Let me preface this short story by saying that I know that people have been through far worse. The point of this post is to share what my former co-workers and I are going through right now, and to possibly seek advice from those who have it.
Earlier this Summer after a long stretch of unemployment and deteriorating mental health, and after many applications and only a handful of interviews, I was finally hired as a bartender at what appeared to be a really hip new rooftop bar that was opening up in Santa Monica. The place’s name rhymes with DooDoo, and ultimately it’s a wish.com version of Elephanté.
However at the time, which was prior to opening, myself and others saw and admired the potential. The owners are French as is the GM, and they had a charisma about them that was easy to trust. We would show up each day that we were scheduled expecting to be trained on the food and beverages, we would sign in on a sheet to keep track of our hours; and when training wasn’t 4 hours- we were assured we could get paid for 4 minimum, regardless.
I can’t really explain to you how, for so long, we were strung along, as anything I will say will just sound insane to the outside reader. But each day that we showed up, we were made to unbox things, physically clean, arrange and re-arrange things, play a little bit on the POS maybe, and eventually it looked like we were about to start training. The servers got some kind of crash course on the food and some tastings, and us bartenders got a really poor excuse of a training on the cocktails (never had anything we needed to make the actual drink according to the recipe). I mentioned a few times to my colleagues that there were red flags, but also that hey- maybe I don’t know it all, and I’ll just go with it and see how opening goes… after all, the owners apparently owned night clubs, and with the cocktails, the final product seemed quite intricate and beyond my experience at the time.
I even kept offering to come in during non-training days to help out if needed. I wanted to make myself useful early on, and put my collective years of bartending and bar management skills to use. Eventually I was taken up on it. I was brought in on “inspection day” to help make sure the bar was going to pass. The bar was still a mess. Physically dirty, and the equipment barely worked. But, within minutes I was just put to work physically cleaning the place. The place was filthy. And my cleaning was described to me as a “once over”, so I thought ok, it’ll get cleaned thoroughly later, my soap & rag isn’t meant to be the final clean, good. Sweat my ass off and get dirty af, keep a good attitude and bust my ass for like 6 hours.
Each passing “training” day my intuition was yelling at me. Up until the day we unexpectedly opened. The place was still filthy. The dishwasher behind the bar had no product in it, and hasn’t been cleaned in the 3-4 years it was last used by the prior establishment. Our soda lines were clogged, probably from both 3-4 year old sugar syrup, and construction dust. We were simply instructed to use it and eventually it unclogged. What. The. Fuck. Anyway, the “friends and family” (free dinner) we were promised never came, we just opened one day. The place was still coated in dust and dirt. We had no bus tubs, no simple syrup, nothing to fucking work with. No recipe book. Not even the products needed to make the drinks. Each drink, depending on who made it, came out different. Voicing our “concerns” (read: extreme health hazard and inability to make the cocktails correctly), went unheard and we were just told to “stick out the opening”.
At this point it’s been 4 weeks, with the preceding weeks being 3-4 days of “training”. No one had been paid yet.
The soft open which was for vendors, hired influencers, and randos who walked by, was a mess but we all did our best. No one tipped that night, lol.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, finally we get paid. My paycheck was like $200. Lmao. What? And we never had a bank (cash drawer) so we never received our tips. I stuck out a couple more shifts as I raised these issues to the GM, and I was assured he would fix it and pay me up. A few shifts later, with ZERO progress in sight, and not getting paid, not even tips, I finished my shift and left, refusing to come back until I was paid up. I was the first to do this.
Long, long, long story short to wrap things up. We are now 3 months or so since then; and I have been the only one to have been made (almost) whole due to my persistence, and putting them on blast publicly. MANY, and if I had to guess, most, if not all, of my former co-workers are owed a massive percentage of their wages and tips. They are desperately trying to get paid up, much like I was doing. The ones who did get some form of payment were still well short of what they earned. Many claimed to have faced sexual and racial harassment and discrimination. I did not witness this, but it’s just another layer of scumminess.
Apparently they own nightclubs and according to the bar manager (who is also owed a ton) told us that the security staff hadn’t been paid over there either.
You know how they’re responding? Sending us threatening Cease and Desist letters saying they will sue us for defamation, including me. They’re sending rent-a-thugs to our residences to deliver these letters, in which they demand us to sign or face a lawsuit. Many of us are not signing. But wow. They’d rather spend a few hundred hiring thugs to scare us, rather than pay us.
It’s taking a mental toll on all of us, and the non-payments have really hurt some of us. Some of us were on government assistance programs. Some have families. How can you not pay these people?? What kind of scum do this? Absolutely makes me sick. I do hope karma catches up to them, ten fold.