'Cry Me A Fricken River!'

By Hildee Baldwin

May 10, 2021

Restaurant owners and managers across America are playing a symphony of tiny violins and the media is giving them a stage and fifty-foot speakers.

‘No one wants to work for us!’

‘We can’t reopen and serve the hordes of customers demanding to be able to overpay for our slop and watered-down booze.’

‘Our fifty-year-old, balding, shirt-button-popping, skeezy af asses will actually have to do work ourselves instead of hiring grunts to do it for below minimum wage!  Oh noes! This will cut into our time sitting at the bar gabbing with hot single customers and hitting on the smokin’ young bartenders!’

‘Employees are ghosting us!  They don’t even respond to our phone calls!’

‘Other restaurants are stealing our employees with promises of $20/hr wages!’

‘Oh, woe is us!!!!’

Prospective employees are demanding answers to their questions so we took to the streets – physical and virtual – to give them the same ink the main stream media is giving their prospective advertising clients.

“Cry me a fricken river!” exclaimed one person who requested anonymity because she didn’t want her name associated with this story as she applies for jobs in California.  “Trump and Newsom are two sides of the same coin – ignorant windbags who broke America through fear and greed.  They were out partying while we were in the trenches getting shit done!  Now politicians, employers, and the media whose profits are made from both want to guilt us into going back to restaurant and hotel work where we make poverty wages serving you food and cleaning up your explosive diarrhea?  Oh yeah, that’s right, the same person handing you your food is also required to clean the toilets because restaurant owners are too cheap to hire janitorial services.  And you fool wonder why you get norovirus, hepatitis, and COVID!” she scoffed as she threw up her hands in disbelief at people whose definition of “normal” is eating out and going to movie theaters while everything America supposedly stood for, burns.

“Newspapers and broadcast media from California (It's like a WAR??? Are you serious, you tone deaf windbag???) to New York are milking this story for all it’s worth – but where the hell were they while RESTAURANT owners and managers ghosted applicants FOR DECADES???  Where the hell is the media when restaurant owners and managers physically, verbally, and financially abuse workers desperate for wages to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table?  I’ll tell you where – in the employers’ back pockets, picking them for advertising money.  Workers never get voices!  Politicians and employers pay for advertising in newspapers and television – of course they’ll print well placed stories when someone from a restaurant group or the governor’s office calls them!  If workers were smart they’d hire their own lobbyists because then you get the ear of the governor and the president and the media!” steamed one worker buying peanut butter, bread, and diapers with the last few dollars left over from his unemployment check after paying enough rent to avoid eviction, paying ever increasing health insurance premiums, and putting gas in the ten-year-old Honda he shares with his wife.

“Where is the media to call out the restaurant owners and managers for their bullshit application process?  It used to be that a restaurant hung a “Help Wanted” sign in the window, posted them at local high schools and colleges, or sent out word via their work staff that they had positons - and applicants could just pop by between 2: and 4:pm to get an application and usually an interview.  More often than not, a position would be offered on the spot to any qualified applicant and boom – JOB!  Now?  Now applying for even a basic job like dishwasher, busser, or hostess requires internet, a résumé, cookies and Java Script to be enabled, an email address in addition to a phone number, and endless patience typing personal data into a third-party app – more data than the fricking NSA requires for Top Secret clearance!  IT’S A FRICKING JOB SCRAPING WASTED FOOD LEFT ON PLATES BY OBESE WANKTARDS INTO A TRASH CAN!  YOU DO NOT NEED OUR DRIVER’S LICENCE NUMBER, THREE REFERENCES, BRA SIZE, AND THE LAST FOUR OF OUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!  You want to run a background check?  Fucking invite us in for an interview!  But you’re lazy!  Your Human Resources Witch is getting sexy-times text kickbacks from the skinny-jean-wearing sales douche who convinced her, over a box of wine, that she’d shave HOURS off her workload if only she’d funnel all applicants through his company’s AI site which scrapes all applicants’ personal information to sell to data brokers.  ‘Just think of all the hours we can spend together if you’ll let my software into your hiring system.  We’ll send you all the best (white) people to fill your slots,’ he purred in her ear, making her hiring system whir like a dot-matrix printer at the notion of having her slot filled by his software…And oh by the way, THEY ARE STILL ghosting applicants!  Try applying for a job via any restaurant, hotel, retail store, or bio tech’s web site – they all use third-party AI programs that weed out people of color, people with disabilities, people with gaps in their work history – well guess what!  After 2020 WE ALL HAVE GAPS IN OUR WORK HISTORY!” spat one frustrated worker who just heard that his state is stopping expanded unemployment to force workers back into low paying jobs.

“Who would blame workers for saying ‘NOPE!’ to an offer of wearing masks all day, the risk of COVID (with the added bonus of no paid sick leave – thanks Democrats for continuing the GOP’s policies of indenture!), sucky wages, rude customers, skeezoid managers, bogus commutes, and in the case of San Diego – having to pay to park your car just to go to work at many locations?!?!  What sane person wouldn’t look at the math and say, “I can make more not paying my rent, getting unemployment insurance payments, going back to school, and looking for other opportunities!”” asked one former waitress who refuses to go back to the industry.

“Before the media let Jerome Powell take a victory lap and say, ‘See, I told you this would raise wages!', let’s have a reality check, shall we?  First rule of the restaurant business – profit!  All these cry-baby restaurant owners and managers telling the media how they’re suffering and offering $2, $3, $5 an hour over their old wage rates just to get employees – it’ll last through summer at the most!  Once the rent moratorium is over, once expanded unemployment runs out, once the worker pool expands…all the people who stepped up now for $20-an-hour dishwasher jobs will find their hours cut to nothing until they quit so the restaurant can hire cheaper workers.  This is how restaurants and retail stores work – they don’t like you, they starve you out.  They don’t fire people, they just cut their hours,” challenged one man we interviewed in the parking lot of a grocery store on his way to an interview for produce stocker.

“Low paying jobs are like rents, only in reverse.  Landlords and employers are cut from the same cloth.  They would rather pay a one-time bonus or give a couple months of rent for free than raise wages or lower rents.  They’ll take a one-time hit to avoid long term changes in their projections.  Powell is the High Prince of Clueless because he thinks all of this will lead to higher wages.  It just won’t.  And “transitory inflation”?  Please!  Once companies get the mouth breathers used to higher prices for tampons, diapers, peanut butter, and gas – they never go back.  Anyone who believes Powell deserves what they get!  The people panic buying homes and paying tens of thousands over asking price and normal comps because the media and the realtors are using the housing market as their new COVID-drama clickbait are going to be sorry in the long run.  It’s too bad we all have to go down with the ship though,” added his girlfriend who’d driven with him to the interview.