The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of "Temporary Workers"

Service workers are often treated as temporary employees—which turns into an excuse to ignore their needs and make their jobs impossible.

Hi! It’s me, with a quick request: Boss Barista has over 2,400 subscribers, and right now, around 100 of those folks, or around 4%, have paid subscriptions. I’m so grateful to everyone who makes it possible for me to do this work, but I’d love that percentage to be higher!

If you’ve ever shared a Boss Barista post, or have found anything here valuable, please consider upgrading your subscription to support this newsletter. Alternatively, leave a comment and tell me what would inspire you to move to a paid subscription. Would you like a discount? Would you be incentivized by any particular action or perk? Let me know! And if you would like to upgrade now, here’s a button where you can do so:

If you’ve ever been a server, a barista, or other service worker, you’ve probably heard some version of, “When are you going to get a real job?”

The idea that hospitality work is inherently temporary, basic, and low-skilled has prevailed for decades—or at least it did until the pandemic hit. Amidst the dark days of early lockdown, service workers were lauded as heroes and essential workers, and became key providers of normalcy and routine. Even if we couldn’t sit in our favorite restaurants and cafes, a to-go meal or a cup of coffee was still a lifeline—a tether to something familiar and human.

But then, as the pandemic wore on, the tune changed back. Now, in 2023, the going wisdom is that “nobody wants to work anymore” (arguably, every generation has said this about the following generation, but it does feel more pervasive than ever). Even though unemployment is at its lowest rate in half a century, many attribute shuttered fast food joints, “help wanted” signs, or complaints about understaffing to this “wisdom.” 

This week’s episode of the podcast features Adam JacksonBey and Valorie Clark, two of the folks behind Go Fund Bean, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to support, uplift, and defend the hourly coffee worker.” Last year, Go Fund Bean ran an expansive wage survey, asking coffee workers to report data on metrics like hourly wages, average tips, and benefits. 

The survey uncovered a lot of revealing information (for example, people who were salaried were more likely to get a raise, and would receive that raise more quickly, than hourly workers) but one of the most important findings was that hourly workers are paid, on average, $14 an hour—but are only scheduled for roughly 26 hours of work a week. 

Perhaps that’s not shocking, but it is revealing of the burdens this industry foists on its workers. One is that many people who work on an hourly basis are expected—or required—to have flexible availability. Another is that virtually no hourly employees surveyed worked a full 40-hour work week—even though the numbers used to determine location-based viable wages (including in tools like the MIT Living Wage calculator) are based on a 40-hour work week as a default.

The “nobody wants to work anymore” rhetoric presents an interesting dichotomy: We have normalized feeling entitled to the labor of service workers, but we’ve also long treated these jobs as “temporary,” and these workers as interchangeable and replaceable. A lot of that has to do with turnover, which we explore in the episode: 

Adam: ...we think about wages and how people are paid in a very weird way in this country, and especially within the restaurant/hospitality industry ... A lot of owners and managers see hourly workers as temporary and then treat them that way, and then they become temporary because they were treated like they were temporary because they were originally seen as temporary. So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The mainstream conception of turnover is an idea I feel incredibly strongly about dismantling, and is something I’ve talked about in the newsletter before. For so long, we’ve viewed turnover as the result of personal faults or whims without acknowledging its common, structural denominators. Turnover is much higher in low-wage, hourly jobs, yet we still seem convinced it results directly from the people who work these jobs, and not the conditions they’re expected to tolerate. 

Baristas often don’t get full-time wages, a third receive no benefits, and while $14 an hour is almost double the national minimum wage, it’s far under what you’d need to live comfortably in almost any U.S. city. (I researched the living wage for a few mid-range U.S. cities, and $14 isn’t enough to live on in any of them.) Most coffee shop jobs are set up to be unsustainable, so while we lament that our favorite spots are closing or are entirely overwhelmed and understaffed, we have yet to address the root issue. 

We’re beginning to see the results of that attitude: Hundreds of thousands of businesses shut down, and more than 57 million people left their jobs, between January 2021 and February 2022. Food workers have also experienced a higher mortality rate from COVID-19 than any other industry. Every now and then, I’ll see someone tweet something like, “Where did all the service workers go?” You need only click through to the responses to find out the grim answer. 

Talking to Adam and Valorie brought up a very visceral memory, which I hadn’t thought about in years. In high school, I worked part-time at a store in the mall, and I’d get scheduled for “on-call” shifts, where I’d have to call the store a half hour before the shift was supposed to start and ask if they needed me. I couldn’t schedule anything that conflicted with that time, but if they didn’t need me, I didn’t work—and I didn’t get paid. I think I was called in about 25% of the time. 

I accepted these terms because I was young, and didn’t understand how manipulative this practice was. When I look at the conditions we place on service workers now, it’s obvious we set people up to fail, which is a shame—in every industry, but in service, particularly coffee, it hits different. If you’re a regular coffee drinker, there are few people you see as often as your baristas. I think Adam captures why seeing them leave their jobs—jobs they love and would want to stay in otherwise—can be heartbreaking: 

You want somebody who knows your order, who talks to you, who knows who your kids are and knows that your kid just had a bad spelling test and loves chocolate croissants and gave you extra chocolate croissants so that your kid feels better.

The little things like that, that may go into your coffee shop really special.

Before You Go…

It’s been a moment since I’ve included a “here’s what I’m reading and here’s what I’m publishing” section, in part because I haven’t been reading and publishing much lately. I’d love your suggestions for articles to read or books to pick up!

I am working on a piece on how family language is wielded at work, building on an article I wrote a few years ago. I’m excited to explore the idea of psychology and linguistics further, and can’t wait to share this one with you folks.

Last month, I celebrated six years of Boss Barista … and I’m wondering how to mark the occasion further. Would you be interested in receiving a “best of” list this month, or anything else to mark this anniversary? Let me know in the comments below—or just leave me a comment generally, because I like them, and I like all of you.