*Warning.....this is a rant*
My daughter could have written this, instead one of her friends beat her to it!
“I have been a restaurant server, bartender, and manager for fifteen years. None of these jobs is, or has ever been, essential.
Now, after months of an industry shutdown because dine-in full service restaurants were deemed too risky during a pandemic, we’re told that it’s okay to start up again. This is madness. Now. When cases in Alameda County, the state of California, and the entire country, not to mention the world, are rising.
I’ve gone from feeling nauseated to incredulous to disgusted to defeated and back through the cycle again every time I think about this. Because the truth of the matter is, there is no way to do this safely. None. And we are going to be forced into it anyway.
Masks are impractical when everyone is eating and drinking. And as we all know by now, wearing a mask is to protect those around you, not yourself. So if every guest is maskless, it doesn’t matter what I do—I won’t be protected.
Six feet of distance from guests is impossible if I’m dropping off drinks and dishes. I suppose taking orders could be done at a distance, if you don’t mind everyone constantly yelling. But in reality, there’s no way I will be able to stay six feet from every guest at all times.
The amount of extra time and work that will now be involved in serving guests is significant. Nothing can be reused—menus, salt & pepper shakers, tablecloths, silverware caddies, condiment bottles, check presenters—the list is endless. The heightened level of sanitization of every surface touched by any guest is another layer to consider. And what about bathrooms? In both restaurants I most recently worked at, each had two single occupancy bathrooms. How is it safe for not only employees, but every single guest who dines in, to use these very limited spaces with extremely limited airflow? It’s not practical or financially feasible to have an employee dedicated to sanitizing bathrooms after every use. There is no realistic way for them to be safe for anyone to use, but most especially staff, who will more than likely have to use them multiple times in a shift.
Have you ever been in a restaurant kitchen? Or behind a bar? Ninety-nine percent of the time they are extremely cramped spaces. Distancing is impossible. And you can’t run either with just one person. It takes a lot of people to run a restaurant with table service. Reservationist, host, server, busser, runner, bartender, barback, expo, line cook, dishwasher, manager. You’re asking every single one of those people to come into contact with each other and countless guests, exponentially increasing the chance that one person with the virus will spread it through multiple vectors, each one of them risking taking this virus home to their households, infecting their families.
Sure, guests can relax at their six-feet-apart tables outside with plenty of fresh air and feel comfortable and relatively confident that their risk is low. But for us, for the staff that’s stuck together in cramped spaces, coming into contact with dozens or even hundreds of people in a single shift over the course of god knows how many hours, maskless people sipping and chewing and laughing and talking, we’re the ones who are going to have to risk our health and our lives. The level of stress this puts on us as restaurant workers whose jobs were already pretty damn stressful, well, it makes zero sense to me. And for tipped employees who rely on volume, working in a restaurant operating at half or lower capacity makes zero financial sense as well.
So why should we be expected to put our lives, our health, our futures, our safety at risk, to make significantly less money than we used to make, while enduring more stress, just so that people can delude themselves into pretending that the world is going back to normal with a plate of french fries and a margarita? If I’m making half of what I made before, I will have to scramble more shifts together to make ends meet, thus increasing my risk of exposure to the virus. Does this sound like a good deal to anyone?
I am not expendable. My colleagues are not expendable. Dining in a restaurant is not an essential experience. It is a luxury. And it’s a luxury that no one should be indulging in right now when the harm it will cause to workers is so great. Show me data that says we’re safer now than we were before the shutdown. You can’t, because there isn’t any. The risk to our lives is the same. The only thing that’s changed is that now people don’t care.“
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