Restaurant kitchens are the perfect example of what happens when you let small business tyrants directly try to optimize for profits. The high pressure is due to understaffing. That understaffing doesn't just mean you're rushing during the rush, it means tons of pressure to come in sick, work long hours, take abuse from the top of the hierarchy, work through injury, and so on. And it should be no surprise that immigrant labor (documented or otherwise) shows up here very, very often, as it's the easiest to exploit aside from children. What, are they gonna go to the cops because you made them work through a second degree burn without treatment?

The hierarchy follows from a tradition in which the small business tyrant is the head chef. They're up in your work, they're seeing where you're going slower than they want, and they demand coordination through themselves. They can be highly competent and great chefs, but the system is very much set up to be this understaffed, high-pressure, top-down thing that serves profits for the owner first. That chef-owner is also pricing the menu, setting staff pay, doing scheduling, ordering ingredients, making sure to hit their numbers or getting stressed out because they're failing to do so.

Capitalism itself drives this through "competition", which in this case, as in most, means driving down wages and staffing. A well-meaning owner-proprietor can't escape this situation, nor could a co-op model: your food will be 1.3-1.5X as expensive if you created actually good and proper working conditions and pay. And by good working conditions and pay I mean doubling staffing and paying far over a living wage.Just like an individual's consumer choices do little to change the system, an individual owner's attempt to do so has limited power. Of course, the vast majority of owners are pieces of shit, but I just want to point out that you can't actually build truly good working conditions without addressing the problems of capitalism.