When Eli Revelle Yano Wilson applied for a job as a server at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Los Angeles, management had plenty of questions for him. “Name three brands of IPA,” he remembers them asking. “How would you explain béarnaise sauce to a customer?”
A job posting in the window of another restaurant was even more demanding: “We are hiring cool, super chill, fun, interesting, eco-friendly, upbeat, smart, life living characters to treat our friends to the best empanadas in town,” it said.
“I still don’t really understand what béarnaise sauce is,” Wilson confessed to audience members at a webinar hosted Wednesday by the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor & Employment. Today he’s an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico, and he’s more interested in the language these restaurants used in the hiring process. Wilson described it as “screening for privileged white tastes,” and said the language restaurants used in “back-of-house” job postings was notably different.
One job description demanded that workers be “fast” and “neat.” Another restaurant posted two signs in its window — one in English and one in Spanish. “We are hiring kitchen staff [and] servers,” said the sign in English. “We are hiring cooks and dishwashers,” said the sign in Spanish, neglecting to mention that server positions were also available.
Restaurant workers are quitting in droves, demanding higher wages, and increasingly fighting to unionize. But if they want to build a broader coalition, they may have to confront the entrenched inequities in their workplaces. On Wednesday, Wilson presented a number of findings from his book “Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers.” He included a detailed analysis of racial and class divisions among workers at upscale restaurants and described how routine management practices — and the workers themselves — perpetuate the problem.
Wilson tackled these divisions by focusing on three high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, which he did not name, and he went to considerable lengths to study them. He worked as a server for a year at each of the restaurants, then conducted interviews with 57 restaurant workers and managers.
He was particularly interested in the divisions between front-of-house and back-of-house workers, which he said are particularly stark in high-end restaurants. According to Wilson’s research, servers, bartenders, and other front-of-house workers are often white and middle class, and can make $25 to $30 an hour with tips. Line cooks, dishwashers, and other back-of-house workers are disproportionately Latino, working class, and born in other countries. On average, they make $10 to $14 an hour and do not benefit from tips.
According to Wilson, management reinforces racial and class divisions between the two groups of workers on a daily basis. In addition to their prejudicial hiring practices, many managers hold separate meetings for servers and cooks, and Wilson said it can be next to impossible for back-of-house workers to get promoted to front-of-house positions. One worker he interviewed, Fernando, had been trying to make the move for years but kept getting passed over for white hires. “To be honest, I don’t see [head manager] letting Fernando train as a server here,” another manager told Wilson.
Wilson also focused extensively on how workers experience and even maintain these divisions themselves. Front-of-house and back-of-house workers rarely socialize. “For them? This is a career,” one college-educated white server told Wilson, gesturing to the kitchen staff. “Front of house? I’m sorry, but you can’t do what we do,” said a second-generation cook from El Salvador. One Latino busboy Wilson interviewed revealed that he had once been promoted to front-of-house manager but found dealing with affluent white customers so stressful that he asked for his old job back.
Wilson conducted his research prior to the pandemic and noted that restaurant work has become much more tumultuous in the last few years. He also observed that the pandemic and ensuing labor shortage has affected front-of-house and back-of-house workers in different ways. Front-of-house workers were much more likely to be laid off at the beginning of the pandemic, he said, and they are also more likely to participate in the “great resignation,” abandoning an increasingly unstable industry for more fulfilling work. By contrast, he said, “We are seeing many cooks really kind of soldier on.”
As workers throughout the food service sector agitate for better working conditions, Wilson finds some proposed labor reforms more promising than others. He described the Fight for $15 movement for a higher minimum wage as particularly exciting, and acknowledged the importance of the debate over “whether tips are imparting a unique set of disadvantages and demeaning labor.” Still, he said, getting rid of the tipping system has proven easier said than done.