Restaurant Waiters: The Precariat Before & During the Pandemic Times in Gujarat.
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Author | Venkataraman, A.,Krishnan, L.R.K.,Venkataraman, A.^Krishnan, L.R.K. |
Introduction
In India's crucial service industry, restaurant waiters situated at the margins of the formal and informal labor economy and working in standalone restaurants that are unaffiliated to any hotel chain; constitute a large unrepresented critical mass of understudied casual workers. In this interpretive empirical reflection, we delineate the interplay between situational and long-term precarity, underemployment, unemployment, and the casualized character of these precarious laborers. We contribute to the sociology of work and employment relations literature by highlighting the importance of studying precarity as an ongoing individualized nebulous process of becoming, being and feeling precarious rather than as a state and an outcome or category. Our study argues that employment relations must look at precarity from each worker's historical and contextual existential frame of reference within and beyond the social relations of their workplace and labor process before generalizing anything about the character of precarious informal labor. We argue that the pressure and sustained bullying and exploitation a waiter encounters are concurrently situational at the site of service and long drawn. It is a unique aspect of his profession that we unpack.
The pandemic was a decisive inflection-point for everybody. However, it affected a class of workers, specifically restaurant waiters, to a far greater degree. By drawing upon individual accounts and interactions, this paper demonstrates how their social context, working conditions, labor process, challenges at the workplace, and emotions co-act to uniquely exacerbate their vulnerability and intensify their cycle of precarity before, during and just after the pandemic. Understanding the silent majority's exploitation requires appreciating each waiter's socio-economic constraints and uniquely resilient macro factors outside their control that shape their distinctive situational matrix. Market competition, legal protection, and their immediate social milieu's normative understandings form the external invisible resilient factors. COVID-19 showed that it is impossible to make statistical generalizations about a waiter's overlapping interdependent multi-layered familial, workplace, and personal circumstances, although they appear similar on the surface. Tracing how and why each waiter and his family are continually pulled deeper into a maze of socio-economic inequality and emotional turmoil can be applied in similar developing national contexts.
We focus on building our findings on the lived experiences of being a waiter and the impact of COVID-19 on them rather than restating the well-known characteristics of precarious and informal labor by citing Standing (2014), Seligmann and Schriphost (2016), Johnson (2016), Barnes and Weller (2020) to define precarity through a specific literature review. Since this is a historical recollection on the pandemic and the period just after that, our analytic narrative inductively brings alive the cumulative importance of bounded decisionmaking, context and situational insecurity, which varyingly privatised the experience of precariousness. Each waiter had to choose between stress and harassment at work or being in greater distress by being unemployed or underemployed.
Research Questions & Setting
This paper answers four interrelated research questions that recur throughout to solve the puzzle of the persisting insecurity and alienation of the waiter.
a) What are the multidimensional combined contextual socio-economic compulsions that go into making of a typical waiter?
b) How does the intrinsic spontaneous emotional and physical labor within a particular restaurant segment uniquely impact his employment and employability within and beyond his restaurant, which in turn affects his employability before and during the pandemic?
c) Why is dissent difficult?
d) How did COVID-19 affect waiters' mental and economic precarity and vulnerability, employment prospects?
We chose leading cities in the state of Gujarat, India due to its variety of cuisines, and cosmopolitan atmosphere.
To prioritise the overall customer experience and waiter's labor process, we chose a variety of restaurants, including those with a set menu, popular restaurants with less emphasis on ambience but a focus on food, and upscale restaurants with an emphasis on both ambience and food [Crang,1994]. Our standalone restaurants lacked the conventional organogram of a star hotel or a conventional firm. Their roles were defined and yet dynamic, from the supervisor to order taking waiter to the food server to water server table cleaner, depending upon the cuisine. The managing supervisors were either graduates or senior waiters who had transitoned to management. Senior regular waiters of experience of a decade and those who were casual but looking to be regularized, having worked there and at other places for over five years, mostly took orders. Those who were temporary and casualized sometimes took orders but cleaned the table before and after the service, placed the water, and filled in for other jobs. The relationships here are structured on interpersonal dynamics and patronage of the owner and being on good terms with the supervisor. Identification with the restaurant was more out of the sentiment of owner loyalty rather than any deliberate teamwork.
Methods
We realized that research on waiters required immersive field research and in this connection, we did extensive unstructured interviews, role play as various kinds of customers, covert participant observation, and phenomenological analysis. Class and social status prevent covert study of waiters. The waiter struggled to speak spontaneously and even if he did his supervisor would follow behind him. Despite these difficulties, we explored the waiters' fluid and accumulated understandings of how to do their work, tacit knowledge, and changing perceptions of social relations and work micro-politics through repeated observation and interaction within and outside the restaurant in their natural settings. We invested time and tried as much as possible to dissolve into the field setting with the purpose of achieving the objectives of this study based on hard facts emerging from the ground and allowed the participants' emergent themes to guide our fieldwork.
In Mar2020, Oct2020, Dec2020, Jan2021, Jul2021 & Jan2022, we undertook the fieldwork in Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Gandhinagar and Surat to get to know the setting and making them more receptive and spontaneous. We also interacted with the waiters after the lockdown and kept track of them through telephonic interactions.
Since each individual experiences were interwoven with multiple causal threads and we were clear that we wanted individual experiences to speak themselves out fully rather than prematurely arrange them thematically. This research was to a journey of immersion first in the field and multiple rounds of intense retrospection, bracketing and then finalising significant statements and then coming out with the final account of each individual and then proceeding to extract some common themes while concentrating on each waiter's individual voice. This intensely self-temporal and reflective process was finally reinforcing and synthesising the emergent themes that had evolved organically from the personalities, self-definitions, and their interrelationships. To triangulate data, we interviewed and revalidated emerging themes with the same respondents, multiple waiters, owners, managers and customers at the studied restaurants.
Work of Waiters Before COVID-19
Becoming a Restaurant Waiter: We discovered that experience of each waiter when he traversed the journey of finding suitable employment varied because the compulsions, circumstances, life journeys and trade-offs differed from individual to individual and inextricably impacted their employment decisions. Pertinently, their unique contextual set of circumstances, challenges and economic hardships along their life-course thus far framed their thinking and orientation and how they responded varied even though they apparently came from similar social strata.
For some, despite...
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