Line cooks of the world, unite!
December 11, 2019 8:45 PM   Subscribe

Over at Eater, Jaya Saxena writes about the growing push for unionizing kitchen workers. It’s not only about the stagnant low wages, it’s about creating a safer work environment, where the dangers are taken seriously.
posted by Ghidorah (13 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Organizing labor isn’t just about getting more money, but protecting workers from managers who don’t want them to go to the hospital for third-degree burns.

How depressing it was felt necessary to include this line. Good read, thanks.
posted by PMdixon at 4:32 AM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


Please keep at it, folks. I will never cross a union picket line and if there's a way I can support kitchen workers in their unionization efforts I am all ears. Too many people have never spent time working in a kitchen or at a hard labor job, and it shows.
posted by jzb at 5:25 AM on December 12, 2019 [8 favorites]


A cook friend of mine had a massive burn on his arm. I asked if he'd reported it to the worker's compensation as a workplace injury. Of course not, if he did that, he wouldn't work again.
posted by jb at 5:30 AM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


The part about the oil burn is what drove me to post this. About a year and a half ago, doing the oil change and assorted pre-shift cleaning in the kitchen where I was working at the time, I nearly lost part of my middle finger on my right hand above the first knuckle. It hurt. A lot. One of the owners was in the restaurant at the time, doing the weekly books. He got me some ice, and that was about it. One of the guys working that night had been a corpsman in the navy and he taped the hell out of my bloody finger (not going to get descriptive, it was gross), wore gloves all night, and worked my full shift, nearly constantly banging my finger into things and whimpering every time.

The next day, I went to a clinic that covers workplace injuries and the doctor asked me what the hell I’d been thinking working a shift after what I’d done to my hand, and told me to stay home. The next day, when I went back to work, I got to deal with the rest of the people in the kitchen assuming that I’d stayed home because of a little cut on my finger, the owners included. When I showed them what had happened, attitudes changed, and to their credit, the company worked with me to make sure my worker’s compensation was filed quickly, and after some discussion, the day I was told to stay home wasn’t taken from my pod days off, but shit, it shouldn’t have even had to be a discussion.

And I was lucky. I almost lost part of my finger earning money for others, and I was lucky that the company didn’t fight me on workers comp. Luck shouldn’t come into what should be common practice.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:28 AM on December 12, 2019 [18 favorites]


It's kind of astonishing the kinds of conditions we accept for people who work with food in the US. The moral argument for treating workers fairly would be a slam dunk in itself anywhere that even pretended to care about morality, but anyone who ever eats anything at all that they didn't grow, harvest, and prepare entirely themselves should have a pretty obvious personal interest in making sure that the people handling and serving your food aren't forced to become vectors for disease outbreaks or contamination through fear of unemployment. If someone's forced to do dangerous kitchen tasks unsafely because their boss is yelling at them to do it now, that's their blood and pus that's going to end up in your food. If someone can't take a day off even when they're deathly ill, that's norovirus in your food. This article is focused on kitchen staff, but if the person harvesting your blackberries doesn't get bathroom breaks and has to do their business in the field, that's the ongoing hepatitis A outbreak that's already hospitalized a dozen people around the Midwest.

It's something I find infuriating to think about, because it just reveals how many of the people in power in this country aren't even making an inscrutable but pragmatic decision to maximize their own welfare at the expense of everyone else and are instead, if it comes to it, eager to sacrifice their own health and well-being for the sake of a meaninglessly higher bank account and getting in on more of that sweet, sweet cruelty.
posted by Copronymus at 8:55 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


1999 was the last year of over a decade career of restaurant work for me. Fancy "fine dining" places, sports bars, mom&pop pizza joints, chain pizza joints, fast food, you name it, and across the board at every type of restaurant, the main thing they had in common other than the concept of serving food was shitty labor relations. Making us work through illnesses, injuries, and natural disasters. Sexual harassment. Fucked up racist shit. Etc.

Whenever anyone extols the virtues of "small businesses" I spit on the ground because every "small business" restaurant that I ever worked at engaged in wage theft and nightmarish sanitary practices. McDonalds was the cleanest food place that I ever worked at.

I haven't been in the business for many years, I'm glad workers are organizing. When I was in kitchens I had never really even heard of unions.
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:23 AM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]



It's kind of astonishing the kinds of conditions we accept for people who work with food in the US


It's about being in a position of power over others and having your sense of entitlement catered to by them. Safe working conditions would admit agency by the workers.
posted by PMdixon at 9:41 AM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]


Working in a kitchen from line cook to chef is tough work. Long hours on your feet, low wages, high pressure, uncertain schedules, no benefits, and generally working when everyone else is off.

Sure it would come at the expense of the final bill but I would certainly feel better about supporting living wages and moral working conditions.
posted by ShakeyJake at 1:42 PM on December 12, 2019


The truth that no one wants to face. Paying living wages and having actual safe work environs would make profitable restaurants a thing of the past.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 4:36 PM on December 12, 2019


Paying living wages and having actual safe work environs would make profitable restaurants a thing of the past.

No, it would just make dirt-cheap, badly-managed, labour-exploiting restaurants a thing of the past.
posted by Soi-hah at 4:57 PM on December 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


Paying living wages and having actual safe work environs would make profitable restaurants a thing of the past.

Jesus, how much are nonslip mats these days?
posted by Etrigan at 5:54 PM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]


My last big-time restaurant job, which ended last year, got progressively more horrible as time passed. By the end of summer 2018, I was working 10-14 hour shifts, sometimes with no break, mostly centered over the deep fryers. Those things are set at 350 degrees, with an air temperature of around 120 degrees. No shorts, no sandals (they "cared" about their employees enough to not want them to get burned by stuff), and a thick apron over top of the shirt & top half of the pants. I was having to lay down on the floor of the -5 degree walk-in freezer to try to cool off, hyperventilating the whole time. If there is one group of people in this country that needs to get together and unionize, yeah, it's the food service workers of America (& the world). Geez, nowadays the fat cats are even trying to re-conceptualize the whole "food service" industry as the "hospitality" industry. And also, you people need to quit going to the resurgent concept of the brunch. You're all just making a shitty job even shittier by making us cook things that aren't normally on the menu in addition to all of the usual menu items.
posted by frodisaur at 9:39 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


The worker who stuck his hand in the fry vat? I’ve done that! I was closing at a fast food restaurant and I was wiping down the dividers in between the vats and I slipped and stuck half my hand right into the hot oil. I was 16 or 17 at the time, so I didn’t even know about worker’s compensation. They got me an ice pack and helped me finish cleaning the stuff I couldn’t do one handed.
posted by Weeping_angel at 12:14 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


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