Photo by Caitlin Abrams
Server with mask on
It seems like I couldn’t light up a screen this week without some news outlet telling me it was hard for restaurants to find workers. Really. Of course if you follow the industry you know we’ve been talking about the labor shortages since way before the pandemic, but that doesn’t really play out in most of these news briefs. It seems that the main narrative currently being spun is: no one wants to work anymore.
You’ve seen the clever signs posted by fast food joints. You’ve probably read a rant or two from a chef or owner about how no one is coming to the job fairs. All of this vented frustration usually sums it all up with an easy conclusion that people are making too much money on unemployment to go back to work. The implication? They are lazy, or worse, grifters, freeloaders not pulling their weight to get this industry back on track.
I have boiled over on a few levels.
First the most obvious: If you listened to those stories and thought, “tsk, lazy” as you worked from home at your laptop in yoga pants while you chose not to put your camera on in the Zoom call because you didn’t want to wash your hair today, stop. Feel free to think about swapping your job for one where you have to smile behind a mask for an 8 hour shift while trying your hardest to communicate clearly with people who aren’t wearing masks and just want their lives back. And you’re doing this all on your feet while obsessively washing your hands as hygiene theater for an hourly wage. Now think about working an open to close shift in a hot kitchen where you never take off your mask. Now think about how your office job probably told you you could take all the precautions you need to feel safe, and you still get paid the same amount. This is hard work, and the payout for that work isn’t amazing. And sure, other articles have already pointed this out.
But that’s not what really irked me.
It was this article about languishing. In this very good NYT piece about the end of the pandemic and how it’s affecting people’s productivity, everyone gets a pass for brain fog and low energy. We are told that it’s ok to not be fine, as Angela Davis recently broadcast on MPR. That this state of languishing is normal, and lack of motivation may be the “dominant emotion of 2021.” This article and its ensuing discussions are, of course, for people who have “colleagues.” So in reaction to the current state of late-stage pandemic, some of us are told to relax and “treat uninterrupted blocks of time as treasures to guard,” while some of us are told to suck it up, put on our big-girl-pants and go get me a turkey sandwich.
Why do the professionals get a pass and a fancy word for their lack of motivation, while restaurant workers get demonized and called lazy? Why can’t we all just be a mess? Which, spoiler: we are.
“My friends are a mess.” Sarah Webster Norton who runs Serving Those Serving, a non-profit focused on providing mental health services to the service industry, knows it’s not just the white collar workers that need a break. “It wasn’t great before the pandemic hit, but that just sent a lot of people over the edge. They're rusty when they go back to work, so they're not doing well, and then they decide that ‘well now I can't do anything, I'm just worthless.’ To put yourself out there every single day in that hospitality space, where you have to give yourself to the hard work, it's that emotional labor that people aren’t considering.”
Norton, a veteran lifer in the hospitality biz, founded this organization back in 2017 when she saw too many of her co-workers losing faith, and dying by suicide or overdose. She’s grown it from being a loose support group to a fully formed 501c3 company, with a pretty simple goal: save everyone.
Do you know what an EAP is? Maybe you have one tied to your health insurance or provided by your company? If you asked most hospitality workers if they knew what an Employee Assistance Program was, the majority would not. It is as uncommon in the restaurant industry as 401K match, and yet, so much simpler and so much more needed. Serving Those Serving can change that, and that's how Norton is changing the industry.
“I have two therapists, it’s why I’m standing here able to do this. But I am not a therapist, so I couldn’t just be the voice on the end of the line for everyone. I realized that we had to find help not just for individuals, but for the industry we love, as a whole. We found Sand Creek out in Stillwater, with no idea that it’s one of the largest EAP providers in the country, they even serve the White House. Working with them has been a blessing and it’s so easy to understand and see how this one small move by restaurants could mean a healthier industry. How can that not be good?”
Here’s how it works: A restaurant/company signs up with Serving Those Serving to provide access to the EAP, which is provided by Sand Creek. Basically it gives the workers and their families access to free and confidential in-person mental health care four times a month. There’s a hotline manned by a therapist 24/7, which is vital to restaurant workers who often find themselves post-shift at 3 a.m. spiraling downward. Norton and her team are the face of the program for the employees, which helps. “They know I’ve been doing these same jobs for years, they know I know the toll it takes. We speak the same language. I have more success with employees when the restaurants have me come in and do face-to-face talks about what services they have available to them now.”
And despite the stigma against mental health that is deeply rooted among those who tend to self-medicate at the bar post-shift, she has seen success. “Sand Creek has a 4% utilization rate overall, over the whole country. So only about 4% of people who have it use it. Okay. We're at a 10% which I think is badass.” I put it down to Norton.
It’s also important to know that this is not a sobriety test. When seeking mental health services through some insurance carriers, you have to be subjected to a chemical assessment, and that puts a huge barrier up for many restaurant workers, a barrier that stops them from getting the mental health guidance they need. “If you want to get sober, that’s one thing but many insurance companies have the stance that if you're not willing to get sober then we can't help you. That's bullshit. When we hear that, we don’t feel understood as an industry, the problems are so much deeper and more complex than that. Sand Creek’s job is to remove those barriers, rather than set them.”
The cost to run this program is about $4 monthly per employee. Jester Concepts is on board, so are the Craft & Crew restaurants, Smack Shack, Broders’, Black Sheep, and Mac’s Industrial among others. But this program could help so many more places that have been strapped for cash and don’t know how to fit this in the budget along with the rising wage costs, more sanitation equipment, rising food costs, and other stressors.
People often ask me if they can donate to the restaurant industry, to help them through these tough times. I often tell them it’s too disparate, there isn’t one group able to funnel funds helping everyone. But I’ve been wrong.
I have said forever, and will continue to say, that restaurants are made of people. And if your favorite restaurant still can’t open for lunch or is freaked out by the lifting of capacity limits because they don’t have enough people to fill the needs, maybe it’s time to start recognizing the cost of emotional labor. It seems that other industries do, why can’t this one? If the industry wants to attract future workers, beyond the wage discussion, it has to provide them with a solid reason to show up. It has to show that it cares, that in times of crisis caused by the industry itself, there is help.
If you donate to Serving Those Serving, the funds can go toward setting up an EAP in a restaurant that doesn’t have one. Norton will provide them a year’s worth of services for their employees and the support needed to implement the program successfully. This is how you support an industry for the long haul. Because who even knows what's coming next.
This weekend when you hear a story about shortages and the health of the labor market, I invite you to go deeper than a lazy hot take about greedy workers, and think about what a healthy labor market really means.
