[We are happy to republish excerpts from a piece originally published by the Organization of Class-Conscious Service Workers (OCSW) which provides a first-person report from a worker for Eurest USA, one of the largest catering companies in the United States, on conditions at their Rhode Island location. Eurest is a subsidiary of the British catering company Compass Group, and beyond staffing cafeterias, cafes and food service locations for universities and businesses around the country, the company is infamous for having multiple catering contracts with the US military and the Imperialist State. To read the full article, visit OCSW’s website by clicking here.]
The ordering at Eurest has always been bad- we are almost always out of something, I think we’ve been out of at least one thing every week since I started. But the general manager got in a screaming match with the client, and while Eurest doesn’t fire managers (just demote them or move them to a new location) she decided to save the company the trouble and put in her 2-weeks notice. Then she proceeded to not do anything for the next 2 weeks. The ordering hasn’t been the same since- the temporary managers that were brought in had zero knowledge of what is needed at the store, and somehow consistently forgot to order things despite being given extensive lists. Some things got put on back-order after orders didn’t get done for weeks, and sometimes the completely wrong things get bought. At the coffee bar, we’re almost always out of something popular, and consistently run out of things like cups and lids.
Then a couple weeks after the GM left, Eurest decided to start “re-vamping” the entire kitchen and cafe in our Rhode Island location. For about a month, a constantly changing rotation of corporate managers and marketing executives had been coming in and telling us how things need to “change”. They claim “efficiency” and “professionalism” are the goals, but in reality it was just constant nitpicking and finding menial things to “improve” while they ignore morale and the major issues that are getting in the way of doing our work. They decided the coffee bar needs to be a “destination”- for who? The people who have to be here every day anyway? So they bring in new bakery items, lunch options not offered in the cafeteria, and set up afternoon snack stations; and some things are successful, but the majority of the effort put in is received by only a handful of customers who buy. Almost all the sandwiches we get after the morning end up in the trash at the end of the day. And often their desire to have these new things get hampered by their incompetence, because the planning and execution is amateurish and has no direction. We constantly don’t have the ingredients, time, or knowledge via communication to set up their new offers.
An example of the manager’s amateurism is in the dishroom- where we had one solo worker to wash dishes during the busiest hours of the day. Working in a sub-optimal setup with an old and worn out dishwashing machine by oneself is bad enough, and the dishes can pile up in the hundreds during our lunch rush, but then the issues were compounded by the fact that we were out of the proper dish detergent for weeks. And managers were coming to our dishwasher and telling him that simultaneously he is not working fast enough and also not cleaning the dishes well enough. There is a second person working as dishwasher, and when there’s a second person on the dishes go efficiently, but this second dishwasher is only part time and leaves before the lunch rush, and during the next 3 hours of the shift the main dishwasher is drowning in dishes and almost never gets support from other staff. He just quit this past week since none of the issues got resolved, one of half a dozen people to have quit since the new general manager started.
[…]
The GM is condescending. When you try and talk about what issues are going on and problems with the work flow, she walks away. She also has done things that make the workers think she’s racist; she picks on our black coworker at the coffee bar in particular, pulling her aside for extra cafeteria work every day and expects her to do shift-lead work which she is not expected to do nor gets paid for. Plus, the only black staff member in the kitchen got fired for “tardiness”, something that very common across all of the workers and which everyone agrees didn’t seem fair, and apparently he hadn’t even been late the week that he was fired.
Time is spent on making us draw on the cups, or getting an ice cream machine that has been used a total of once, or making sure all the fancy new snacks in the cafeteria are fully stocked and look pretty 100% of the time; but when we have an abusive head chef screaming at the cooks, or are backed up and look messy during rushes because of the lack of staff, or when there is zero communication between the managers and all the workers, it’s like they don’t care at all.
People are quitting, and calling out due to stress. We are being worked like slaves and the wages aren’t good enough that people want to stay and hope things get better with management. And even if wages were better, we would still also need to be able to have job security and have a say over the decisions that are made about our jobs. We can achieve these things, but only through an independent, class-conscious union and committee of workers. Maintaining independence in our union is especially important, because the main weapon in the labor struggle has been hampered by no-strike clauses in the ‘official’ state-sanctioned unions. The state unions also typically include “managerial rights clauses” which grant managers rights to enact discipline & to direct the workflow, the very thing that is driving the biggest problems at our work. Forming a class-conscious union is imperative to fulfilling our demands in the workplace, and we need to do so now.
