My Life at the Bottom of the Food Chain
I have a friend who has recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in History. I've been living with him this past summer, and he has been unemployed for most of it. About a month ago, he came home happy. He had found a job at an upscale restaurant in the city.
After a bit of prodding, he finally admitted to what it was. After years of education, thousands of dollars spent on tuition, countless readings and promises for a bright future, my friend was now a busboy.
This isn't a one-off, freak accident. In these economic times, the horizons of university students, once bright and wide, have grown dim and dismal. I’m about to enter my senior year at the U of T as well. My own recent employment issues have only dealt with trying to find a summer job. In April, I had high-hopes I’d land something glamorous in advertising. A few interviews later, no Mad Men for me—just mad men. On street corners. Was this where I was headed?
Suddenly bussing tables didn’t seem so bad.
I had an easier time finding work as a busboy than my friend did. After a few days and a few phone calls, I was in all black. I walked into what I will call Restaurant X, a Japanese place in the west end of Toronto.
In many ways I was lucky to get this job. Sang Kim, a perennial figure in the Toronto culinary industry, told me this about the sociology of bussing: Having worked as a consultant for super-trendy local restaurants such as Blowfish, Ki Modern Japanese and a host of other key hotspots in the city, Kim has experienced the highs and lows of the industry.
The busboy, he said, is the lowest in the restaurant food chain. He is easily replaceable, has a menial job, and is looked down upon by the rest of his co-workers. “Sixty percent of people who apply for bussing are Arts & Science students,” says Sang Kim. “Most of them are coming straight after school, and frankly, I'm not going to hire them. In fact, everything else being equal, I will hire a Sri Lankan who may or may not have papers over a recent graduate.”
When asked why, Kim went on to explain that as bussers, or any low-level position at a restaurant, Sri Lankans are willing to put up with harder times, be willing to be paid less, and also have a work ethic that is second to none. “People who are in process [of starting a new life] are hungrier; they want to prove things. The university student has a sense of entitlement,” proof of the racist adage that “Tamils run the kitchens in Toronto.”
“With Sri Lankans,” Kim continued, “there is no strained power dynamic between the busser and the customer like there is with college graduates. Nor do they have the attitude problems students do.”
This makes sense, for after all, who wants to have gotten a degree in political science and spend his days setting forks and knives on a table? But I felt I ought to try and prove Kim’s theory wrong.
I began my job with the enthusiasm and hopefulness every young person feels when he first starts a job. However, while it took me a week to begin hating my drudge work at an office last year, it took me a mere shift to loathe my position at the restaurant. Diners waved me away, barely spoke to me or answered my questions, and treated me like I was nothing.
For all intents and purposes, I was nothing. The busboy is the person no one wants to speak to. He's not selling anything, he doesn't know the wine list or what the specials are; he's there to literally get dirty things out of the way and scrap 50-dollar scraps into the garbage bin. It's odd when one considers that the busboy clears what he can never eat; he isn't far removed from the maid who cleans an apartment she will never be able to afford.
“At the bottom of the restaurant food chain, everyone gets paid minimum wage; the dishwasher and the busboy,” Kim observed. In Toronto, that's $10.25/hour, and even lower in the United States. Most restaurants now pool tips to balance things out. This means that four to eight percent of a server's sales go to those who “supported” him, i.e. the busboys, line cooks, dishwashers. “However,” Kim added, “we're seeing a trend today in which parts of those tips also go to the manager, and the front-of- house staff”--that is, those who are already making well above minimum wage.
“There does exist another method however,” Kim continued, “in which the busboys take care of the servers who regularly make big tips. That way, since they both helped out, the tips gets split more evenly between them.”
While this method may seem better, it evokes the image of an ecosystem: the busboy is the flea on the elephant, picking up the former's scraps of bacteria. While the waiter does benefit from a diligent busboy, he can do without him; the busboy, on the other hand, needs the feeding hand of the server; this is testament to his position in the hierarchy.
As a busboy, my end zone was the floor, but my start zone was the kitchen, alongside the dishwasher. His name was Mac, a 25-year -old white male (besides me, the only one working behind the scenes), who, I'm afraid I have to say, did look like a dishwasher: unshaven, earring in the ear, and with a coarse, gruff attitude. As I brought him dirty plates I hoped to find a kindred spirit; after all, we were both dealing with the sordid tasks of cleaning off bits of partially eaten food. Yet he never spoke to me or even thanked me for bringing in his duties. This could partially have to do with the fact that his job was harder than mine. As another restauranteur, who wished not to be named, told me: “Being a dishwasher is much harder than being a busboy. So no, you can't be a dishwasher without experience.”
As an undergraduate studying the allusion to Christ carrying the cross at the end of The Great Gatsby, it's difficult to grasp that in order to use a nozzle, I must have “experience.” The idea that someone who merely hosed down glassware had more qualifications than me made my job all the more embarrassing.
But beyond the sheer lousiness of my job in the restaurant food chain, it was also menial, repetitive and draining. On my feet all day, without cigarette breaks (which means my hands shook even more under the weight of plates), I passed into a drone state that had me start throwing out plastic chopsticks on more than one occasion. There is literally almost no thought process to what I did. I saw empty plates, I picked them up. I began to dread the day someone would ask me at a party what I did for a living.
The worst part however of being a busboy might very well have been the waiters. It says a lot about a man when he begins to want to be a server. In comparison to bussing, their job seems prestigious—more, in the pantheon, or something higher. They interact with credit-card-carrying diners and recommend wines from Argentina and Napa. But the best part? The tip on the horizon. It must be Christmas Day every night for waiters, anticipating the cold, hard cash they're going to take home with them at the end of their shift.
Naturally, not all diners tip well, but there is always the guy trying to impress a girl on a first date, or the old man who's had too much to drink. It's heartbreaking to be a busboy and pass by bills on a silver platter, and then tell the waiter who's chatting with someone at a table that his night's drinking money is waiting for him. I've mentioned the tip payout scheme that restaurants now employ, but at most, that's eight percent, and no consolation for what my better-dressed, “eloquent” superiors get.
Bussing may be better than no job, of course, but then again, what isn't? I decided to leave the bussing industry. I'm happy no longer to have to be a busboy, and so was my friend when he found out he had been fired. In fact, we all went out drinking to celebrate that night. But now that the due date for rent is coming up he's getting squeamish; the real jobs he's applied to just aren't calling back. Nor are mine…
Daniel Portoraro, 21, is a senior at the University of Toronto, majoring in English. This is the first in his 5-part series of trying to find summer work in a tough economy.
