Hi guys,
Came across this sub and wanted to drop a story of my first job.
I live in the UK and got my first job at a buffet restaurant when I was about 15 during my summer holidays as a way to fuel my bodybuilding/powerlifting ambitions 🙂
This restaurant I worked at had a manager who most the workers hated. At first I didn't understand why as he always seemed to treat me with respect. At first I thought maybe it was because of how I spoke to him and maybe the other workers didn't speak so politely. I always reffered to him as “Uncle” instead of “manager” like the others did. This was just out of respect and habit I guess. Since in our culture we always call our elders uncle/auntie out of respect when we are young (I'm Pakistani myself but I believe this is common across most desi/Asian or even Middle Eastern cultures). But maybe this sort of respectful communication brought about a more personal and deeper respect between the 2 of us…
Anyhoo as time progressed I soon realised this manager was an absolute c*nt. When I first joined he would let us eat lunch from the restaurant kitchen and eat up on the floor of the restaurant as it was huge and usually only about a quarter of the restaurant was in use at a time so there was PLENTY of empty tables. I thought eating near the kitchen out of sight of customers around the corner would be fine. Over time the manager commanded I ate in the badement(it was like a storage room with old furniture and those big gas containers, tables and just random stuff) I went down once and was disgusted at the state of this “lunch area” considering the place was full of dead flies, cob webs and spiders crawling about. I just couldn't understand what the issue was with workers being seen eating on their lunch break. I mean I'd expect the workers at a restaurant to eat at the restaurant they're working in right?… Its not a bad look at all. I guess it also kinda proves the foods good and clean since we eat it ourselves?
Anyways, it started off with just silly things like this but progressively got worse. We would get paid at the end of each week. Me and one of the other girls went to collect our payment at the end of one Friday shift and he under-pays us both by about £10 or so. That was about 2 hours worth of work for us at the time since we were on £4.50 an hour pay. When we approached him about this after just receiving our pay he went absolutely balistic saying “if you expect every single penny to the dot, I'll make sure you work every minute of the day without any breaks too!”. I was like wtf… We have an hourly rate and we did it. What makes you think you can round our pay down to whatever you feel like giving us and then threaten to make us work harder when we ask for our actual pay based on the hours we did… (we approached him with complete respect about this by the way stating maybe he made a mistake and nothing more)
-ps, he took our envelopes back, and returned them to us about 10 minutes later with more than the actual pay for the week. We both just laughed about it and walked off without telling him. If that was anyone else that accidentally paid me more, I'd actually tell them but not this prick…
So this manager had an absolute dick personality. I slowly became less niave and learnt the only reason he was a little more respectful to me than the other workers was because of how well I spoke. I grew up watching top gear, listening to very mature English podcasts and my parents speak very fluent English too without any slang. On top of that I'm very fair skinned as I'm pathan. This basically gives the illusion I'm English. A lot of people actually can't figure out what my ethnicity is lol. Even people from my own background mistake me for being English or mixed race. But the point is he used to have me working at the front of the restaurant engaging with customers and being a bit easier on me just because of how I spoke and my skin colour. All the darker skinned or people with desi/Romanian accents he talked down to and they worked at the back of the kitchen.
If this wasn't enough to make me lose all respect for him… I later learn he is paying the Romanian grown adults(who have families + children) a tiny £3.50 an hour meanwhile I was on £4.50 a hour as a 15 year old…. All because of my skin complexion and my spoken English. These guys worked so frikin hard, non stop running around, cookin and cleaning and I felt so bad for them being taken advantage of being paid less than a child's minimum wage! (may I add Eastern Europeans/romanians typically have a bad image in the UK as many end up thieving and laying off of benefits. Even I had somewhat of a stereotypical idea of them but this job changed my thought process completely and I'm glad! Truth is, there's good and bad in every ethnic group…)
I specifically remember one night working and one of the workers scraping up bits of a left over birthday cake to take home for his little daughter to enjoy. The joy in his eyes knowing he would have some left over cake to take to his little princess. He obviously didn't have much else to offer but even that was enough to light his face up with excitement.
This story does have a kinda good ending as we all planned to leave on the same day and fucked the manager over. It was going to be a long busy week. I specifically remember one of the days they were expecting 300+ customers for a birthday party or something and none of us turned up. Most us younger guys decided to stop working as school would be picking up again anyways and other jobs were available. Most the romanian workers moved to work at a similar buffet restaurant about 3-4 miles away which had a much better pay and they were so much happier. I remember one of the workers explaining “when its end of my shift, its ended. No problems. If there's mess on the floor manager says go home, I'll clean it, you're finished today” since the manager at the previous job would simply make them work over time without any pay.
Im not quiet sure what happened to the manager after we all left. I'm guessing he got fired by the restaurant owner as he was nowhere to be seen and soon after and the restaurant was managed by new guys.
I'm just glad we made a statement and done the prick over because enough was enough…