To the editor:
Restaurant patrons understandably love a candlelit dinner with a soft inch or two of snow accumulating outside the window, but winter weather presents a very specific seasonal exploitation for service industry workers. While those of us with the means to do so are visiting mechanics to have winter tires put on and calling to arrange plow service for our homes, a quick look at any restaurant employee parking area reveals how different the experience of getting there is for the staff. They’re full of older cars with a litany of mechanical problems; jumper cables are standard equipment in most kitchens. Service workers often earn barely enough to keep a car moving legally at all, let alone enough for the extras that make winter driving safer in our climate. While transportation hardship is hardly exclusive to the restaurant industry, several specific details of the cook, dishwasher or waiter’s life combine with low incomes and high costs of living to create a unique danger to workers.
Those working weekday jobs have the benefit of a road maintenance regime that highlights the morning and evening commutes as the times most important for roads to be clear. A restaurant worker usually misses both of these when commuting to and from a dinner service. While diners eating out can choose to eat out or stay in on a whim, a restaurant worker is routinely faced with the choice of either completely losing a night’s income or facing a drive to work that: starts in a driveway they must shovel themselves; is often longer than their patrons’ (as housing close to town centers becomes less affordable, commutes lengthen); is made in an older car often more poorly maintained; is made without snow tires; is on roads that may not be plowed when they go in and will certainly be worse when they leave between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.; and gets them to a shift during which they will almost certainly make less money than on a clear night. Even workers who prepare for the usual shifts in income in a seasonal industry may not be prepared for the major swings that bad weather can cause, especially if it falls on a usually busy holiday. These decisions weigh heavily on both staff and management, who walk a fine line between protecting employee safety and keeping a business running.
How can patrons and restaurant owners help? While we can’t stop the snow, we can help employees prepare for it by supporting efforts to increase minimum wages, and especially minimum wages for tipped employees. Transportation issues aren’t isolated; they’re explicitly connected to other issues of affordability, including rising costs of the state-subsidized health care that almost all restaurant employees rely on as well as the costs of housing and utilities. Owners can also transition staff away from unreliable tipped incomes in slower seasons that unfairly put the burden of a slow night on staff that can’t afford to stay home. Most simply, patrons can look with compassion on the doors of an unexpectedly closed restaurant on a snowy evening and be kind in their inconvenience, knowing the hard choice that caused it.
Peter Tiso
New Marlborough
The writer is a manager at the Stagecoach Tavern in Sheffield.