Publisher’s Note: The publisher has had no role in editing this column, which is published as the writer submitted it with the intention of publication in BEACONS.
By Angelica Melara
Kathleen Kingsbury’s eight piece, 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning, story about minimum wage restaurant workers is definitely worth the read.
The stories won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 and wrote about how grueling restaurant work is and how the pay is little to nothing. These hard working individuals dive into their work with the intention of being able to move up in the restaurant work.
The images that she uses in her stories include how a person can detect a former restaurant dishwasher by the “long, deep scars [that] often line their forearms,” and how people have to deal with customers who “expect their coffee to be prepared exactly as they please and only sometimes drop a penny in the tip can.”
In For $1 per Big Mac, a truly livable salary for millions, she talks about Hope Shaw who is a 38-year-old single mother of three and is also the assistant manager at a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Like many other minimum wage workers, Shaw lives paycheck to paycheck and in the story she is quoted saying how each month she feels as though she is choosing between paying her bills or putting food on the table.
As someone who has worked minimum wage jobs since she was 16, I understand how hard a person has to work in order to actually make money.
I’m not in the same position Shaw was in, mainly because I lived with my mom at the time and did not have any children, but I still had to pay my phone bill and my car insurance. I can’t imagine how it was taking care of three children while working for minimum wage.
Kingsbury also talked about how managers will take tips away from their employees, and explains how tips are supposed to work. She says “ending the tipped minimum wage would be the first step to preventing this kind of abuse. Frequenting and encouraging eateries that include a service charge in the price of a meal is another. Until then, tip well.”
I agree with her statement. I also feel as though ending the tipped minimum wage is the first step in preventing abuse when it comes to making sure employers are not illegally taking tips away from their employees.
It’s not fair that workers go out of their way to give customers the best service they can, only to be paid minimum wage.
Kingsbury makes it a point to explain how “the food-service industry is one of the leading employers - and exploiters - of immigrant labor.” She explains how the immigrants who are working these minimum wage jobs are continuously working these jobs because they need any form of income they can get.
With the working conditions Kingsbury talks about throughout all of the stories it brings into consideration how bad the workers are treated. She is able to turn it into a talk about the humane problems and the solutions to them. She transitions into all of the solutions smoothly which makes all of the stories easy to understand.
Some workers go above and beyond for their customers while others couldn't care less. I am someone that feels as though if the service is good, you should show the person providing that service how much you appreciated it by helping them and giving them a good tip.
In Kingsbury’s last story she says, “more humane working conditions in restaurants aren’t likely to arrive until patrons start demanding them as part of their dining experience, too.”
This is something that any reader of this story, and any decent human being should take away. If as a consumer you want the best dining experience, you should want to fight for the people trying to make that happen.
Instead of being a “Karen,” which according to urban dictionary is a “middle aged woman, typically blonde who makes solutions to others’ problems an inconvenience to her although she isn’t even remotely affected,” try being a decent person and understanding that the people working minimum wage jobs are working to make a decent living.
Kingsbury concludes her study of the minimum wage working conditions by providing solutions to help out the minimum wage workers.
In the last article, Diners should pay attention to workers, not just the food, she states the best ways of getting better working conditions for restaurant workers are: demanding intelligence, patronizing the good guys, tipping in cash and pushing for higher wages and work rights.
Kingsbury’s stories are very easy to read and follow which makes her stories about minimum wage food workers very worth the read. These stories are ones that everyone should take the time to look through because she talks about how helping the workers would result in people getting better dining experiences, and let’s be honest who wouldn’t be happy about that?
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