Let's Get Real About Abuse in the Restaurant Industry
By: Jolee Sullivan
I secured my first job at fourteen at the dingy Greek restaurant a quarter of a mile from my house. It paid something like six dollars an hour, and I’d receive a white envelope weekly, stuffed with grubby bills and coins, with my boss’s math scrawled in pen on the outside. I was thrilled to be making my own money, and to be a responsible young adult with a real job of my own. I took the job very seriously. I even opted to walk ten minutes in the rain to get to my first shift when my ride bailed.
The job sucked. It was a reasonably slow business with cheap owners who were less than happy with their lives and careers. The lights were dim, everything was always faintly greasy, and very few customers ever came in. It was depressing.
The bosses were two tough Greek women who were not exactly friendly.
However, a born people-pleaser, I figured I’d work my fourteen-year-old ass off until they treated me like they liked me. It took many months of working extra shifts, staining all my shirts with bleach, getting (unknowingly) grossly underpaid, and crying in my dad’s car before and after shifts because “they all hate me there” until I was treated with anything resembling respect.
I worked there for four years. I’d proven myself a reliable worker, so the bosses were nicer to me, but the job was still depressing, and I always left feeling dirty and icky and reeking of beef gyro. When I was a junior in high school, I worked four days a week, Tuesday through Friday. I was taking AP classes and was extremely concerned about my college prospects. When I mentioned struggling with the workloads and asked for an adjusted schedule, my boss more or less made fun of me, asking me why I “couldn’t handle” something as simple as working and going to school. Wanting to maintain my status as her #1 worker, I swallowed my stress and pushed through. My grades suffered, and my mental health was at one of its lowest points ever.
I finally quit the day after I was assaulted by my boss.
It was a hectic day at the restaurant, and we were quite usually understaffed. Things were wild, customers were waiting, and I was overwhelmed. As I pulled a basket of fries from the deep-fryer to check if they were ready to be served, my boss turned from what she was doing and snapped, “What are you doing?” I began to respond that I had been waiting for the fries to be done to complete an order when she put two hands on my shoulder and pushed me out of the way, sending the basket out of my hand and back into the fryer, spraying hot oil onto both of us. She told me to go do something else because I was taking too long.
I trembled with a shocking wave of adrenaline and anger, but I said nothing.
I walked out mid shift the next day, utterly fed up, leaving no explanation. I never returned.
I worked at my next restaurant job even longer.
When I started, the contrast was so strong I couldn’t even believe how long I’d stayed at the Greek place. Everyone at the Italian restaurant was just so happy. It was a larger, more popular restaurant, with big bright windows and colorful mosaics. On my first day, one of the waiters told me, “We’re like a big family here.” I was thrilled.
I got to wear cute outfits and take home free food whenever I wanted it. And, for the first time in my life, I was getting lots and lots of attention from all of my male coworkers. As an insecure seventeen-year-old, I ate it all up. It wasn’t until a year or so later, when I was more comfortable in my own skin, that I recognized how unsettling it was for a man old enough to be my father to make comments about my smile and my body so often. Even later, I acknowledged how wrong it was for those comments to be coming from a business owner.
Once, I brought a friend of mine in to take over my position as a hostess when I moved on to a serving role. When she told the owner that the men in the kitchen made inappropriate comments to her, the response she got was, “that’s just the business.” While I was generally liked by my coworkers due to my easygoing agreeability that, at worst, turned into snarky snapbacks to their comments, my friend was almost immediately known as a bitch — only because she quickly and adamantly put her foot down when anyone said anything disrespectful to her. I couldn’t tell her to just go with it, and I began to feel ashamed of my inaction.
The longer I worked at the restaurant, the more comfortable my coworkers and I became with each other. While some of them felt like close friends or like family, many of them did not. It was a painfully confusing misbalance. Comments about my body were incessant, as were unprecedented, off-color comments about my boyfriend. My boss – one of the owners – told me more than once that he wished he were younger or unmarried so that we could be together. On the one and only instance in which I snapped, I was 23 and had been working at the restaurant for six years. An older coworker who was very close friends with the owner and had worked at the establishment for fifteen or so years had always been particularly pushy with me.
He often told me that my boyfriend wasn’t good enough for me and that he would treat me better.
Needless to say, I was utterly uninterested.
With him, it wasn’t just inappropriate comments. When we greeted each other with the light, one-armed hug that everyone at the restaurant was accustomed to, he’d always linger longer than anyone else. He’d make a habit of reaching out to rub my arm when we spoke, even if I was simply asking him a quick question about the menu. He often came up behind me while I punched orders into the computer and began to massage my shoulders. After months of awkwardly shrugging him off and repeatedly asking him to stop, he came up behind me one afternoon while I rearranged the fridge and kissed me on the neck. That familiar surge of angry adrenaline rushed through me, and this time I acted on it.
I whipped around and loudly told him to get away from me. He laughed at this and backed away with wide eyes, telling me to relax. I went to find my most trusted manager and said to him that I would quit if someone didn’t do something about this. Having already known that this particular worker was regularly inappropriate with other young female employees and me, my manager assured me that I was supported and told me that he would talk with the owners. This restaurant was owned by two men and one woman. The woman was the majority owner, and as such, she very rarely actually showed up at the restaurant. She was the one who told my friend that sexual harassment was “just the business.” During the pandemic, she refused to come into the restaurant but was adamant that we remained fully staffed. When the restaurant was twice fined because kitchen workers didn’t wear masks, she was enraged at the loss of money and called the head chef to set him straight. When a dishwasher came down with the virus, she told him he would have to work since we couldn’t afford to be understaffed. She didn’t come into the restaurant a single day in 2020. The first time I saw her back was in May of 2021, which was the same month I finally quit the place for good.
No one ever approached me about the kiss, whether to ask me what happened or how I felt. The coworker continued to work alongside me, though he was quieter than before but just as chummy with the business owners. This restaurant was a small, family-owned business. In contrast, a friend of mine worked at a popular chain restaurant and was inappropriately touched by a coworker. On that same day, her manager called the police and fired the employee – no hesitation, no questions asked. I understand that stricter rules and more comprehensive employee protection is a benefit of working for a corporate-owned business. But, is this right? How can it be?
Looking back, I see that I accepted the treatment I received and mostly refrained from standing up for myself. I am not proud of that. However, does that make it okay for an adult to have treated my coworkers and me that way, even regardless of the age difference? It most certainly shouldn’t. I’m not sure if this might be a more extensive conversation about how those with wealth or power treat those without it within the realm of business ownership or if it’s a more pinpointed issue surrounding the highly unregulated restaurant industry. Either way, I am left with these thoughts:
Business owners: Is it really all about image? Is there no room for integrity or concern for the well-being of your employees? Why?
Employees: Don’t put up with this stuff, not even for one minute! Do not perpetuate this toxicity. There are jobs elsewhere, and you deserve to be respected in any environment. Lastly, stand up for yourself. You are more than your job, and no one should feel that they are allowed to abuse, disrespect, or take advantage of you.
