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I live in france, and I recently went to some presentation by some "restauration job industry" school director, who tried to encourage us to apply. I was open t

• Gortal278 5y ago
  It's not slavery, that's a ridiculously naive and dumb statement. It's a shitty job, but it's not slavery.
  • dsr_ 5y ago
    There's no inherent reason why it has to be a terrible job, either.
    • amiga-workbench 5y ago
      They're dealing with the general public, they're nowhere near well compensated enough to put up with that.
    • acomjean 5y ago
      Our cafeteria at work is union. There is something about getting a decent wage which seems to inspire them. The food is really good (the best cafeteria of the 4 I've had at work) and they're quite pleasant.
      • dsr_ 5y ago
        If you see the same people every day, it can become natural to treat them as coworkers rather than staff. Treating people well starts with paying them well, but has to continue with respecting them.
  • erdos4d 5y ago
    It promises to suck every shred of energy from you in exchange for a poverty wage, and you get treated like utter shit by society if you don't go along with it. I think there are some parallels here actually.
  • rollcat 5y ago
    Where's the line, if a "shitty" job is about the only one you could get, and you can't even afford to stay without one for say, one month?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • xyzzyz 5y ago
      How many people are we talking about here? How many restaurant workers literally have no other job or other option available to them whatsoever? Have you ever actually looked into that, or are you just hypothesizing based purely on feeling-inducing narratives? Or is it just a trolley-problem style hypothetical, not meant to represent real world conditions?
      • rollcat 5y ago
        I do have a close friend trapped in a complex situation, so yes, I'm certainly biased, but also very much the opposite of hypothetical.
• cortesoft 5y ago
  > Except it's hard work, and there will always be a culture of "I pay, I decide, you work". Isn’t that every job, though? In return for money, you do something you wouldn’t do if you weren’t paid?
  • jokoon 5y ago
    Sure, except restauration is one of the most obvious form of exploitation, where one works directly for the pleasure and luxury of one other person's desire. Most people know how to prepare food for themselves. I'm not against it, I'm just saying it's an expensive luxury which requires hard work.
    • ozim 5y ago
      Well it is not one other person's desire. There is bunch of restaurants/joints offering me to buy a burger or buy some food with them. Yes it is more expensive than cooking myself. But no one is making them to offer those. I am not going around making people to bring me food. Making food for one or two people is not that hard work as I mostly do it for myself or my GF or she is cooking. Making food for hundreds of people is hard work and it has load of regulations to meet safety - that is why it is expensive. Almost everyone can make food, almost everyone can be a waiter that is why pay is not that great, if someone wants to make more money he can do something that is more complex, like making super good food like celebrity chefs. If I would like to be nasty (as I am not and I agree it is hard work) I would go with explanation that there is bunch of lazy people who are not willing to learn anything more complex than making food and want to charge extra for that.
      • jokoon 5y ago
        What I meant was essentially that restaurants are the most prime example of economic servitude, cooking a meal for somebody else who has enough money to pay for it.
        • cortesoft 5y ago
          You keep describing a job as 'economic servitude'. Do you think the waiter is then exploiting the farmer when the waiter uses that money they got waiting tables to buy food for themselves? The farmer is 'growing food for someone else who has enough money to pay for it' If you find this economic servitude, then you basically are saying that anyone who participates in the economy is being exploited. I guess in a sense we are all servants to our need for food and shelter, and the fact that we need to do things that we might not want to do in order to cloth and shelter ourselves. Not sure why obtaining food and shelter by trading your labor for goods is somehow a worse situation that having to grow and make all your own food and build and maintain your own house.
• posguy 5y ago
  Restaurants by and large are not high revenue businesses. Most small grocers generate more revenue in 1 to 2 months than a restaurant will generate in a year. It seems like restaurant owners in the US turn over often, varying from every few months to 3 years on the outside. Seems like a really stressful industry that can have good margins, but maintaining profitability is hard and consumers are quite fickle.
  • minikites 5y ago
    How is this a justification for paying workers less than a livable wage?
    • xanaxagoras 5y ago
      The only justification required is their willingness to accept it.
