I remember reading this whole thing years ago. I’ve worked in restaurants as have friends and family members. It’s amazing how there is virtually no solidarity of any kind in these places. There are so many contradictions in even a single restaurant. Each person is (for the most part) just trying to do the bare minimum, dump as much work on others as possible, and get out. This is understandable given the misery inherent to working in capitalist restaurants. The division between the wait and kitchen staff is also pretty remarkable. Waiters (IMO) are generally quite bourgeois, and I think this comes from the fact that the vast majority of their earnings come directly from customers as tips. They’re basically small business owners who are renting out these spaces from the restaurant owners (in the form of the sub-minimum wage). But even the kitchen staff has divisions of its own: the professional chefs and the semi-professional line cooks versus the more proletarian dishwashers (who often hail from other countries).

I worked as a dishwasher for a few summers. My dad worked as a professional chef for decades and was cheated by every single boss he had. He also had a lot of disdain for his coworkers, and I don’t think it’s just because he’s a lib (although that’s part of it). White workers in particular expect to inherit some property in eighty years or so (their biggest beefs with america are either woke video games or trump’s impoliteness), which tends to make them hostile to all workplace organizing. Not that any of us even thought of doing any organizing at the time. Most of these places are also seasonal around here which just makes the situation amazingly difficult.

I worked in one restaurant that was a good place. We were 4 people, everyone was a professional, we had final say over the guest list, and tips were shared evenly with the whole crew. And even then the work was very unhealthy.

This article has a very american understanding of the industry, many of the positions and divisions used never existed in the places I worked at. And Customers have way less power, in the good places we were told to throw out customers, who, for example, snipped their fingers at us. "Because we are not dogs".

The worst place I worked at put the workers in competition with each other, it turned people into monsters. I still experienced a lot of solidarity with other reastaurant workers in my time. Most supportive bunch I ever worked with, by and larger. Gastronomy still radicalised me though.

I spent less than one summer working in a fast food restaurant and I'm never going back.