Abstract
This essay takes a discourse-centered approach to understanding the historically contingent construction of restaurant service as a devalued occupational identity, showing how service is actively constructed as low wage and organized along hierarchies of gender, race, and class. These discursive constructions shape the relative visibility and legibility of workers as fully deserving of rights, compensation, and dignity. Building on prior research on the struggle over meanings of work, occupational identity, and gendered and racialized job segregation, the essay begins by tracing constructions of the “ideal server” predating the contemporary rise of restaurants from relations of servitude within and beyond the plantation economy, to the eventual entrenchment of tipping, and the gendered and feminized constructions of domestic service. It discusses racialized and gendered relations of servitude in the Pullman Company's dining cars and the eventual white feminization of waitressing. Adopting a historical narrative built on secondary literatures, it demonstrates the centrality of race, gender, and class to early occupational formations of service. It highlights how employers have cultivated occupational hierarchies and divisions as well as efforts by restaurant workers to transform how their labor is valued and compensated.
Highlights
This morning, the young barista woman told me that a customer came in with a mask, but not wearing it
Constructing Ideal Restaurant Server occupational hierarchy, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, wage theft, and wage inequality in the restaurant industry (One Fair Wage, 2020), there is a clear need for greater attention to how unequal work relations have been constructed and maintained over time
My analysis of shifting occupational formations of service within the early period of U.S restaurants contends that the question of who performs the labor of serving is a significant one
Summary
This morning, the young barista woman told me that a customer came in with a mask, but not wearing it. The essay proceeds with a brief overview of contemporary occupational hierarchies and wage inequalities of restaurant service before turning to a much-needed focus on the long aftereffects of slavery and its associated gendered and racialized meanings tied to the work of serving. Historical discourses and practices of servitude originating within the plantation economy found adoption within debates over domestic service as well as within the gendered and racialized occupational hierarchies of the Pullman Company dining cars to the eventual white feminization of public-facing restaurant service.
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