A Million Little Incompetencies

It’s so Joever… haha… unless?

            I’ve been having trouble at work. I work at a restaurant, which is fine, and my restaurant is unionized, which is supposed to be a good thing. I spend a lot of time and energy trying to maintain basic, reasonable operations so that my coworkers are safe and healthy and our customers get good food. It is significantly more difficult than it has any right to be. The owners of the restaurant are largely absent; they hired a manager, a friend of theirs, who has frequent outbursts at both staff and customers, calling people “fucking idiots” and, on one memorable occasion, a “fat lard.” When I approached ownership about this, they told me that “some of the staff like their management style” and nothing changed.

            This is all fine except that it’s not supposed to happen in a workplace, and certainly not a unionized workplace. We’re supposed to rally together and fight injustice; we’re supposed to, at the very least, file a complaint with the labor board. We have done none of those things, largely because we’re all too tired and too poor and frankly the restaurant isn’t doing so well these days, and if we get into a protracted legal battle over what should be an obvious workplace relations issue there’s a good chance that rather than this manager being fired the entire restaurant will close. Doing what would seem to be the right, legally protected thing—in this case, unionizing—has not resulted in the changes that we promised ourselves when we set out to do it in the beginning. Instead, a million little incompetencies on the part of management and ownership have driven the restaurant into a fail state, where staff are too exhausted and depressed to fight for the workplace they once loved and customers are turned off from the raising prices, the worsening food quality, and, in some cases, the hostility they are met with from management.

            What we love is ending, and the little control we believed we had over saving it seems only to be accelerating its end. This matters because the conventional wisdom hasn’t worked—the systems that are put in place to protect us haven’t been able to overcome the hubris and self-interest of the owners, and we have become so beaten down that we aren’t able to adequately resist. I’m afraid because I’m watching as things that “aren’t supposed to happen” happen in front of me, every day, and when I speak up about them I’m told that what I’m seeing is normal, that nothing out of the ordinary or against the rules is going on.

            I wanted to write about fascism when I sat down today, and this is what I wrote. I wanted to write about how I’m afraid of what’s happening to our government, I’m afraid of Trump’s inauguration. I spent the day reading articles about Trump’s second day plan, I watched him say that the government will only recognize two genders, “male and female,” to a standing ovation. I saw Trump’s presidential portrait. I’m afraid of what’s happening, not because our government has ever been unilaterally fair or good or just, but because the kind of hostile injustice that has descended upon our capital is of a flavor that I’m not sure we will be able to return from without sacrificing a lot along the way. I’m not sure who or what will be the sacrifice.

            This is what I sat down to write about, and instead I wrote about the restaurant where I work. I’ve been feeling for awhile like the decline of our political system has aligned with the decline of my workplace; they say the first sign of a recession is that people stop going to strip clubs, but the second sign is when they stop going to restaurants. Work has been slow and the owners are freaking out so they keep making bad decisions, like laying off a kitchen manager and changing the kale to the kind you buy at the grocery store, pre-shredded in a bag. The country has been falling apart so we elected a twice impeached convicted felon to the presidency.

            It’s a loose parallel, maybe, but I’m experiencing it as though the two are intimately tied. The other day I represented a staff member in a disciplinary meeting, where the worker was written up for missing work without notifying a manager. In fact, the worker had notified the manager; they pulled up the text message, which the manager hadn’t seen. We all stared awkwardly at the worker’s phone. The manager said, “oh.” Then he went along with the disciplinary process.

            I, for the life of me, still don’t understand why he continued to file the disciplinary notice despite receiving proof that the worker had followed the rules. I don’t understand why the worker signed the form, and I don’t understand why I signed it. The manager told us that it “wasn’t even a real write-up, just a verbal warning,” and then asked us to sign a piece of paper that said “Verbal Warning” written on it, designed to be put in the worker’s file. It didn’t seem like a verbal warning, insofar as it was written down on paper and placed in a permanent record. It didn’t seem like the worker had done anything wrong, and it didn’t seem like the manager thought the worker had done anything wrong. But still, we went through the motions. It was like we were all too embarrassed to stop the train from running, despite the tracks falling away beneath us.

