Around the Table

Food service worker organization: It’s not safe for workers to return to restaurants

By Amanda Haggard

On May 11, doors opened for restaurants who wanted to open at 50 percent capacity.

Mayor John Cooper announced the move to begin the city’s first phase of reopening — nonessential businesses will be allowed to open in this phase, but must follow certain guidelines like wearing masks and checking their temperature in order to open their businesses.

While many restaurants are choosing to stay closed until they feel safe opening, several restaurants and bars that serve food opened. Some bar owners like Steve Smith, who owns Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on Lower Broadway, launched protests in the days before Cooper’s decisions saying they should be able to open their businesses since the state had already loosened restrictions before Nashville did.

ROC-Music City is a local affiliate of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit organization fighting to improve wages and working conditions for the nation’s restaurant workforce. Hayden Smith with ROC-Music City says the organization was horrified when they saw Cooper’s announcement that restaurants were going to be allowed to reopen.

“Nashville has come nowhere close to the metrics [Cooper] set in his own guidelines for reopening and the fact that this comes just days after a group of owners protested outside of his office shows he has clearly caved to the pressures of special interest groups,” Hayden Smith says. “It is shameful that not just he, but all of our elected officials have displayed this level of disregard for the lives of our workers.”

“[We] cannot afford to just stop drawing unemployment and not have a job. We feel like hostages and the people who should be responsible for protecting us are our captors.”

Hayden Smith points to a few reasons why a full-service dining experience could be problematic:

• Servers cannot stand six feet away from guests as they take orders and deliver food.

• Kitchen workers cannot stand six feet away from each other because many stations on a line are shared work spaces.

• The virus can be spread through droplets, so a dish pit is unsafe by any reasonable metric.

• Most dish rooms are directly next to the kitchen, so it is very easy to imagine a situation in which these particles, carried by the steam, travel from the dish room to the kitchen.

ROC-Music City formed after the pandemic started and launched a campaign called Safer-At-Work, which started with a petition that asked Gov. Bill Lee to continue unemployment payments for restaurant workers who do not feel safe returning to work.

“We have been doing everything in our power to reach out to workers and have gotten a pretty resounding answer: ‘We’re scared,’” Hayden Smith says. “There are no protections in place for us.”

Hayden Smith points out that on the state level there’s no agency to enforce guidelines or for workers to report bad behavior by restaurant owners.

“But what’s even scarier than catching a potentially deadly disease is the risk of financial fallout,” Hayden Smith says. “This afternoon, on a webinar hosted by the mayor, a labor attorney told us directly that infected workers won’t be entitled to worker’s compensation. If someone gets called back and refuses to go it disqualifies the individual from state unemployment and they have made it very clear that any further payouts would be treated as fraud. Our members are people, with lives and families, and too often thinly stretched budget from the rampant abuses that were occurring pre-pandemic. They cannot afford to just stop drawing unemployment and not have a job. We feel like hostages and the people who should be responsible for protecting us are our captors.”