Substance Abuse, Alcoholism and Sexual Harassment Await the Young Restaurant Worker

When Michelle woke up naked, lying next to her restaurant manager at her friend's house, she knew she had to take action and checked into drug and alcohol rehab for a month. She remembered the drinking at the game, the nice gesture on the part of Bob, the manager, and little else. Melitas dreads the beginning of her shifts where she knows her boss and restaurant owner will grab her, hug her in that salacious (and he doesn't even pay her salary!) way old men have and attempts to seduce her with his much bragged about sexual prowess. She has already taken her little yellow pill (Valium or equivalent), so she smiles her way through the advances and escapes to the "safe" space of the restaurant dining room.

For reasons that I need not go into, for this particular piece, I have found myself working, for the last two years, in a family owned restaurant, as a waitress. Except for another two year stint in the same business about 20 years and as many life times ago, I was unfamiliar with the workings of this particular business and their modus operandi. It has been a harrowing experience that has brought me physical and psychological consequences that I think will still be with me long after I'm done with this.

Waitressing always comes up in the top five list of the most stressful jobs, and as I've painfully discovered those lists do not lie. The stressfulness of a job can be broken into its many components: the pay, the hours, the possibility of promotion, the work environment constitute some of the factors. In this particular branch of work the discrepancies in these factors vary immensely depending on what sort of restaurant you work in. Whether it is a corporate restaurant, a small economic family owned or an upscale" bistro" will of course dictate much of a waiter's pay, working conditions and possibility of promotion.

But from my experience there is one common factor which might seem on the surface a coping mechanism, but is in truth a highly corrupting, unhealthy and ultimately socially expensive consequence of the structure of this type of work: the alcohol and substance abuse and almost concomitant sexual promiscuity that after a while almost seem to be part of the job. It is indeed a regular experience for a worker to call in sick because they have "a 24 hour flu", a widely abused euphemism for a bad hangover.

The after work drink to de-stress often becomes an all-nighter binge intended to forget the misery brought on by the and paid for by the psychological stress the person is under for eight hours at a stretch , quite often without so much as a 5 minute break in between. With the drink comes the joint and with the joint come the various uppers and downers easily available to those in the business. With the booze and the drugs come the all too common close encounters of the sexual kind, encounters facilitated by the effects that said substances have on judgment. Quite often the drinking and "drugging" are naturally done with co-workers and quite often what are "off the cuff" remarks while on the job site become full fledged advances at the bar or at someone's house.

Although not as frequent in the corporate restaurant scene, the familiarity and mingling natural in a family owned business, lead to the kinds of situations where managers, owners and wait staff often end up in situation that compromise the good business practices that should exist. Nepotism based on sexual and drug favors are the norm and anyone not involved in the social scene invariably gets stuck out of the "social circle", getting the worse shifts as well as the least frequented tables.

There is almost no regulation that applies to the so called "food worker" and not even a simple TB screening is required. An apron, a smile, good looks and youth are always a huge plus, and it is just as easy to get hired as it is to get fired, or more aptly, just dropped from the schedule. In "right to work states" such as Colorado, there are no subsidies of any kind, no vacation time, or any other benefits. There is not even a federal minimum wage, so the worker is at the mercy or the each client and their generosity or lack thereof.

When the owners are men, the problem becomes more complicated and it is sometimes a fine line one has to tread between joking around (ha-ha) and out and out sexual harassment. And so the waitress gets used to the verbal abuse heaped upon her by her colleagues, the demands from the costumers and the advances from the employer. What does she do? She drinks, she takes pills, she blacks out and if she happens to be out with a manager, well, he has his problems too and no one is the worse for a quickie that isn't even really remembered the next morning. Sex and drugs and restaurants indeed are a match made in hell." Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" the inscription at the entrance to Dante's Hell, would be apt for the waitress who fills out an application.