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Kitchen staff were canaries in the coal mine (2022)


I’ve long been a lurker on r/kitchenconfidential. I did a few brief tours in the service industry when I was younger and my partner used to manage a successful upscale restaurant. If you&#821…

Things have been bad for a while, with a pervasive sense that the industry was dependent on employees with weak outside options (i.e. a criminal record) or high exit costs (i.e. can’t afford to be on entry-level wages in a new career track). I was a public school teacher for two years, and I endured lots of third drink questions of “Why?” to go along with daily complaints about pay and “continuing education” requirementss with my colleagues. Sure, working grill for $15/hour might not sound like something you couldn’t bring yourself to leave, but if you’re 34 with a high school diploma, a felony drug arrest, and a mortgage to pay, the intermediate stage between the status quo and something better might not seem so great.

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