A Lifetime Sentence
Hanna Brooks Olsen | Paradoxes of Engagement | I Don't Dream Of Labor | A New Restaurant Business Model | Factoids
Quote of the Moment
Work feels like a lifetime sentence with no possibility of parole.
| Hanna Brooks Olsen, How Do I Know If This Is Burnout?
Paradoxes of Engagement
Over the next months, I will be sharing work-in-progress on the Paradoxes of Engagement book project, exclusively with supporters (paid subscribers), who will also be getting a copy of the ebook, once finished. It’s a distillation of writings I’ve made over the last few years. My goal is to finish before the New Year.
I’m able to do this because I am focusing on only a few minimally time-consuming consulting projects for the next months. So, I am especially thankful for those pledging to support me at this time.
One teaser:
Engagement, like happiness, can only be sought -- or understood -- obliquely. And there is no panacea, only a cascade of paradoxes.
I Don’t Dream Of Labor
The viral TikTok meme ‘I Don’t Dream Of Labor’ was likely started by TikToker @thetrudz with this:
My ‘dream job’ is . . . not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor.
But its underlying anti-work message has been twisted into a pretzel by travel influencers and designer goods fans.
Caitlyn Clark dissects this coöption of the deeper meaning:
The phrase has been transformed from a pithy anti-capitalist critique to an endorsement of neoliberal capitalism’s worst excesses — used to justify wealth without work and mindless consumption, feeding the capitalist need for endless growth.
Clark applies a Socialist lens to this traduction, and tries to use that to apply leverage to wider worker unionization and solidarity:
Yet the “I don’t dream of labor” meme is unfortunate proof that one can recognize capitalist exploitation as the root of their problems without understanding collective action to be the solution.
This vignette is another example of how a thought that holds up a critical mirror to our culture is merchandized into selling mirrors instead of reflecting on the original intent of the thought.
Clark goes on:
The world of designer bags and luxury travel depicted in the many videos participating in the “I don’t dream of labor” meme cannot exist without the labor of the workers who stitched the bags, the baristas who poured the coffee, the people who generated the wealth featured in these videos in the first place. This luxury for the wealthy few requires the exploitation of workers en masse.
This vignette is another example of how a thought that holds up a critical mirror to our culture is merchandized into selling mirrors instead of reflecting on the original intent of the thought.
Clark attempts to wrest back that reflection, pointing out that in the U.S., we remain at record lows for union membership despite the headlines about UAW, SAG, Starbucks, and various unionization drives on college campuses:
But workers in France, rather than “quiet quitting,” have kicked off weeks of general strikes, protests, and riots in response to the government’s attempted increase of the national pension age. Some say this difference is a result of “American individualism,” but the collective efforts of workers at various points in US history suggest a different explanation. “Class consciousness is the consequence of class organization,” [author of The Class Matrix, Vivek] Chibber says — not, as many have suggested, the other way around.
Actually setting out to make a world where we don’t dream — or have nightmares — about labor will require a reformation of society and culture. Clark points out that such a transformation will require more unions; much more.
Instead of dreaming of either the exploited labor of capitalism or the self-indulgence of the idle rich, we can dream of a world that is more beautiful, more just, and freer for everybody.
I’ll give that a secular amen.
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A New Restaurant Business Model
Anthony Strong offers a compelling personal history and a blueprint for a new model for how restaurants might work. Strong had to shutter his ‘normal business model’ restaurant because of the pandemic, but even prepandemic the work was hellish and almost zero margin [emphasis mine]:
By my early 30s, I had made it in San Francisco as an executive chef … which meant 80-hour workweeks while barely scraping by.
I eventually struck out on my own, deciding to play it safe by opening a restaurant with a normal business model. And as is usually the case, normal sucked. Our 80 seats were full every night, employing great folks and serving great food and cocktails — and sweating our $11,000 rent and roughly $90,000 payroll each month. Structurally, our mission to price affordably had landed us in the death zone: full service yet unable to charge fine-dining prices. The anxiety was weapons grade.
The standard model for a business almost all of us engage with regularly, the one we frequently post our own reviews about, has barely worked for a majority of the more than 12 million people it employs. The restaurant industry accounts for some 4 percent of the G.D.P. in the United States but has been stuck in a deeply flawed business model with sadly outdated practices. The pandemic only brought this reality to the center of the plate and made it something we couldn’t push aside anymore.
