Communicating Values to Cultivate Sustainable Occupational Identity: How Restaurant Workers Resist Service Work Stigma

Pre-COVID-19 pandemic, restaurant workers comprised one of the largest workforces in the United States, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the national economy. Yet, restaurant workers routinely face customer abuse, meager wages, lack of benefits, sexual harassment, and one of the highest rates of turnover across industries. Given these conditions, this qualitative study investigates how restaurant workers make sense of a contested occupation and manage the stigma associated with their occupation. Specifically, this study examines how food and beverage service workers identify with and navigate a demanding industry while managing the sociocultural assumptions of service work. Using a multi-level discourse analytic framework, we analyze how service workers craft and enact occupational identities. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with 19 restaurant employees, we demonstrate how people foreground the positive attributes of restaurant work while resisting social Discourses that position the work as dirty, demeaning, emotional, and meaningless. We analyze how workers frame the values of working in restaurants and the communicative strategies they use to navigate stigmatized social interactions, including emphasizing flexibility, empathy, emotion management, and teamwork. Theoretical and practical implications offer suggestions to improve workforce sustainability and working conditions for employees.

“I Mean, Define Meaningful!”: Accounts of Meaningfulness among Restaurant Employees

Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a five-year period, this study addresses the complex topic of what constitutes meaningful lives. This research examines restaurant employees’ accounts of meaningfulness in and outside their workplaces. The meaning they ascribe to their jobs and activities external to work reveals five categories of meaningfulness: Helping, Mentoring, Expanding, Belonging, and Supplementation. Regardless of popular opinion, which marks restaurant work as meaningless, the data show how and why restaurant employees construct meaningfulness from the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of their jobs. Additionally, this investigation sheds light on how social constructions of meaning have the potential to contribute to and diminish one’s sense of meaningfulness. This study provides a more comprehensive and inclusionary perspective of the related concepts of meaning, meaningfulness, and meaningful work. Specifically, meaningfulness exists in quotidian and extraordinary experiences, and the workers engage in, understand, and appreciate both.

High performance work practices and well-being at restaurant work

This study focuses on human resource management (HRM) and high performance work practices in small restaurants. Empirical material is collected through interviews aimed at individuals working in the restaurant industry. In the first phase of this study in 2010, ten employees were interviewed, and in the second phase in 2018, five of them were re-interviewed. In 2010, the interviewees were working as employees in a restaurant where well-being was constantly challenged during work. During the second round of interviews in 2018, the interviewees had continued their careers in the sector and worked in five different restaurants. The findings indicate the signs of rapid change within the specific restaurant studied and provide insights into managing well-being at work in the restaurant industry as a whole – an industry that is constantly facing new types of challenges related to new working modes. Findings indicate that well-being at work is a holistic combination of individual and work-level activities; thus, a comprehensive approach to HRM is required.

Status Of Child Labour In Hotels Of Hetauda Sub-Metropolitian City

The problem of child labour, as faced by the developing economics today, has indeed taken on serious dimensions. The exploitative socio-economic structures resulting in the marginalization of the poor have left them with no option but compel them to adopt child labour as a survival strategy. In the study, efforts are made to understand the societal facts about child labour and the root causes of the problem in the context of the socio-economic dynamics prevailing in the country. Child labour is a serious and wide spread problem in Nepal. Hotel, teashop and restaurant work are the most visible and hazardous forms of child labour, which is mostly common in the urban areas of Nepal. Moreover, they are among the most neglected, abused and exploited segments of the population. The study gathered information on hotel, child laborers socio-economic condition, their working condition, root cause of being laborers and problems faced by them. The child laborers come from almost all parts of the country and they are from different castes and ethnic groups. The majority of children are of age group with the average age being 14.5 years. Most of child laborers have their poor condition, step mother scenario, and illiterate family background. The children were found marginally illiterate. The household poverty is the leading cause of being child laborer in general. However, other factors like social injustice, unequal access to resources, large family size, death of earning family members, illiteracy, etc. contribute to enter into labour market from early age. The communicable diseases were prone in child laborers.

Status Of Child Labour In Hotels Of Hetauda Sub-Metropolitian City

The problem of child labour, as faced by the developing economics today, has indeed taken on serious dimensions. The exploitative socio-economic structures resulting in the marginalization of the poor have left them with no option but compel them to adopt child labour as a survival strategy. In the study, efforts are made to understand the societal facts about child labour and the root causes of the problem in the context of the socio-economic dynamics prevailing in the country. Child labour is a serious and wide spread problem in Nepal. Hotel, teashop and restaurant work are the most visible and hazardous forms of child labour, which is mostly common in the urban areas of Nepal. Moreover, they are among the most neglected, abused and exploited segments of the population. The study gathered information on hotel, child laborers socio-economic condition, their working condition, root cause of being laborers and problems faced by them. The child laborers come from almost all parts of the country and they are from different castes and ethnic groups. The majority of children are of age group with the average age being 14.5 years. Most of child laborers have their poor condition, step mother scenario, and illiterate family background. The children were found marginally illiterate. The household poverty is the leading cause of being child laborer in general. However, other factors like social injustice, unequal access to resources, large family size, death of earning family members, illiteracy, etc. contribute to enter into labour market from early age. The communicable diseases were prone in child laborers.

Restructuring Restaurant Work: Employer Responses to Local Labor Standards in the Full-Service Restaurant Industry

Recent research shows that increasing the minimum wage does not result in significant job losses. Yet, there is still uncertainty as to how higher labor standards may reshape employment practices within firms. This article directly examines employer responses to higher labor standards through a qualitative case comparison of the full-service restaurant industry across two fundamentally different institutional settings: San Francisco—with the nation’s highest minimum wage and related mandates—and North Carolina’s Research Triangle region. Evidence shows that higher labor standards led to wage compression even while some employers offered higher benefits to reduce turnover. San Francisco employers seek higher-skilled, more professional workers, rather than invest in formal in-house training, and find better matches. Yet, higher-wage mandates have exacerbated the wage gap between occupations, and some employers have responded by radically restructuring industry compensation practices by adding service charges and eliminating tipping.