            I saw an Instagram post today that warned me “not to take what Trump says too seriously.” It told me that many of the claims Trump would make, many of his executive orders, wouldn’t be legal and so wouldn’t be enacted. Like last time, the post told me, there would be protracted legal battles in courts that would ultimately delay and ultimately halt any of Trump’s inane policy initiatives. What worries me is that I was at a disciplinary meeting with a staff member at my restaurant where they got written up for doing something that everyone in the room knew they didn’t do. What worries me is that Roe v. Wade was overturned, that Daniel Penny was found not guilty, that a twice impeached, convicted felon was elected president.

            I’ve written before about how Biden, campaigning on a “return to normalcy,” instead lead the nation in four years of extraordinary, miasmic cognitive dissonance, acting like we could “go back” to a time before a global pandemic ravaged our lives and our lifestyles, before a dictatorial, soon-to-be felon was elected president, before we flooded the nation in protests against police brutality, abortion bans, and bombs in Gaza only to be met with sympathetic virtue-signaling and no legislative change. Now, two days after Trump’s inauguration, all I’m left with is a ravaged nation and my phone number on a marketing list the Harris campaign sold to Greenpeace and Hakeem Jefferies.

            If I sound pessimistic it’s because I am. I know we’re all supposed to get up and fight, but I’m afraid that too many of us feel too burned out from fighting and failing. I’m afraid that too many of us are going to try to get by as best we can while they pick off the people around us, until it’s us they’re picking off. I’m afraid that we’ll all participate, contributing to the million little incompetencies that produce the million little injustices that rip others’ worlds apart, because it’s easier to pretend we don’t see, or to say we see but not to cause a fuss, or to cause a fuss but give up when faced with resistance, than it is to refuse, wholeheartedly, at the expense of a “normal” life.

Already, things that aren’t supposed to be happening are happening. Elon Musk stood on stage at the inauguration and performed a Nazi salute, and instead of immediately rioting everyone’s in the Instagram comment section debating if he did it on purpose or if it’s AI. The fact that Trump was elected despite having been impeached twice and indicted on federal campaign finance violations; the fact that TikTok was banned for 24 hours and thanked President Trump on its homepage upon return; Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan, describing his policy shift on censorship as a political awakening without mentioning Trump’s threat to imprison him “for the rest of his life.” We can spend all the time we want charging Trump with crimes and challenging his policies in court, and some of us will—but I’m not sure that the court system is the failsafe that it’s meant to be. Clearly, what’s supposed to be will not be any longer.

So what do we do now? I don’t know. It’s easy to find a new restaurant job; it’s hard to find a place to live that’s free of the imprint of American influence. I think we have to stop trying to find solace where there is none. We have to stop participating, to stop saying stern words without bolstering with corrective action. I’m ashamed of how ineffective I’ve been at protecting my coworkers from abuse by management, and I’m ashamed of how much I’d like to hope for the best without preparing for the worst. But I suspect that, now more than ever, normalcy is over.

My friend Joshua wrote a great piece yesterday about the need for action that reflects the scope of the problem. He writes that we need to build, rather than to respond to—that protesting and discoursing won’t be enough, that we need to build alternatives to the world that Trump is crafting. I think he’s right, and I think alternatives start with a refusal to participate in the “new normal.” The personal is political insofar as politics operate through people, and often and especially through people who are “just doing what they’re told” or “trying not to cause trouble.” So ask questions. Ask who profits from your labor, ask whose labor you’re exploiting. Ask what your taxes pay for, what Instagram does with your data, ask how much the janitor at your job is paid and ask if they work harder than you. Cause trouble with the answers. I regret not causing trouble at my restaurant, and I am determined not to make the same mistake again.