He was forced to convert the restaurant to a food store, and then later started a mobile catering service from a VW van. But his determination to create a business around food that avoids the ‘death zone’ led him to a new model: an on-premises pasta store with a small dining room.
Fast-forward to today. Most days, you’ll find me at my new pasta shop in a residential neighborhood on the west side of San Francisco, where we’ve rethought pretty much everything in order to create a sustainable business model.
Standard restaurant logic dictates that your dining room be as big as possible, but we cut ours in half (to just 35 seats) so the business has an additional leg to stand on: a retail shop that is open all day selling freshly made pastas, sauces and high-end pantry items, all of it prepared and curated for people to make easy dinners at home.
He has built-in resilience: both the daily sales of take-home food products and the small dining room as an adjunct. Diverse streams of revenue, based on core branding and work effort: making great pasta-based food.
But then he also made significant tweaks to the ‘normal business model’:
Obligatory 15% service charge, which leads to dependable income with better margins and fair pay.
Ordering at the front prior to being seated speeds up ‘table turns’ by eliminating the fifteen minutes or so where patrons mull the menu — while seated — before ordering.
No reservation service — walk-in only — to avoid the usurious fees from various online reservation services and to sidestep having someone answer phone calls for reservations.
A small menu, which reduces food waste. The menu is mostly what they make for take-home with an occasional special or two.
A new day for restaurants? A little more hassle (and cost) for customers?
Underneath that blueprint, is there a transformation of all sorts of other customer-facing food and retail businesses? I could imagine a sushi restaurant that is also a fish shop and take-home store. A bakery, a butcher shop, and so on.
But more generally, Strong is reformulating the form and function of his business to pull it into post-pandemic economics. In other lines of business, it would take different forms, but the foundation is to question everything and to cut out all friction and frivolous expenses with the aim of making work less hellish, and with better pay for front-line workers, and expecting customers to roll with it.
Factoids
Converting all of America’s ethanol corn farms into solar plants that also grow food would more than meet the country’s electricity needs. | David Gelles
Solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn.
…
Last year, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed while walking on U.S. roadways. Between 2010 and 2021, in fact, pedestrian deaths rose 77 percent, from an annual total of 4,302 to 7,624. These increases represent 40-year highs for pedestrian fatalities. | Jamelle Bouie
40K people are injured every year in NYC by cars. | Streetsblog New York
Trucks and SUVs are dangerously large, and speeding is way up.
…
For most of the 1960s, American women in their prime working years were less than half as likely as men to be part of the paid labor force; by 2000 three-quarters of the gender gap in labor force participation had been eliminated. | Paul Krugman
…
A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines’ mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion. | Ganesh Sitaraman
UNIONS:
I worked in a union once, for 11 years. I have often remarked that it was like being on a ventilator in ICU - it was essential and life-saving, but that doesn't mean I liked it one bit.
The first problem with the union - and I see this in reporting of union issues in the media - is they felt compelled to stand by and protect every member, no matter how egregious the conduct. In my workplace that meant the union's objective was to bring everything to the lowest intellectual common denominator. "Fairness" meant no one got treated better than anyone else, and that included performance based on intelligence, ingenuity or initiative. Rewarding those characteristics was forbidden, because this other person could not be disadvantaged, despite being a useless sloth.
The second problem with the union was rejection of all change. Jobs, once created, could never be eliminated without a holy war and a strike. This was particularly irksome to me working in IT, and seeing my own colleagues, whose very purpose as IT people was significant labor elimination through automation, arguing that their role as labor eliminators should not in any way eliminate their own labor.
As long as unions protect the worst of us and act as unthinking anchors to the progression of workplaces to new models, they're not an answer I can support.
(And I'm what half of Americans would derisively label a socialist. I do not believe companies have an obligation to protect jobs, but I do believe companies have an obligation to protect the people in those jobs. Those two things are different. A few months ago my employer closed a division and laid off the entire workforce. While some of their layoff compensations for workers significantly exceeded minimum requirements, and the company was generous in that respect, I am critical of them for making ZERO attempt to facilitate the movement of laid off workers to other parts of their enormous workforce. That's just wrong.)