The Employer Mentality
By 
I wonder if there’s something employers could do to get workers into available jobs? Imagine….what if there was an incentive such as higher wages or better hours that could convince empowered workers to labor? Shocking I know. Anyway, one thing that’s fascinating to watch here is how employers think about all these things now that their power over the poor has at least temporarily diminished. Add to this one of my favorite topics–the Santa Fe restaurant industry, which at its high end is very very high end in a poor state where whites have driven brown people out of town, thus forcing lengthy commutes on workers as well. Anyway, I chuckled at this:
Restaurant Martín can’t find enough servers with the special skills necessary for fine dining.
“You can make up to $65,000 a year as a fine dining server, and nobody responded to our opening,” co-owner Jennifer Rios said. “We just resorted to training people. We gave up looking for people who could hit the ground running.”
Whaaattttt?????? Having to train workers? What has this world come to? Employers have to lower themselves to actually showing workers how to do their job effectively? Someone call the University of New Mexico and demand it start a new major just to service Santa Fe restaurants!
It gets better:
Hiring bonuses are in vogue for a range of businesses — with restaurants offering up to $500 and local hospitals offering as much as $11,000 for nurses.
Rios rejects that concept.
“I’m looking for people who want to work for me,” she said. “What kind of team member are you if I have to wave $500 in your face?”
Oh fuck off. Your team no doubt meant so much to the workers you laid off in the pandemic, to the workers that you probably treated like crap for years before this, in an entire industry where people cycle in and out of restaurants because the working conditions are so toxic. Here’s the kind of team member one should be: an employee who never trusts the boss at all and seeks to have a union in order to have a say on the job.
Ugh some of these people are awful.
Also, looking at the Restaurant Martín’s menu, even though they are presently still just to-go, I just don’t see how they could offer a $500 bonus to new workers when they charge $48 for the beef tenderloin or $49 for the lamb rack. But hey, the wines start in the $40 range and go way up from there, so I can see the cries of poverty.