Hello don’t know if this is the right sub for this, but I frequent the sub and thought some people here might have some advice to give. I honestly don’t know that much about unions and how they work or how to even go about this but I really would love to start a union. I work at a very busy chain restaurant that has locations around America. We are a super busy restaurant, and my particular location is located in a very busy tourist area with millions of visitors every year. I have a love-hate relationship with it, they’ve been on the best places to work last for years but when you’re on the inside it’s much different the awards they have been given.
We often deal with very long, hard nights. We have thousands of people walk to the front door every night and it really takes a toll. Sometimes they will schedule people closing which can be till 2-3am and then schedule you an opening shift at 8am. It’s not uncommon for employees, esp dishwashers to sleep in their car overnight in the parking lot bc there’s no use in going home and getting like a few hours of sleep and coming back.
They let customers get away with harassing us and hardly ever let us refuse service to rowdy guests who have gone as far as physically assaulting someone and throwing plates at servers. A lady tried to swing on me one time for a minor inconvenience and if I hadn’t ducked she would’ve hit me. My managers wouldn’t let me call the police, they just made me write up a report for corporate.
This one may be kind of minor but I feel like it’s very fucked up. They’ll add automatic gratuity to big parties but then they let the guest take off the gratuity. Which makes no damn sense. Once, one of my coworkers was serving a table of 20 people for like3-4 hours, They took up a majority of her section so she couldn’t make any more money, and then they took the gratitude of the check after running her around for hours and running up a $900 check, her tip would have been around $160. So she made $0 in tips for 4 hours of work And essentially had to pay for those people to sit at her tables because she had to tip out bussers based on percentage of sales and not percentage of tips. So she had to tip out about about $50-60 to bussers, food runners, and bar staff bc the table drove up her sales. That left her with about $30 after working a 7 hour shift.
They do offer healthcare at 25 hours a week but if we’re slow for some reason and they don’t schedule you a lot of hours and there’s no shifts to pick up, congrats! You no longer have insurance! My co worker is a single mother who works two jobs and uses the insurance bc her other job doesn’t offer it. Since they scheduled her 18 hours for ONE week, she lost the health insurance that helped her with her son’s constant trips to the hospital bc he has sickle cell and it’s pretty bad so he has flareups pretty month on a bimonthly bias.
This may be minor too but we get no type of holiday pay even though holidays are sometimes our busiest days. Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day we get absolutely slammed and no extra compensation for working those extra grueling days. Tips usually aren’t that different on those busy days either. They also take our breaks away on holidays bc it’s “busy” and then say they’ll provide meals for us, but then it’s the equivalent of school lunch food from a company that makes 70-100million a week. ( very rough estimate but I did do calculations based on our avg sales for a day, times by all the locations in the us, times 7 days a week).
They will schedule you outside of your availability then make you call out or get the shift covered. They don’t offer free meals to you if you pick up a double, only if you were scheduled one. So basically, you don’t get to eat even though you’re essentially helping them by coming in on your day off.
The kitchen is absolutely awful. People will fight each other and call each other slurs and it goes beyond normal kitchen banter as my boyfriend who worked in the kitchen for a year, got assaulted by another chef (they purposely slammed a metal drawer on his hand and let him burn himself by saying something was fine when it was burning hot) and the company did nothing. They singled him out for his race a lot and made a lot of cruel remarks and when he went to the manager about it, they literally just said “that doesn’t happen here, I don’t see it” after he was saying to check the cameras, it’s all there but of course they never followed through so he left for a better paying job.
Also I know it’s fairly common, but they also pay new hires WAY higher than the people who have been slaving away in the company for years. I got so mad finding out someone I work with who isn’t even trained on all the things I am, made $3 more an hour than me. They were also fresh out of high school and had no work ethic so most of the work landed on me. When I brought up that they weren’t working very much, and they should have more work ethic for being paid pretty well as an 18 year old, my manager just got upset with me for talking about pay bc it’s “not allowed” which isn’t even legal to do.!!! Which I told her that and she just ignored me and walked away.
Once, our AC and electricity went out in the middle of Florida summer and at first they made us close, but then made us reopen once the lights came back on but the AC was still barely working. The kitchen was getting to be over 100 degrees and everyone was fed up, multiple people walked out. They also never close the patio when the weather is extreme and above 100 degrees. No one will sit on the patio, but they keep the server on the shift all day so they make no money.
Sorry for the mini rant but I’m just tired of all the mistreatment and it’s hard to leave bc of the comfort and job security, plus I’ve opened that location and know the ins and outs of the place. Other people accept the mistreatment bc “it’s good money” but I just don’t care. Making good money is NOT an excuse to accept poor treatment. My fellow coworkers just make it harder by accepting the mental torture bc they just LET them get away with it!!! And I just won’t tolerate it anymore!
So any advice anyone could give on this situation, please let me know bc I’m very interested but haven’t brought it up to anyone besides close coworkers out of fear of retaliation .
Anyone who made it to here, thank you for reading about my mess of a workplace.