Company subjects employees to California's ridiculous labor laws (no matter which state you work in). Company makes you sign a form saying that you agree to stay longer than your assigned shift if employees scheduled after you don't show up for work. (Since Kitchen Assistants only earned $8/hour, this happened A LOT!) Kitchen Assistants are expected to be on call when employees don't show up for their shifts. If you have a life and say you're not available at a moment's notice, the chefs get extremely angry at the people who won't drop everything and show up for an unscheduled shift (instead of being angry at the people who didn't show up for their shifts). Long hours and extremely low, non-competitive wages. Mean co-workers and chefs. Some Kitchen Assistants refused to wash dishes, even though that was the main job function of a Kitchen Assistant. Inexperienced chef managers. (At my store, there was a horrible plumbing problem in the kitchen. The sinks backed up and caused frequent flooding on the classroom floor. Instead of using her budget to get a plumber in there to fix the drainage problem, the Resident Chef, a baker, spent a lot of money on new cake-making supplies for the classroom. Bizarre.) Filthy work environment and institutionalized disregard for food safety rules/guidelines. (I had a TAPS Food Safety Manager Certificate when I worked here because I was in culinary school at the time. Whenever I tried to use or suggest better sanitation methods, I was met with resistance, disdain, and a lot of eye-rolling from other Kitchen Assistants and from the chef managers.)
