How Restaurants Get Free Labor Out of Servers and Bartenders
In DepthWould it seem absurd to read that most restaurants in America get a significant amount of essentially free labor out of servers and bartenders for work that has nothing to do with serving or bartending? If so, it’s also such a basic, universal fact of the industry that almost no one even comments on it at this point.
Let me introduce you to the concept of side work.
Side work is, simply put, the things you have to do after your actual service is over and you’ve stopped taking tables, but before you’re allowed to go home. A by no means exhaustive list of side work duties either I or friends have had to do in the past:
- Refilling ice (or emptying out the ice tray, which is significantly more annoying)
- Silverware roll-ups or napkin folds (if you’ve ever had to do an oyster fold, you know how obnoxious those can be)
- Marrying and refilling ketchup bottles*
- Re-setting tables
- Vacuuming or sweeping the entire restaurant (or simply one’s own section)
- Changing the chalkboard illustrations and marketing materials
- Refilling salt, pepper, and sugar, taking out the trash
- Cleaning and plastic wrapping the entire soda fountain
- Lighting or extinguishing all tea candles in the restaurant
- Cleaning out the entire industrial-grade coffee machine
- Changing out/refilling salad dressing containers (an event which frequently leaves you smelling and occasionally looking like the Bleu Cheese Monster)
- Cleaning up messes in the kitchen (usually side work for the cooks/prep cooks, but this defaults to servers in some places)
- Cleaning up the bathrooms (for people in trendy areas, this frequently involves the additional danger of dealing with drug-related biohazard disasters)
- Cleaning up innumerable and unspeakable bodily fluid-related disasters
- Steam-cleaning and polishing wine glasses
- Scrubbing out an entire walk-in freezer and chipping the ice off the floor
- Re-stocking basically any product you care to name
- Numerous other duties that don’t immediately come to mind (feel free to share any I’ve missed in the comments below)
Please bear in mind that side work most commonly includes many of those examples at once.
Not every restaurant is guilty of the problem to the same degree, as side work varies greatly from restaurant to restaurant in amount as well as form. There are even theoretically restaurants that don’t involve any side work—although I’ve yet to work at any of them, I’m sure they exist somewhere. It also varies in time expenditure; at some places, it’s minimal, to the level of simply doing 50 roll-ups of silverware, which takes about 20 minutes if you’re not busting your ass. At others, however, like the diner in College Park, Maryland** where I first started waiting tables, side work could take up to two hours, which is particularly brutal if you’ve just worked a 5 PM – 3 AM shift and are expected to do so again the next day (a scenario that happened to me more than once during the three months I worked there). Though side work generally falls somewhere between those two extremes, there are technically no established legal protections to prevent side work’s harsher variants (though as we’ll see below, courts generally side with workers when this issue is actually brought to the legal arena).
I’m sure the response to this from many quarters will be “well, employees at other jobs have to do re-stocking and other assorted stuff; why should all these entitled servers and bartenders be any different?”, but the answer to that is quite simply that employees at those jobs are paid the same wage for that work as they are for any other aspect of their job. In that same vein, it’s important to note that the ethical issues with side work do not apply in states with no tipped minimum wage; obviously, at that point it’s a (relatively) fair wage for fair work, insofar as the current minimum wage can be described as “fair” for anyone.*** Side work is likewise a fair proposition at any restaurant where employees are paid a living wage, like Bar Marco in Pittsburgh, which pays its workers a salary and bans tipping. But for the vast majority of servers who work in one of the 43 states with a tipped minimum wage and/or at restaurants which cheerfully take as much advantage of them as possible, working a sizable portion of their time on the clock doing non-tipped work for $2.13/hour is both par for the course and really, really messed up.