Worlds Apart

This chapter brings readers further into the workplace by examining how coworker dynamics reinforce the extant social organization of higher-end restaurants, and ultimately how workers themselves understand their differences. The author details how educated white servers and working-class Latino cooks enact symbolic boundaries against the other that close off two distinct worlds of work by race, class, and gender. The racialized and classed boundaries that employees enact lead to strained and distant interactions, and can disrupt the flow of service in very real ways. More importantly, symbolic barriers decrease the likelihood that workers themselves feel they are able to access jobs for which they do not fit. This disproportionately affects Latino workers by further miring them in the lowest-paying and least visible jobs in the workplace.

Flexibility, Play, and Privilege in the Front of the House

This chapter examines the respective worlds of work in the front and back of the house through the perspectives of those who inhabit each space. Engendered by divergent social memberships and structurally unequal job conditions, the two asymmetrical work cultures in restaurants are explicated in this chapter. Wilson describes how many of the men and women working in the front of the house are able to approach the unpredictable elements of their jobs as “perks.” These perks, such as flexible schedules and lucrative tips, allow them to forge custom-fit work lives.

Producing Difference

This chapter shows how management structures a socially divided workplace from the back office. Chefs and dining room supervisors at Match, Terroir, and The Neighborhood channel workers into distinct types of service jobs based on socially coded ideals, and subject each group of workers to divergent supervisory practices. I argue that management’s strategic decisions regarding hiring, service protocols, and workplace policies adhere to an overarching logic of upscale service packaged with powerful race, class, and gender assumptions, as well as strategically differentiated service brands that nuance how each workplace is organized. Wilson shows how service brands shape the kinds of social relations and labor prospects that workers encounter.

Introduction

This book explores the reproduction of social inequality within everyday service settings. Wilson analyzes everyday relations among different types of workers, managers, and, to a lesser extent, customers in restaurants. Seen from the ground level, workers negotiate their surroundings by finding ways to make their labor conditions more palatable using the resources available to them. Amid compounded forces that pull workers into divided worlds of work, class-privileged whites and working-class Latinos derive meaningful forms of identity and community from their respective roles in restaurants. This nuances the workplace in unexpected ways: while immigrant Latino workers struggle to contend with their structural disadvantages in marginal jobs, later-generation workers have been able to leverage some of these very conditions to their advantage.

Mobility Pathways and Closed Doors

This chapter compares instances of worker mobility and marginalization in the workplace. Wilson examines the mechanisms by which some Latino workers have been able to access better-quality jobs while others have not. Specifically, he argues that later-generation Latinos leverage their “in-betweenness” to gain more prominent roles in a socially and culturally divided workplace. By contrast, those who remain stuck in the lowest-rung restaurant jobs are hampered by compounded disadvantages that cut them off from not only their fellow coworkers but also relatively better job opportunities that are available to the latter. Confined to the “back closet” of restaurant employment, undocumented Latina workers bear the brunt of a socially segregated workplace that has no place for them but at the bottom and out of the way.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the key arguments of this book while also emphasizing the key theoretical advances that it makes related to the production of service brands, racialized group boundaries, and in-betweenness. Additionally, Wilson describes several emerging trends in the restaurant industry, such as the movement to eliminate tips, that will shape the kinds of opportunities and barriers that future generations of restaurant workers will face.

Brown-Collar Careers in the Back of the House

This chapter turns to the back of the house, where many first- and second-generation Latino workers work long hours that they view with a complex mixture of loyalty to mentors, masculinity, and an ethos of craftsmanship. While back-of-the-house and support workers endure more structurally marginalized work conditions than their front-of-the-house colleagues, many are also more committed to building “brown-collar” work careers within restaurants.