The ordering at Eurest has always been bad- we are almost always out of something, I think we’ve been out of at least one thing every week since I started. But the general manager got in a screaming match with the client, and while Eurest doesn’t fire managers (just demote them or move them to a new location) she decided to save the company the trouble and put in her 2-weeks notice. Then she proceeded to not do anything for the next 2 weeks. The ordering hasn’t been the same since- the temporary managers that were brought in had zero knowledge of what is needed at the store, and somehow consistently forgot to order things despite being given extensive lists. Some things got put on back-order after orders didn’t get done for weeks, and sometimes the completely wrong things get bought. At the coffee bar, we’re almost always out of something popular, and consistently run out of things like cups and lids.
Then a couple weeks after the GM left, Eurest decided to start “re-vamping” the entire kitchen and cafe in the Rhode Island location. For about a month, a constantly changing rotation of corporate managers and marketing executives had been coming in and telling us how things need to “change”. They claim “efficiency” and “professionalism” are the goals, but in reality it was just constant nitpicking and finding menial things to “improve” while they ignore morale and the major issues that are getting in the way of doing our work. They decided the coffee bar needs to be a “destination”- for who? The people who have to be here every day anyway? So they bring in new bakery items, lunch options not offered in the cafeteria, and set up afternoon snack stations; and some things are successful, but the majority of the effort put in is received by only a handful of customers who buy. Almost all the sandwiches we get after the morning end up in the trash at the end of the day. And often their desire to have these new things get hampered by their incompetence, because the planning and execution is amateurish and has no direction. We constantly don’t have the ingredients, time, or knowledge via communication to set up their new offers.
An example of the manager’s amateurism is in the dishroom- where we had one solo worker to wash dishes during the busiest hours of the day. Working in a sub-optimal setup with an old and worn out dishwashing machine by oneself is bad enough, and the dishes can pile up in the hundreds during our lunch rush, but then the issues were compounded by the fact that we were out of the proper dish detergent for weeks. And managers were coming to our dishwasher and telling him that simultaneously he is not working fast enough and also not cleaning the dishes well enough. There is a second person working as dishwasher, and when there’s a second person on the dishes go efficiently, but this second dishwasher is only part time and leaves before the lunch rush, and during the next 3 hours of the shift the main dishwasher is drowning in dishes and almost never gets support from other staff. He just quit this past week since none of the issues got resolved, one of half a dozen people to have quit since the new general manager started.
The current General Manager has no respect for agreements that were made between employees and management before she arrived. And she has made multiple scheduling mistakes, putting people on days or hours that don’t match up with our schedules that have been agreed upon by all the staff and previous managers. She is cutting staff at the coffee bar, which brings up previously resolved issues that occurred under the last manager. She wants to have only 4 people at coffee bar during the week, and only 2 people all day Friday. She claims “the client won’t budge, we can only have 4 people on coffee bar”- but when we only have 4 people that means someone has to come in at 7 and work til close at 4:30; or even worse on the days only 3 of our staff can work it’s 6:30-4:30. A 10-hour shift is grueling, especially in these high-intensity food service environments. And the Friday with 2 people- Friday is supposed to be our cleaning day, we scrub and sanitize all our equipment, deep clean the fridges and cabinets- and while we are much slower on fridays than other days of the week, it still gets busy. And during the times of the morning where there is a rush, we really need a 3rd person; but if we are going to get our deep cleaning done we definitely need a 3rd person.
We have talked to the GM about the staffing problems multiple times. The solution so far has been to hire temp workers through “insta-work” – some app similar to doordash and uber, but specifically for the purpose of companies hiring scabs. Of course, not all their jobs are scab work, but essentially every day is training for them unless they take repeat jobs. So it is almost less helpful for us to have these insta-workers here, because we have to take on the extra task of following this person around to make sure they’re doing things right. And they certainly can’t work register, because our POS system is confusing and can take ages to check someone out if you aren’t familiar with it. One monday, a temp worker had to watch the coffee bar by herself because we had a mandatory hospitality meeting that started half an hour before the coffee bar was set to close- so we got out of that completely unnecessary meeting and then had to rapid close the coffee bar because nothing had gotten done (because why would it, she didn’t know what to do!)
Let’s talk about this meeting: the GM starts off by giving the baristas certificates of “appreciation” for “barista appreciation day.” I would have rather been given toilet paper because at least I could wipe my ass with that. The manager also, for one barista, put her nickname on the certificate instead of her actual name- does she even know this barista’s name? And this is our one Black coworker at coffee bar, so regardless of intention it definitely is a micro-aggression.
Halfway through this meeting, the GM left to do whatever else, and the hospitality executive from corporate who is running it says, “now that the managers are gone”, like he’s one of us. He tells us he “knows” our frustrations- “if one manager comes in and tells you to put something somewhere one day, and a new manager tells you to put it somewhere different the next day, that’s not helpful.” Like yeah it’s not, so what’s going to be done about it? “We’re gonna fix it”, blah blah blah, well in the weeks since the meeting not one thing has changed at all. We shouldn’t have to deal with people coming in and changing everything without even communicating with the team. We need to have a say in what happens at our work, and how things can run well.
The GM is condescending. When you try and talk about what issues are going on and problems with the work flow, she walks away. She also has done things that make the workers think she’s racist; she picks on our black coworker at the coffee bar in particular, pulling her aside for extra cafeteria work every day and expects her to do shift-lead work which she is not expected to do nor gets paid for. Plus, the only black staff member in the kitchen got fired for “tardiness”, something that very common across all of the workers and which everyone agrees didn’t seem fair, and apparently he hadn’t even been late the week that he was fired.
Time is spent on making us draw on the cups, or getting an ice cream machine that has been used a total of once, or making sure all the fancy new snacks in the cafeteria are fully stocked and look pretty 100% of the time; but when we have an abusive head chef screaming at the cooks, or are backed up and look messy during rushes because of the lack of staff, or when there is zero communication between the managers and all the workers, it’s like they don’t care at all.
People are quitting, and calling out due to stress. We are being worked like slaves and the wages aren’t good enough that people want to stay and hope things get better with management. And even if wages were better, we would still also need to be able to have job security and have a say over the decisions that are made about our jobs. We can achieve these things, but only through an independent, class-conscious union and committee of workers. Maintaining independence in our union is especially important, because the main weapon in the labor struggle has been hampered by no-strike clauses in the ‘official’ state-sanctioned unions. The state unions also typically include “managerial rights clauses” which grant managers rights to enact discipline & to direct the workflow, the very thing that is driving the biggest problems at our work. Forming a class-conscious union is imperative to fulfilling our demands in the workplace, and we need to do so now.