![]() It’s no coincidence that more than 70 percent of servers are women, Jayaraman said. Women, many of them black and brown women of color, bear the brunt of this institutionalized economic inequity. In the 81 years since then, the subminimum wage for tipped workers has risen to a paltry $2.13 per hour. This practice was formalized in 1938 as part of the New Deal, creating a two-tiered wage system for tipped and non-tipped workers. ![]() This messaging goes all the way back to the time of Emancipation, when restaurants and other businesses in America fought to keep tipping as a way to employ newly freed slaves without having to pay them, leaving the primarily black, female workers with a $0 wage and completely dependent on customers’ gratuities. According to Jayaraman, the restaurant lobby has lobbied for 150 years to pay service workers next to nothing on the basis of the work being billed as “temporary” and not for “skilled professionals,” despite the very real labor, skills, and challenges involved with the job. “Service workers are seen as not professional disposable workers, basically slave labor,” said Saru Jayaraman, the president of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, in a phone interview. Service workers still face belittlement and condescension - even well-meaning defenders might employ comments lamenting how “structural inequalities leave talented people ‘trapped’ or ‘wasting their potential’ behind the bar,” as Gavin Jenkins pointed out in a piece for The Outline - thanks to long-held stigmas informed by classism, racism, and sexism. ![]() It’s as though they think being a member of Congress makes you intrinsically “better” than a waitress.īut our job is to serve, not rule.- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez March 8, 2019 I find it revealing when people mock where I came from, & say they’re going to “send me back to waitressing,” as if that is bad or shameful. Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson dismissing Ocasio-Cortez as a bartender “with no particular education” is not the same as supporters marveling at the intelligence and political savvy of a “former bartender,” but the undertones skew uncomfortably close, revealing the classist attitudes with which many Americans (inadvertently or not) still view servers and other tipped workers. The precise slant of that message may differ depending on the context and the speaker’s intent. The way that the media, the public, and other politicians have talked about Ocasio-Cortez’s bartending and waitressing experience has always been dubious, framed not just as an objective fact, but imbued with extra meaning. Joe Crowley one year ago, “bartender turned politician” has more or less become her epithet, an easy phrase to use in headlines to signal the sheer unexpectedness of her meteoric rise - and apparent novelty of her service background. ![]() Since Ocasio-Cortez won her primary against Democratic Party heavyweight Rep. COULD YOU MAKE ME A TEQUILA SUNRISE” “ Lady, you are a one sick case of waitresses playing politics gone awfully wrong.” “ This is the reason you don’t allow bartenders and waitresses too work in Congress, you get complete stupidity !!!!”īy now, Ocasio-Cortez’s history in the service industry - she bartended and waitressed for years after graduating college, before becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the age of 29 last year - is the stuff of legend, an origin story for a superhero-like figure many have come to regard as the future of the left. A recent flurry of Tweets provides just a small sample: “ HEY BARTENDER. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the news must be accompanied by a flurry of responses from detractors reciting a common refrain: Shut up and sit down, bartender. It is a truth universally acknowledged that any mention of Rep. ![]()
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