Labor Day Musings

Labor Day felt different this year. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been to the office in almost 18 months. Or maybe it’s because I live in Arizona now and school starts BEFORE Labor Day, which is just so strange.? Or, perhaps, it was just the guilt I feel when I reflect upon the challenges of this past year, and how privileged I have been to have an employer concerning itself with my health and well-being during these unprecedented times. Somehow, between the tweets about minimum wage, the news about our economy in “recovery,” and every other restaurant having a sign stating they are “short-staffed,” I think I finally gave Labor Day its proper moment of reflection and I have to say that a day off for those of us with benefits, along with a local parade, just doesn’t seem to do the movement justice.?

*Note, &Pizza CEO Michael Lastoria has seen no staff shortages.?

Throughout high-school and college I worked a myriad of jobs. Some of the more memorable jobs included groundskeeper for the local college, (very long, very hot days) waitressing weddings and events, and one summer in particular I spent a large amount of my workday just shredding papers for a local administrative office...so...much...shredding! In my early 20’s, I spent? one memorable summer working as a waitress AND a maid at a highly-trafficked highway plaza in Ohio.? I would spend my mornings changing sheets, cleaning chewing tobacco out of bathtubs and bleaching the hot tubs located in the second floor “suites,” then I would change uniforms in the bathroom and walk across the street to Bob Evans where I would work my restaurant shift until close. Oftentimes I would see the same customers eating at Bob Evans that had asked me for towels earlier in the day, most of them were very surprised to see me.? “What are you doing here,” they would ask. My answer was always the same, “earning money for my study abroad program; I’m going to London this fall!” Sometimes that would elicit an extra dollar or two for my tip, the standard of which was $2, but it was rarely enough to make up for the $2.13/hour wage I received as a waitress.?

I have a very clear memory of sitting on the parking barriers outside the hotel with the other maids at break-time, eating Cheese-Its from the vending machine (on a good day, paid for with the tip left for “the maid,”)? and listening to them talk about their next shift. Most of the women I worked with-other than the lady in her 70’s- worked service at hotels and restaurants as a career. They raised families on these jobs, often as single parents, and never took a sick day for fear of losing a day’s wage. They were prolific and highly skilled in navigating people and delivering quality service. To say I learned something from them would be an understatement- I learned everything from them, the most important being humility, gratitude and perspective.?

That summer I worked harder than I had ever worked,? knowing that I would be back to college in a few short weeks, pursuing an education that would ideally prevent me from ever having to work two jobs again. And I value that education so much that I’ve spent a career trying to ensure everyone has access to quality education; not just for the economic benefits, but for the health and civic and community benefits correlated with education. But it wasn’t until recently that I started to wonder how our world would look if we valued essential jobs like restaurant and service work, more...so much more that we would be willing to go to great lengths to transform essential jobs into “good” jobs.?

The Good Jobs Institute recently released this article, posing the question: “what if instead of focusing on improving the ‘low-skilled’ individual, we devoted more resources to improving the millions of low quality essential jobs?” ?While the systems-thinkers out there know this isn’t a new concept, it certainly seems the right moment in time to be asking ourselves how we expect to have a recovering, thriving economy if the 53 million people working “low-wage” jobs decide they won’t work those jobs anymore.? How would we have survived a pandemic without food service and retail?? If we only focus on “up-skilling” for higher wage occupations, are we missing the opportunity to ensure essential jobs -jobs that are imperative to our infrastructure-are filled and provide stable opportunities for meaningful careers and pathways to the middle class???

Design thinking has opened up a whole new way of problem solving, both for fortune 500 companies and individual entrepreneurs alike. This “human-centered” approach to problem solving allows for rapid prototyping and innovative thinking based-off concepts such as empathy and activities such as “un-learning” and “re-learning,”...it offers teams a process to ask the more interesting question and immerse themselves in user experience. When it comes to the future of work however, we seem dreadfully uncreative in our ability to think beyond the individual. We design complex and costly pathways to the middle class, requiring individual “up-skilling” and labeling individuals as “low-skilled” because of their paycheck, but we rarely ask the companies or employers to redesign their industry to better meet the needs of their employees.? At $2.13 per hour, the Federal minimum cash wage for “tipped” employees is the same as it was when I was a Bob Evans waitress over twenty years ago. For an industry that has been able to reinvent the cheeseburger a thousand times over, to the tune of billions of dollars in profits, I find it hard to believe they can’t design a human-centered solution for their staff shortage.?

With companies like Target & Walmart now partnering with Guild to offer “debt-free” college assistance, there is a glimmer of hope that we may see a movement that might actually bring essential jobs to a level not yet seen, and I hope these companies set a trend of employee-centered business practices that take hold. But as I stopped in a store this past Monday to buy a few items for my labor-day barbecue, it was not lost on me that the store was full of people laboring on the day made for them.? As my husband thanked the woman at the front of the store for working, I wondered how many days/hours she had worked over this pandemic. I wondered if she had been responsible for keeping the shelves stocked as we all rushed to clear them out, and I wondered if she felt valued and dignified for her significant contributions over this past year.? I hope so, and I hope this past year has taught us that we can’t have a working society or economy without taking better care of those who skillfully take care of us.

**disclaimer- I did go to k-12 public school with Michael Lastoria, and I think his pizza and business practices are the absolute best.