‘The Fact That I Can’t Fix Things Now Is Breaking My Heart’

How to get cash into servers’ pockets—and food onto the plates of the many thousands more gig workers suddenly without income—is the key question for restaurant owners across the industry. For workers, the shock was equally sudden. Lillian DeVane, a bar manager in Brooklyn, “felt unsafe” as the coronavirus started its incursion but restaurants stayed open. Closing was the only way to protect both workers and customers from infection: “You don’t really take sick days,” she told me matter-of-factly, “even if you have them. We’ve been working sick for years. That’s just how it goes.” As brunch crowds continued to sweep in last weekend, she worried about not being able to “keep up sanitation standards the way I wanted to.” Then, Sunday evening, she and her colleagues received an email telling them to file for unemployment.

“When we realized we were on our own,” DeVane said, Kelly Sullivan, a fellow service worker and DeVane’s co-host of a podcast called “FOH” (“front of the house”), helped launch a worker-relief fund called the Service Worker’s Coalition. The fund primarily raises money to purchase gift cards for undocumented workers to buy groceries and medical supplies to help tend ill family members.

The sudden shock has made workers around the country assess their financial health, and might prompt a national reassessment of the controversial “tipped minimum” wage, which allows numerous states to pay a very low hourly wage ($2–$3) to servers who stand to make much more with tips. The workers go home with their tips; the restaurant reports to the IRS that its employees were paid the regular minimum wage, and is required to make good on any shortfall between what workers actually take home with tips and what they would have taken home if they received the non-tipped minimum wage. When workers go to collect unemployment, though, their claims are based only on the number of hours they worked at the state’s minimum wage—not on what they took home with tips.

This reality was sobering for Carlos Salazar, also a Brooklyn bartender, who picked up shifts to supplement his arts career. When he realized his sources of income had vanished, he calculated that even if his take-home hourly income was three times the regular minimum wage, he would be eligible for $200 at most in unemployment a week—“and I live in fuckin’ New York City.” He did plan to file for unemployment, he told me, but was waiting to hear that even one friend had been able to “ring the bell and say I filed and it ran through”—the constant texts he was receiving from other servers reported only online snafus. In the meantime, he would rely on “some checks I haven’t deposited and some envelopes of cash and whatnot.”

Saru Jayaraman, a co-founder of the nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Center, hopes this might be the moment to finally abolish the tipped minimum wage for workers. Her group has started a relief fund to send servers immediate checks for $213, symbolic of the $2.13 tipped minimum wage that still applies in some states. Within 24 hours, she told me, 10,000 service workers had signed up for checks—and she wants particularly to get help to the thousands unable or afraid to try to get governmental help. Maybe this will be the time, Jayaraman said, to stop workers from having to live “tip to mouth.”

Pretty much every member of the restaurant industry has looked for a way to jump in. In the hard-hit city of Seattle, Edouardo Jordan, the chef of Junebaby, turned his restaurant Salare into a soup kitchen to feed unemployed service workers, using a seed grant from the Louisville-based LEE Initiative, founded by the chef Edward Lee to promote diversity in the restaurant community. That small foundation is already funding 13 such centers around the country, including one at the Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton’s Chi Spacca. Daniel Humm, the chef of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, told me via text that he is raising money to start a soup kitchen in the restaurant to employ 20 of his restaurant workers to produce 40,000 meals over the next six weeks for shelters throughout the city. The chef José Andrés, whose World Central Kitchen has taken the lead in disaster areas, including Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, has converted some of his D.C. restaurants into “community kitchens” serving meals for those out of work.