- Food and retail jobs usually don’t pay a living wage—let alone enough to pay back student loans—and they’re supplanting jobs that do. The average restaurant worker made $15,000 in 2009, compared to $74,000 for a manufacturing worker. Factory work, once the default employment choice for many newly minted adults, was backbreaking and monotonous. But, if unionized, it was also stable, full time, and decently paid.
None of these things are true of the modern service industry, and shockingly few people are working to change that. Only 2 percent of food-service workers are union members. When you subtract the ones who work at hotels, that number goes down to approximately zero. Big unions like the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union opt to organize health care workers and teachers instead of the folks behind America’s bars and cash registers.
But the restaurant workforce is changing. Whereas in the 1970s you could visit a steel mill and declare all the metal pourers “working class,” today philosophy majors from Brown are making lattes alongside folks who grew up poor and assumed they’d sling drinks for life. Most of the college grads are like Emily—they tell themselves they won’t be here long. Others have a hunch they might be making minimum wage for a while.
And a few of them have decided to do something about it.