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Waitress work culture was based first and foremost on the positive assessment of the occupation held by individual waitresses. To a surprising degree, waitresses valued their work and derived both pride and pleasure from service. Although burdened with adverse employment conditions and stigmatized for engaging in personal service, many working-class women preferred waitressing to the other jobs available to women with little education and training, such as factory, domestic service, or sales work. The attraction was based in part on objective criteria: flexible shifts that could be adjusted to the sleeping and school schedules of young children or a working husband; the possibility of earnings above other working-class jobs; and the security of regular meals and board.
But waitresses also volunteered more qualitative, intrinsic factors in explaining their choice of waitress work: the opportunity to interact with coworkers and customers and to meet new people, the pleasure of leaving a customer satisfied, the gamble and immediate gratification of the tip, the general excitement and challenge of work where face-to-face contact was required. One waitress explained why she preferred food service to secretarial: “I just can't feature sitting at a typewriter all day trying to make out what some longwinded big shot made me Gregg down. Now getting him in a good humor with a sandwich and a cup of coffee, I adore that. I just plain get a kick out of feeding people.” Another emphasized the appeal of ever-changing social encounters: “I have to be a waitress. How else can I learn about people? How else does the world come to me?”65
Waitresses, however, recognized the skills of judgment and memory involved in waitressing and the dignity that attends a basic human service provided in an expert manner. Drawing on the positive aspects of female socialization and women's culture, they defined service as important and skilled work. As one explained: “it's a good experience to serve; I think everybody should have to serve sometime in their life. Serving is giving, as corny as it sounds.” Another waitress of twenty-three years considered her work to be “an art.” “When I put the plate down, you don't hear a sound. When I pick up a glass, I want it to be just right. When someone says, ‘How come you're just a waitress?’ I say ‘Don't you think you deserve being served by me?’” A former farm girl who became a waitress in Memphis told Works Progress Administration interviewers of her thrill in learning the trade. “I was just tickled to death with myself when I got expert. Ten different orders in my head without getting coffee crossed with Coca-Cola was going some for a country girl.”67
Waitresses recognized that their performance could be critical to the success of a business. Many patrons responded more to the personality of the food server than to the quality of the decor or food. Minnie Popa, for instance, was “more than a waitress; she was an attraction.” She pulled in the customers no matter where she worked. “With all the feasting and flirting and merry exchange of wit,” some restaurants came “near being a salon,” with the waitress for their “Madame Récamier.” Even the most determined employer was unable to exert complete control over this service exchange. Waitresses could hurt business by suggesting the least expensive menu item, ignore the poor tippers, offer food and drink on the house, or simply provide lackluster, uninspired service, even though it jeopardized their own tip income. Waitresses could also go out of their way to add that special attentive, anticipatory touch that would cement the customer's patronage.69 Anticipating customers’ needs or “getting the jump” on the customer along with “suggestive selling” could impact on customer spending and hence increase the size of the tip as well as the profit margin.70
Like most service workers, the relationship with the customer gave waitresses a measure of control over their work environment, no matter how intrusive a boss they had.71 Employers defined certain boundaries for acceptable behavior with customers beyond which the food server could not cross, but within those parameters, waitresses exercised a considerable amount of latitude. The sphere of autonomy provided by face-to-face interaction with the customer both strengthened waitress group ties as well as undermined them. On the one hand, the independent relation to the customer promoted a recognition of skill and provided a basis for assertion in the face of employer hostility. On the other hand, waitresses sometimes saw themselves as successful entrepreneurs who did not need group solidarity because they could rely on their own individual “bargaining” with their clients and employers.72
The elaborate group work rules devised by workers rivaled the most sophisticated personnel systems. Workers created job rotation schemes and regulated station assignments. In one restaurant, the waitresses took turns calling in sick when they felt the supervisors had overstaffed. Waitresses assisted each other, but each had her regular customers and other waitresses were expected to honor those previously developed relationships. Valentine Webster explained “the way we worked it” when a new worker arrived. “I'd show…[her] what to do and I'd take the heavy load until…[she] learned the ropes.” Whyte unearthed layers of informal work practices regulating work flow and crises; he concluded that without these work groups the business of feeding would grind to a halt.81
