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A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

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Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#61

Post by romwell »

jonhohle wrote: post #44
neilv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to the importance and underappreciated status of dishwashers... I only sometimes washed dishes at middle school. If you wanted the cafeteria "hot lunch", but your parents didn't pay for it, you could get it that day by volunteering to wash everyone's trays, in lieu of recess. Personally, I think this wasn't a great lesson. In the current very inequitable US environment, I support simply giving nutritious food…

Your last point is rarely discussed and incredibly unfortunate. We’re creating a lower class of citizen who must exist in the shadows, constantly fear being relocated, and can easily be exploited for labor or worse. Then somehow this is packaged as being humane in some way.

...while being simultaneously vilified for "taking our jobs" and being "dangerous" (whereas they are being very deliberately used to generate profits).

You are making a solid case to issue permanent residence permits to all undocumented workers (since our economy would, at this point, collapse without them), and - most importantly - punish employers with prison time for hiring people unauthorized to work going forward.

That's it, illegal immigration problem solved.

Employers like that are having their cake and eating it, too. The undocumented workers are the ones who get punished for their employer's crimes. Sorry, I'm not going to cite sources, as I've yet to hear about anyone going behind bars for hiring illegal immigrants.

EDIT: never mind, here's a source[1]. It wasn't hard to find.

>For example, the latest available data show that during the last twelve months (April 2018 - March 2019) only 11 individuals (and no companies) were prosecuted in just 7 cases. There were no prosecutions during either of the last two months.

Corporate employers aren't even being prosecuted. This tells you everything about the hypocrisy of the entire system (and anti-immigration rhetoric in particular, whether legal or illegal).

EDIT 2: "sporadically" hiring illegal workers isn't even a crime punished by prison [2]. Yay.

[1] https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/559/

[2] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#62

Post by barryrandall »

infecto wrote: post #21
tennisflyi wrote: post #6

The "heart," but the only mention of pay is $10/hour, and advancement leads to more long nights as a chef in the volatile restaurant industry? Such respect Edit: also, the lip service of the title "porter" - the electric company will surely except that as payment

Honest question, what should they be paid? Its purely manual labor, there is not much if anything to innovate or be creative. The output is fairly binary, clean or not clean. I am all for fair wages but how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low? Interesting how serious questions get so quickly downvoted. I am genuinely curious how you would price a dishwasher when the output is important but the work itself…

A lot of "serious questions" asked on the internet include assumptions and assertions that may or may not be true. These questions are often downvoted when people object to those assumptions and assertions.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#63

Post by infecto »

atoav wrote: post #33
infecto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what should they be paid? Its purely manual labor, there is not much if anything to innovate or be creative. The output is fairly binary, clean or not clean. I am all for fair wages but how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low? Interesting how serious questions get so quickly downvoted. I am genuinely curious how you would price a dishwasher when the output is important but the work itself…

How much? Enough to live within 10 miles of the place they are working at sithout having to pinch pennies, while being able to safe something for the future. Sure it isn't a complicated job — but without it the likes of us would not be able to enjoy going to a restaurant. And it is a job that would be both mentally and physically too exhausting for many people. Let's stop doing as if jobs like these are not real jobs…

How did we go from asking what is the proper wage to suggesting its "not a real job"?

All jobs are real but some are less valuable than others. There is nothing wrong with being a grocery store stocker your whole life but I am not sure how you set the wage for a 5+ year worker that never moved on/up from stocking shelves. I think its a fairly difficult problem to answer and throwing in classism and white collar vs blue collar is just deflection on accepting its hard to come to the right answer here.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#64

Post by FredPret »

darby_nine wrote: post #59
FredPret wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get this idea? What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes? Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it. In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to p…

> What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes? The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for. > Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it. Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handin…

I'm quite disappointed that you're willing to lift your ideas wholesale from a French communist [0] unless of course by "Capital" you mean "Das Kapital" in which case it's the original, German one [1].

Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and read up on the theory of people who disagree with you.

Specifically:

> The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.

