:45 A.M. for the real industry definition of being on time).

By the time students had made it home, taken a shower, perhaps make time for some food to refuel our bodies with, and gathered our homework and daily timelines, it was practically time to be getting dressed for the next class. At the time this felt unrealistic, even degrading. I remember thinking how unsafe it was for all of us to be wielding knives, controlling fire, and maintaining kitchen and food safety all without any meaningful rest to refuel our human bodies. Nonetheless, I marched forward. One part of me gained an Anthony Bourdain-ian style pride for my survival through the experience, the other part of me couldn’t help but to have been just confronted with the realization for the first time that although I would do anything for the culinary industry, the industry seemed to have very little of my best interests in mind in return. As I became increasingly confronted with these types of scenarios, my emotional response began to manifest in my personal and professional trajectory in ways bigger than I could have then imagined.

Becoming All Too Familiar with Foodservice Industry Clockwork

Thinking back to my years working as a cook in New York and Chicago I recall the harsh disparity between the incredibly high-quality food that I spent my 12+ hour work days preparing for customers, and the abhorrent food that I was binge eating at the end of the night. Whether it was the bodega sandwich I picked up on those nights when I was really spent, or the greasy dollar slice of pizza that I snagged on my walk to the subway, something about this late-night eating (or sometimes not eating at all) felt systematically oppressive in regards to what I was preparing for customers day after day.  After spending the time to meticulously prepare a single batch of pork ramen with handmade soba noodles, house pickles, and ferments that I had helped to nurture for weeks, something about getting by on packets of instant ramen seems disjointed. Still yet, this is the reality for far too many restaurant professionals.

Working as a line cook, you learn how food is gradually transformed throughout the day. In my last job as a line cook, I worked on the wood-fired grill in a downtown Manhattan restaurant—you know, one of those uppity spots named after one of those fancy French chefs. Here, it was beyond evident that food was always in transition, slowly becoming the final dish that would be presented to the guest. Whoever opened the grill station for lunch would start the day early in the morning by putting meat on the smoker. Most often this included menu items like the slow-smoked short rib which had been sitting in a dry spice mixture since the night prior when the closing grill cook began the process at the end of their shift (around midnight or later). The opening grill cook would load the smoker at around 8:00 A.M., and leave the meat to slowly cook until dinner service that night. These same slow-smoked short ribs would gradually sell throughout the night until around midnight when service would finally come to a close, and a new batch of short ribs would begin. This was the endless cycle of food preparation, for just this one protein, in and out, day by day.

Again, I question: How is it that I’ve spent so much of my time preparing and educating myself to work in a position where food is so highly coveted that it is babied for a 24 hour period by—at the very least—three skilled workers, and yet the food that goes into my own mouth is so instantaneously regretful?  Furthermore, how is it that this cohort of highly talented foodservice laborers is constantly focused on food production for restaurant guests while most often working on empty stomachs, or sustaining themselves on food that is so obviously substandard. In one of my jobs, even when I would get a lunch break (which my sous chef had scheduled from 10:30-11:00 A.M.) there was no available food to eat because “family meal” wasn’t be served until 11:00 A.M. Even more frustrating was the fact that each day, my paycheck was being deducted to pay for food that was not even available to me (something that managers failed to remedy even when brought to their attention). Eventually, I began to pick away at some extra prep food from my station. Sometimes, I’d bring in a granola bar to quickly devour before beginning the day’s service, or most often, I would simply hold out until my shift was finished.

The grill station that I often worked on was located out in the dining room in front of the restaurant's guests. The days that I worked this station, I struggled to keep the smile on my face. Each night's challenge was not simply the complex preparations of Kobe steaks, lamb chops, and fresh-caught fish for the diners. Driven by our publicly-accepted oppressive industry and social constructions, it remains an unsettling reality that service providers are forced to accept their apparent position so far beneath the customer-base. I don’t mean to detail my resentment for being a service worker to a higher class than I occupy myself. Rather, what frustrates me is that I know that even (and perhaps especially) at the highest levels of the foodservice industry, skilled laborers are continually taken advantage of and subject to the daytime fasting/late-night binging cycle. I cannot forget the countless breaks that my coworkers and I did not receive, and too many hours spent working away before and after we were actually on the clock.

Foodservice Labor Welfare Injustices At a Glance

Part of the issue is the history of accepting subpar industry standards throughout the food sector, particularly in terms of working conditions and legal wages. For generations, writers like George Orwell attempted to wake society and expose industry hardships in his book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Additionally, modern takes have helped bring societal gaze to the prevalent yet unacceptable working conditions of the professional kitchen: Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000), Spiced: A Pastry Chef's True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-hours Exploits, and what Really Goes on in the Kitchen (2009) by Dalia Jurgensen, Saru Jayaraman’s book Behind The Kitchen Door (2013), and even the cinematic drama Burnt (2015) featuring Bradley Cooper as the typically aggressive Michelin Star chef. While many of these outlets have good intentions, legacy’s such as that of Kitchen Confidential in particular have been perceived by many as a glorification or even celebration of such industry standards. By his late years, Bourdain himself spent much of his career correcting his “misunderstood” message and advocating for foodservice labor welfare as paramount. If people have been discussing these issues for nearly a century at least, why does this issue seem to timely and new?