Waitress work culture also helped women realistically interpret the flirtations and sexual games of male customers. Unrestrained by masculine ears and oblivious to the dominant culture's strictures, waitresses talked candidly with each other about sexual matters and the power relations that existed between men and women. These group appraisals of male behavior must have saved many a waitress from being swept off her feet by flattery or from being rushed into a mismatched courtship and marriage.83
Furthermore, the nature of service work itself discouraged idealization of the male. Unlike many working women who were either segregated from or subordinate to men at work, waitresses interacted constantly with male customers, supervisors, and co-workers, often “initiating action” with bartenders, cooks, and customers rather than responding to their demands. They were confronted daily with the foibles of men and could observe first-hand the battleground of the sexes by watching the stratagems of other waitresses in dealing with male customers, co-workers, and bosses. Waitress Mame Dugan's reaction in O. Henry's short story “Cupid à la Carte” was rather extreme: she refused to marry because “after watching men eat, eat, eat…they're absolutely nothing but something that goes in front of a knife and fork and plate at the table.” But many waitresses had “met man face to face” and discovered “that the reports in the Seaside Library about his being a fairy prince lacked confirmation.” The work of serving food and the peer culture developed at the workplace undermined rather than reinforced romantic fantasies.86
Before the 1930s, few American workers were organized: in 1920, at the peak of pre-New Deal organizational strength only a fifth of the nonagricultural work force belonged to unions. The situation changed dramatically during the 1930s and 1940s as workers flocked to the labor movement and for the first time in American history gained collectively bargaining agreements in such major industries as steel, auto, and communications. Nevertheless, by the early 1950s, union growth sputtered to a halt, reaching a high-water mark in 1954 with 35 percent of the nonagricultural labor force organized.1
just useful background to remember
Waitresses turned to unionization as early as the 1880s, forming separate all-female unions as well as locals that included male waiters and other food service crafts. With the help of the Federated Trades Council of San Francisco and the International Workingmen's Association, San Francisco waitresses organized a separate local on May 25, 1886, while Los Angeles waitresses united with male culinary workers in requesting that the White Cooks, Waiters and Employees Protective Union of the Pacific Coast charter a mixed-gender and craft local. Many of these earliest locals affiliated briefly with the Knights of Labor, but by the mid-1890s most had either disbanded or cast their lot with the newly emerging AFL.4
Described in 1930 as little more than “an association of coffin societies,” the labor movement confounded critics by its unprecedented expansion over the next two decades, adding fifteen million members by the early 1950s.2 Culinary workers were not immune to the union fever: HERE nearly doubled its membership in 1933, the first heady year of New Deal legislation favoring unionization. Membership spurted ahead during the sit-downs of 1936 and 1937, and again during the war years. By the end of the decade HERE membership topped four hundred thousand, with a quarter of all hotel and restaurant workers organized.3
As the International union matured into a substantial power within the hotel and restaurant industry, its membership became increasingly female. The percentage of women within the union doubled after 1930, climbing to 45 percent by 1950. Waitress locals aggressively reached out to unorganized waitresses in hotels, cafeterias, drugstores, and department stores; many waiters’ locals opened their doors to female servers for the first time; and the new industrial hotel locals swept in large numbers of waitresses, chambermaids, female cashiers, checkers, and kitchen workers. By the late 1940s, more than two hundred thousand female culinary workers were organized, with close to a quarter of these within separate waitress organizations.4
The NRA codes sparked organization in the culinary industry because they raised hopes of improved wages and working conditions, yet failed miserably in delivering on these promises. The problem was twofold: the codes themselves, largely determined by employers, were substandard; and employers violated even these barest of employee protections because the government gave little evidence of either having the will or the ability to uphold code standards. According to San Francisco waiter official Hugo Ernst, if employers in that city adopted the governmental standards, working conditions would be “as bad as those thirty years ago.”7