    • posguy 5y ago
      This is not a justification for paying low wages and treating employees like garbage (eg: no notice when the business permanently closes, reshuffling schedules with no notice, poor treatment when on and off shift, etc). The current restaurant industry is a failing business model that usually harms those involved. The employees, vendors and business owners often end up destitute and with damaged bodies, hence why this industry burnt through people even pre-pandemic.
  • almost_usual 5y ago
    Sounds like restaurants are obsolete if they can’t afford living wages.
  • sumtechguy 5y ago
    Also look at how many chain restaurants are structured in their financing and it is not great. Usually some portion (40% or more) of the net goes to the parent corp. Then out of that you pay the lease on the building, any required decorations, and buy from locked in vendors. Both all owned by the parent corp or some sister corp. Then out of what is left you pay your employees, taxes (on the net), and yourself. You are looking at maybe 10-15% of the net to do that with too. People can say 'oh just make the wages better'. But that may literally be the difference between there being a restaurant and nothing at all. Many gas stations run the with the same model. The twist is the gas companies own the land, and the pumps, and set the price. You just run the business. Basically most of these places someone 'bought a job'. Think I heard somewhere that places like McDonalds is one of the largest land owners in the world. Yet most of their stores are not 'corporate'.
• rayiner 5y ago
  > In my view, preparing food for others is a form of slavery. It's one the most obvious form of social inequality. This is an odd sentiment, the byproduct of living in economically segregated places. Where I live, an hour east of DC, there isn’t a restaurant in town where someone who worked there couldn’t afford to go there at least on special occasions. I was getting a hair cut the other day, and it turns out that my barber likes the cocktails at the nice restaurant (right on the water) where I like to take out of town visitors. The people who clean our house live a few blocks away. (Although the Fed money printing machine is causing our real estate prices to go up, and causing DC’s inequality wasteland halo to keep expanding outward.) There is, of course, nothing intrinsically coercive about someone cooking food for the person who cuts their hair. An economy is people doing stuff for each other for money. It’s only in a handful of metropolitan areas where you have outrageous inequality and economic segregation that creates the situation you’re talking about.
• ocschwar 5y ago
  It's not really slavery, but it's true that too many people rely on restaurants to reassure them about their place in society, which means the waiters have to make a show of being, um, in a different place in our society. It got really obvious when people objected to having to put on a mask for the safety of the waiter serving them, and I can't blame anyone for noping out of that noise.
• randycupertino 5y ago
  > apparently it's hell on earth. That industry has the most drug users I spent 3 years as a waitress, prep cook and dishwasher at a mid-range chain. Our regional manager would literally hand out speed pills to the staff if we were working a double or otherwise tired. Oh, having a rough shift? Here, have some trucker Yellowjackets I picked up just for this scenario at the sketchy truck stop just over the border. Also, employees would steal literally everything that wasn't racheted down. Steaks, frozen fish, margarita glasses, people stocked their houses with the dishware and cutlery. It is a tough industry to survive in. Forget thrive.
• bitwize 5y ago
  In English we have a saying: He who pays the piper calls the tune. People who pay for a service expect, within reason, to decide how that service is to be rendered. The opposite is what was depicted in the show Seinfeld as the "Soup Nazi": a person who renders the service only a particular way (and may even throw you out of their shop if you object). But even on Seinfeld the Soup Nazi only got away with how he acted because his soup was particularly good and it was worth conforming to his idiosyncratic etiquette on how to order, etc. So having such autonomy is uncommon and reserved only for the greatest -- even, say, in software: John Carmack can expect to have working conditions as he desires. You or I will have to settle for open plan offices and constant meetings. That said, food service is indeed grueling and physically taxing work. My sister and her boyfriend both work in the industry. The boyfriend is a chef and smokes a lot of dope -- conforming to your observation about drug use. So I do what I can to make life easier at the restaurants I patronize, mainly being polite to the staff and, as America is a tipping culture, tipping them generously.
• LunaSea 5y ago
  > the culture of food is amazing It really isn't. France has lots of delicious recipes but the food that gets actually produced in the average restaurant in France is terrible.