Improving the work of 100 people by 1% is worth a hell of a lot more than a clean dish, no matter how society is organized.

> Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.

I fully agree. But to say all labor is alike is wrong. Some labor is worth more. That doesn't mean the people doing it are better people. Their work is just higher quality / on a larger scale / better / faster / in the right place / at the right time / all of the above.

> The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me.

True, but they won't stay rich unless you make them much more money than they pay you. Do they stay rich? (Interestingly, the restaurant industry is notorious for ruining unsophisticated investors)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#65

Post by hackeraccount »

I started work at a restaurant washing dishes. That's work. My main takeaways were learning that eggs are the worst thing in world to deal with and getting really annoyed with the servers who would put the water in the glasses in the trashcan.

I mean who had to take out the trash and lift the the damn thing into the dumpster when it was filled with water? So annoying.

That said it was fun job in it's own way, the variety of the people working there made the place a hoot.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#66

Post by nehal3m »

I was a dishy for years in a few different restaurants and hotels. It's hard work but if you do your best to help out the kitchen and wait staff wherever you can (picking up ingredients, helping mise en place, fetching dish carts yourself, stocking bar) then you can really make a difference in the day to day. Sometimes I miss the camaraderie. It's an easy industry to get stuck in though, and there's usually a lot of alcohol involved. It took me a while but eventually decided it's not for me.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#67

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #37
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #29

I wash dishes by hand as we've got a small kitchen, but one thing I've noticed is that dishwasher machines leave a unique taste/smell that can be noticed when drinking water from washed glasses. It's so much nicer to use a glass that's been hand-washed.

Surely this would depend on the detergent? Still, going to put this in my stack of lifestyle choices next to film photography and vinyl records

Possibly, but it seems common to most dishwashers and never happens with hand-washed glasses.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#68

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

FredPret wrote: post #50
jazzyjackson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely this would depend on the detergent? Still, going to put this in my stack of lifestyle choices next to film photography and vinyl records

If you have soap residue: - Try running the dishwasher a second time with no soap, or on a rinse cycle - If you use soap pods, try putting it not in the soap tray, but directly in with the dishes. [0] [0] This video (starting at 11:40) explains how soap is used in a dishwasher. This guy (who has an excellent channel) gives tips to maximize soap exposure in your dishwasher, but you can do the opposite to minimize it i…

Unfortunately, it's other people's dishwashers (I don't own one) that are the problem and it comes across as rude if you accept a glass of water from a friend and then complain that it tastes nasty.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#69

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

Filligree wrote: post #34
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #29

I wash dishes by hand as we've got a small kitchen, but one thing I've noticed is that dishwasher machines leave a unique taste/smell that can be noticed when drinking water from washed glasses. It's so much nicer to use a glass that's been hand-washed.

Dishwashers are all designed not to 'waste water', so they don't end up fully rinsing the dishes.

When I hand wash glasses, dishes etc, I don't always fully rinse the items as I consider that the washing up liquid reduces surface tension and so should drain off the items quicker than just water. I can't say that I've ever noticed any flavour residue of the washing up liquid.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#70

Post by piva00 »

FredPret wrote: post #36
Y-bar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the full time wage can't result in a decent living (housing, food, medical expenses, clothes, feed and clothe a kid or two, and put away a little on the side) then it clearly is too little. Edit: Check out https://livingwage.mit.edu/ for examples based on real-world data.

While I agree with your sentiment, that logic doesn't hold. If the wage for a job is too low to afford life, then we can say either the job is underpaid or the job is fairly compensated but simply not worth doing. If dishwashers quit in numbers for other jobs, dishwasher pay would have to rise if restaurants can afford it, or the restaurant industry would wither, and from an economic point of view, deservedly so. Of…

> Of course, this theory works best in a dynamic economy where people and capital can move around with a minimum amount of friction.

This assumption is akin to a spherical cow, frictionless surface, etc.

In the real world capital and people won't ever move around with a minimum amount of friction, nor will people retrain for other jobs easily.

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