But, in order reach the funerals safely, she needed to work - she needed money for new brakes for her 1999 Chevrolet Lumina. Vail said she wanted to stay in bed all day, crying and cuddling her one-year-old daughter. The next day, Vail was scheduled to wait tables at a restaurant near her home in Lafayette, Indiana, a 45-minute drive from Logansport. Among the dead were her 25-year-old cousin, her cousin’s three children (ranging in age between three and one-month old), her cousin’s stepfather, and her cousin’s 10-year-old stepsister. 28, six of Eryn Vail’s relatives died in an accidental fire in Logansport, Indiana. On that income, there is often not enough money to deal with life’s tragedies. The median wage for restaurant employees nationwide is $8.89 an hour. Other tipping memes reveal an economic insecurity over paying bills. While service industry memes do address these issues, the majority of the ones tackling gratuity focus on the performative nature of waiting tables: how degrading it feels to laugh at a customer’s stupid joke and forcing a smile in order to preserve a decent tip. “There’s no other major industry in which customers basically determine the wages of workers.” “The relationship between customers and restaurant workers in America is very warped,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. After taxes, most servers receive a paycheck for zero dollars. Today, though seven states have mandated restaurant workers earn a full minimum wage, the majority of American servers make the federal tipped wage of $2.13 an hour. When the practice spread to America around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was used as a way for restaurant owners to avoid paying newly freed slaves. Gratuity was popularized in 17th Century England as a way for aristocrats to give a bonus to serfs on top of their wage. Several people interviewed shared that sentiment, and like most of the service industry’s issues, it seems connected to tipping. (Other professions also share memes and support each other in online forums this type of camaraderie is especially popular among two other emotionally laborious professions: nurses and teachers.) But, they also tackle consequential topics, like raising minimum wage, being overworked, and sexual harassment. The memes come from accounts like Server Life (634,000 Instagram followers), the Bitchy Waiter (803,000 Facebook followers), and the Angry Bartender (332,000 Facebook followers), and they make fun of common frustrations, such as inept managers and intra-server drama. In private Facebook group pages, workers are posting stories about rude customers and asking for advice on how to handle everything from footwear to surly line cooks.īut, because it’s the internet, most of the commiserating revolves around sharing relatable memes. For an industry that has over 13 million people, a high turnover rate, and almost no unions, social media has given restaurant employees a chance to build a community. Life can be hell for service industry workers, and social media has become a central place for them to air their grievances.
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