I am a waitress. At the moment I work as an extra in a restaurant that only serves eggs, since I couldn’t get anything better. That means exactly that I am extra, completely dispensable. This means I have ‘free time’ but also means I am broke. It makes for a hierarchy inside my workplace, since often I get the worst, small tasks, my presence facilitates the other workers’ breaks, whereas I am often dismissed before the time when I would be entitled to a legal, paid break. Sometimes my employers call me in for 2 hours and send me away again. The journey takes 1 hour in total, and luckily I am good at fraudé the metro, otherwise I would pay 2/5 of my hourly wage getting there and back. So far I have worked there just two or three days a week, and my only other source of income is childcare ‘in English’, i.e playing with as much energy as possible with young children for an hour, or two hours at a time. I am often astounded when parents, who themselves work, often as academics in the university, come home and say ‘did she start to speak in English?’, as if one hour in my presence would have magically transformed their four year old’s linguistic capacities. Still, I nod, smile, lie, say ‘a bit’, since I don’t want my services seem ineffectual. Last time I looked after my favourite student she dressed up in her mother’s high heels and we spent the day drawing pigs and throwing teacups in the floor “I don’t wanna work! I wanna rabbit!” she said, jumping up and down on the sofa.
As for my job as an extra, I am not sure that my employers have actually declared me, although I have asked for it, and since I don’t yet have a número secú, my badly paid hours are probably not contributing at all to my as yet non-existent social security file. The social security say it is the responsibility of my employers, and my employers say it is my responsibility. The first day I worked at this particular job it was Mayday, there was a huge manifestation elsewhere in the city where many arrests were made, and I was told afterward that I should have been paid double for working on a holiday. Instead the boss, who is retired from the music industry, ushered me into the small side street next to the restaurant, which serves just egg brunch-dishes at a mere €25 per meal, and pressed €60 into my hand for my 7 and a half hour’s work, as some kind of special treat. Actually this is completely illegal as it comes out as far less than the SMIC (minimum wage), which is €9.67/hour.
Before this I worked as an English teacher on a salarie ocassionel, which means you have no guaranteed hours, and are paid according to how much work you are able to get and the agency take a large cut. I became unenthusiastic about the job, which required so much preparation and admin, and often involved large travelling distances for one or two hours of work at a time, which drove my wage down to way below the SMIC. Unlike most young French people, because I am not French, I don’t have RSA or other benefits yet, so I have survived on cash work. This teaching job gave me only just enough for my rent and nothing more, since students (business men) kept cancelling. I left it at the beginning of the social movement, quite by accident, as one day, I guess it was in late February, there were lycées bloqués and an extremely spirited and tempestuous un-notified manifestation sauvage ahead of a union march, in Nation, and I decided to call in sick and never went back. Indeed, this kind of strike, one that is not formally collectivised, is the character of many ‘strikes’ that have been taken by friends through March, April and May. It has been common to hear people on the demonstrations relating that they were taking the day off sick, or even, if they had a sympathetic boss, had declared them selves on strike. Just as the lecturers of Paris 8 have, for the most part supported the student-strike by unilaterally awarding students a good grade of 16/20 across the institution, many sympathetic doctors have similarly provided sick notes. Completely by accident, I then found myself completely unemployed for the riotous month of April, since it was also school holidays. *
I’m sure that the conditions of waitressing (that is: running up and down stairs with heavy, hot plates piled high with food that customers do not eat, and is priced at three times your wage; being yelled at on repeat by a coked-up boss; cleaning, re-laying tables with this or that particular fork; finding yourself sympathetic to customers in the face of employers; having no guarantee of hours; sometimes receiving little in the way of tips; having no break despite the fact that it’s the law; the kitchen staff all being people of colour, the waiting staff being mostly white; the boss being disorganised and the waiting staff being verbally abused, the boss, for example, throwing a plate at one of the cooks so it smashes on the floor at his feet) haven’t changed since for example the 1970s. Indeed there is nothing extraordinary about this kind of work, and it’s not worse than many other kinds of harder labour. Still, I relay these details of my own employment situation to explain, that while the huge union mobilisation addresses the famous French social security and stable post war work schemes which the Loi du Travail will attack,for many people of my age, or indeed for strangers who do not yet have access to benefits or social security, the consequences of the Loi du Travail are already mostly in place. There are numerous kinds of contracts which lie outside of stability. Indeed, this week it seems that the issue of who takes the tête de cortége, is at once a question of the support or condemnation of private property damage, as well as one of who is allowed to represent the movement. The taking over of the tête also appears as a demand for recognition of non unionised kinds of work.
Waitressing