 Perhaps the more important question that should we should be asking is why this deeply embedded industry reality has shifted into the public gaze. The answer here is perhaps far more concerning. The national food industry historically has depended on a lowly regarded socioeconomic workforce,  but in this 21st century our contemporary upper classes of society have begun to infiltrate the culinary industry. This displacement of the foodservice labor force has disrupted industry status quo.  Now that food has reached the upper echelon of educated and/or socially aristocratic laborers, these embedded industry horrors have become more visible to societal masses. Many of these realities have surfaced into discussion because for the first time they have reached society’s upper classes to which this sort of injustice is largely unfamiliar or misunderstood to be a tragedy of the past and not the present. These realities (which I myself would have remained further out of touch with if it had not been for my own interests in pursuing a career in the food sector) have since changed my career focus and goals. I’m still very much in the process of exploration and finding my fit in the industry, however one thing is abundantly clear, a primary focus of mine is and shall remain food systems and labor welfare advocacy. Inhumane industry standards pushed me away from my early career dreams as a chef. As the veil of naivety falls away, I cannot help but to share the collective experience of abused and victimized foodservice workers who power the daily consumption cycles of customers.

 Currently the United States Department of Labor regulates the food sector, notably through the “Wages and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)” which according to the U.S. Department of Labor “establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and youth employment standards affecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments.” However even with federal and state attempts to protect food laborers, shortcomings and violations are rampant in the vulnerable food sector specifically. A 2017 Economic Policy Institute report analyzed the nation’s 10 most populous states and found that between 2013 and 2015, food workers fell victim to wage violations which collectively amounted to $8 billion a year, with a further estimated national underpayment exceeding $15 billion per year. In an industry riddled with typically low pay, these wage violations prevent U.S. food laborers from making a fair living wage and only further the cycle of starvation and scavenging. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that food preparation workers in the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan Division received an hourly mean wage of $12.50 in 2017, falling well below M.I.T.’s Living Wage Calculation for New York County which sets the living wage at $16.14 for one adult. Furthermore, this report reveals that of the 22-listed occupations’ typical annual salaries, “food preparation and serving related” jobs earned the least, at $22,858. With even a little research, it is abundantly clear that laborers throughout the food sector are being taken advantage of and denied livable (if not legal) wages. Beyond wage violations, a multitude of labor injustices are often lacking in regulation and enforcement. These include improper protections from inhumane working conditions, sexual harassment/assault, and even systematic racial/ethnic or gender disparities among so many others.

Conclusion

It cannot go without stating the following clearly and upfront: my experience has baggage and bias. My time as I have experienced this industry has been spent with privilege in more ways that I can probably count: I am male; I am racially Caucasian – even down to my last name being “White”, I have received top-level education in my industry without acquiring a mountain of student loan debt, I know my rights as a food service worker, I speak English as a first language, and even I come from a family able to offer financial security and support in times of need. These collective realities have skewed my experience and perception as a worker in the industry in more ways than I am probably able to admit. If nothing else it has somewhat helped my ability to stick up for myself in situations where I knew that I was being taken advantage of.

While it seems inarguable that no human worker should be forced to forego their rights or dignity, the reality is much more graphic (particularly so for those without my inherent privileges). The truth of it all is that the foodservice industry can be a grimy, glorified, human welfare mess. As is the case of many service providers, our society has failed to protect the wellbeing of foodservice workers as they turn the gears in the clock of consumers’ lives. Food is first and foremost seen as sustenance by those who have never worked in the food industry. However, everyday unknowing consumers make choices that impact food worker realities, and labor welfare at all levels of the food supply chain (farmhands, growers, and animal husbandry workers that create the food products; intermediary processing, distribution, and transportation laborers; foodservice workers that prepare and serve the food; as well as waste and maintenance personnel). This leads us to the question: should consumers be held responsible for the impact of the food they are served, and if not, how else are we supposed to ensure that these matters of labor welfare and social justice be taken into consideration? The short answer from my perspective is that we should all have increased responsibility and accountability for these injustices.

While I admit I don’t have the full solution for the abundant issues faced by food sector laborers, I do know that progress can be made. For example, we can eliminate the cook’s typical all-day fast if they are given proper (*ahem, legal*) break accommodations to get them through their typically lengthy shifts. An industry focused on food and feeding knows better than to force its workforce to sacrifice their health and wellbeing. Food chain employers can take immediate action by vowing to create fair workspaces which uphold, or even surpass, legal standards. Additionally, consumers can support businesses and products that rely on socially mindful systems of production. Without federal/state intervention and massive reform of food labor regulations, workers will remain vulnerable to the unacceptable power dichotomies and hegemonic structures that have come to dominate the food sector.

A version of this article was originally published in Dishrag Magazine’s 24 Hour issue which was be printed and released for sale beginning on July 9th, 2019.