At the restaurant where I work, there is a notable separation of employees by classification. For example, there are no female managers. Not one. Six managers and all of them are male. Three of the six are former servers, promoted through the company, and though the majority of servers who work for the company are female, and nearly half are black, all of our managers are male and, except for one, white.
Not surprising.
But what really hits me each day, whenever I have a moment to think about something other than who had a diet soda and which table still needs bread, is the status of the Hispanic or Latino employees in our restaurant. None of them are servers. And not one is a grill cook. Or a cashier. Or even a hostess.
A couple of the guys who are fluent in English work as back-up cooks. They make bread and soups and the foods that can be dipped out easily and slopped onto a plate – meatloaf, roast beef, macaroni and cheese. I often take smoke breaks with these guys, and one of them refers to me as “mi esposa” even though he already has a wife and family, with whom he was shopping when I ran into him once outside of work. On more than one occasion, he has made offensive and suggestive gestures with his tongue toward me, a practice which he quickly discontinued when I told him it wasn’t cool. He’s funny and adorable in a teddy bear kind of way, but obviously a cad.
In prep, the part of the kitchen where they make salads and desserts and “prepare” ingredients for back-up and grill, there are four different women, all women of color. Two are Hispanic and proficient, if not fluent, in English.
All other Hispanic employees work in the dish room. The men who have a basic understanding of English are bussers, but for the most part, the people in dish speak little or no English at all. Posted on the wall beside the bussing station is a Spanish-to-English translation chart, laminated, with the corporate logo in the corner, meaning that this set up is not unique to our particular location. Listed on it are basic terms and phrases that we might find useful, such as “caliente” = “hot pan” even if that isn’t the actual translation.
For the most part, dish employees tend to stay in dish and only converse with other dish employees in the break room, and though I know the name of every other employee in the restaurant within a few days of their employment, I seldom get to know the names of anyone in dish, even the men I sometimes tip out for bussing my tables so fast and helping me turn them over.
And it bothers me.
Without them, none of the rest of us can do our jobs. I can’t serve drinks. Prep can’t chop vegetables or make desserts. Back up can’t bake corn bread. Grill can’t plate food.
They are anonymous cogs in the machine of our restaurant. Separated from the rest of the employees in their little corner. Overlooked until we run out of clean glasses. And what they do in the dish room – sort out the dirty dishes in bus tubs, separate plates from wet napkins and half-eaten chicken and gum stuck to the insides of glasses by guests – I wouldn’t do again for anything (well, almost anything). They spend their entire work day standing, wet, elbow deep in the discarded bits of other people’s meals, and at the end of the day, when they go home to their families, probably in neighborhoods where they are separate too, do you think they wonder if this is the American dream they’ve heard so much about?
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