This is why America will be hit hard by Covid-19. We live in a precarious society built on exploitation and the pundit class and many well-off (people making more than 60K a year or so) cannot see it because they never experience it. Many of them even disbelieve it because I think accepting the truth would mean something must be done about it.
My mom was a waitress for something like 10 years, mostly at Cracker Barrel. CB was a better job than most of them, which is she stayed there, but she still made very little. I know exactly how much it was because she’d throw all her money (all cash tips back then) on the counter and I’d count it every day and arrange it. She was too exhausted to do so after, often, a 12-hour shift.
Her average night’s take was something like $50. Sometimes, she might make $80 on a really good night. This was in 1990 or so but I’m converting it to 2020 dollars. By the way, this corresponds to what waitresses still make in most states today.
People, I make more in an hour than most servers make. My independent consulting rate is twice what servers pull in — for an hour! And I can barely afford a health emergency in this country. Do you think people who make so little will miss work or go to a doctor? Ha!
And if you think food service is some minor industry, that surely it won’t have any effect, and you ask yourself, well, how many of them can there really be? I urge you to read this and then read it again:
~14mil people work in food service in the US. They're in every community. Everyone has to eat.
They live and work in conditions that make the spread of disease inevitable.
They won't go to the doctor until it's a crisis, long after they've passed things on to others. pic.twitter.com/PCDZKDuq0A
— Do not Thump the Book of G'Nome (@NomeDaBarbarian) February 27, 2020
Maybe not with Covid-19, but soon, a lot of people are going to learn a hard lesson.