Pros
You work with people whose biggest goal in life has never been to make a ton of money, just enough. Their biggest goals tend to be: to cook, make cool stuff, hang out with friends, teach and learn, play. I'd rather work and drink with that type, my type, than the financiers who own Sur La Table, Inc., and ultimately employ SLT kitchen assistants: Bahrainian investment firm Investcorp (assets: $12 bill.).
Cons
It makes your coworkers pretty ornery that they can't possibly, at SLT, earn the means ever to just cook, just make cool stuff, or just hang with the frequency and security of rich people; it can grate that their minimum-wage job is to do JUST THE OPPOSITE of "just doing" nice and humanly things: a kitchen assistant's job is to commodify and mime, for faintly to energetically condescending yuppies in a high-stress retail vacuum, those same activities and experiences they love (cook, hang) but hollowed out and stuffed back up with job stress and class anxiety. Common thoughts on my shift: — "Can I make this person like me enough to spend $700 on a coffeemaker at my suggestion?" — "Is my public manner adequately mingling conviviality among peers, attentive deference to privilege, and manipulative insistence? Can my performance produce in uppermiddle-class people a self-satisfied mood to spend? If not, what's wrong with me?" — "Can I outdo my coworkers in speed and sales so that when shifts are scheduled it's my friend who can't pay a bill and not me?" ++++++++++ Every complaint I have about SLT is a problem that Fight for $15 organizes around: pay you can't live on, scheduling you can't plan on. There is this difference however: SLT sells higher up market than McDonalds. McDonalds eaters eat it without thinking too hard about it or needing too much from it; SLT shoppers have or aspire to have the leisure to cook fancy food, the cash to cook it in fancy pans, and the wish to see every thing that they have made and, behold, they're so tasteful. They make dinner in their self-image. SLT shoppers expect sophisticated fun from life: not too stuffy but not too undistinguished from poverty pleasures either. ++++++++++ So, the needed atmosphere shall be staffed by folks whose relatively happy American upbringings and origins do not dispose them to call, say, well-dressed white people of the same age "sir" and "ma'am" on the shopfloor. Too WASP. No, the right ambiance for flattering and fleecing a (sub)urban foodie requires kitchen assistants to feel it not above their place, to feel neither unprepared nor mortified to assume personal equality and chat up the leisure class along with its imitators during downtime. To do it, kitchen assistants shall have their own sparer stock of sophisticated fun from which to draw pleasing airs: insider knowledge of authentic ethnic eats of the moment, preferences between coffee beans, sentimental memories of meals abroad, knowing mispronunciations of foreign words that nonetheless suggest a perfect knowledge of the foreign language — downplayed to not be stuffy, to put the room at ease that it's in agreeable company, not too déclassé. ++++++++++ Yet the double-digit annual percent profit increases Investcorp demands of itself (ambition!) shall be squeezed from its holdings like Sur La Table, which shall squeeze it in turn from minimum-wage part-timers pitted against each other for hours. So, yes, in declassed company: kitchen assistant tend to be low-wage workers cowed by their rejection from the middle class, whose manners they learned and can now publicly perform as a sales tactic to coax rich strangers into amiable spendthrift. Then they wash dishes and mop for an hour, the last 15 to 20 minutes often off the clock, as corporate bashes everyone from the store manager down if a worker doesn't clock out at 3.99 hours per shift whether work to do remains or not. (Shifts are regularly understaffed or cancelled from a day to several hours before start time.) ++++++++++ I had the necessary, contradictory thoughts people think without the power to fix a problem all alone. But they aren't alone there: the 1%er economy has many, many victims, and the frustrated middleclassness of SLT's particular share of them gives the work a peculiar tang and shames the workers into a peculiar resentful obedience. It also equips them with this old consolation: working there, I'd think to myself that this was just a temporary setback on my journey upward, that someone as bright and promising as I'd been told I was surely could learn to be as fast and able as the shift-cap demanded. ++++++++++ What rankled enough to quit trying over was this: certainty that we all told ourselves that same story to private egos wounded by the same helplessness in the same economy — but we wouldn't share our variations of this story with each other, feel less alone, and then act on behalf of ourselves against millionaires at SLT, billionaires at Investcorp who make SLT's millionaires scamper. We all told ourselves that we had better work in our futures, but we couldn't all be right. But why? We took these jobs because we couldn't find others, and the others we could find bore the same problems: poor pay, bad scheduling, anxious quietism. Look: kitchen assistants sacrifice their comfort to do underpaid work making the world's more important people feel good, legitimized, and unburdened of manual tedium, and one night it struck me that all the store's women of color except one were kitchen assistants. You do not escape that ugly pattern by quitting SLT. You escape it by organizing.
