Featuring Brenda Waybrant, union organizer and former restaurant worker in “Music City” Nashville, Tennessee, whose service job required her to risk catching COVID-19 for $4.50 per hour. Does commercial health insurance provide the coverages restaurant workers need to cope with the physical and emotional abuse they face at work?
Restaurant Worker Abuse? Let Us Count The Ways
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Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host, Brenda Gazzar.
What physical and emotional toll does restaurant work take on workers’ bodies? Why is it easier to maintain our cars in America than it is our own health? Brenda Waybrant of Nashville grew up in poverty and worked in the restaurant industry for 15 years. She became a union organizer after COVID left many in the industry without a job and few protections.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Brenda.
Q: This is an industry that is really hard on the body. What would you like to see in terms of health insurance and restaurant workers?
Waybrant: That they have access to insurance, that it’s affordable insurance, that it has good things on their plan. Our cars get more maintenance than our bodies do. We need to start including chiropractic care. We need to start including mental health care for our restaurant workers. I mean I can’t tell you how many 12, 14, 16-hour shifts I’d work and then I’d go upstairs to the bar above my restaurant and get hammered just to deal with the emotional abuse that I took or, you know, the emotional labor that it took to get the job done and like deal with people who are just unhappy about the way that a steak was cooked or are mad that their hamburger wasn’t brought out with an extra piece of lettuce.
We’re all human beings and people deserve to be treated as such… There is so much emotional struggle that we deal with in a restaurant and in the restaurant industry, that we need to start realizing that mental health care is health care also and chiropractic health care is health care also and those need to be offered if we’re going to have a healthy industry.
Q: How did the COVID pandemic affect you? You were still working in the restaurant industry at the time.
Waybrant: I think COVID changed everything for me. COVID really was the catalyst for me to start asking why. I talked to one of the managers of the restaurant that I was working out before I left, which is also downtown Nashville – it wasn’t Dick’s Last Resort — and I said “Hey, I see that China is shutting down. I see that places in Europe are shutting down. New York is in a shutdown right now. Seattle, Washington is in a shutdown right now. This is an international tourist destination. If we have to shut down, what’s our contingency plan? Are we going to get paid? If so, what is that?” Subminimum wage for servers in Tennessee is $2.13 an hour and I was at a place where I was making $4.50 an hour and so I was like “if we do get paid what’s that going to be because $4.50 an hour isn’t really going to cut anything.” And this manager laughed at me — laughed at me — and I was just like, it’s one thing to not have an answer, but to hear me as a human being asking about my safety and welfare and laughing at me? And so then, you know, a couple of days go by and I’m still kind of chewing over do I leave work. Can I say that?
If I take a leave of absence now, is it going to affect me if we shut down and I have to file for unemployment? Like I don’t want to sign any paperwork and then have them use it against me as I go get unemployment. And the last day that I worked, my last table was from Seattle, Washington, which had an active outbreak at the time and … it really made me stop and look at how exploited restaurant workers are. We think about (chef) Gordon Ramsay and how you yell at the back of the house kitchen and that is normal but we’re human beings, and we don’t deserve to be yelled at all of the time.
Q: So what happened then, did you end up leaving your job?
Waybrant: I did. I left about a week before the shutdown. I remember looking back at my journal at the time and I was like I had like $400 in my bank account and I had money on my credit card and I was like, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’ll figure it out, and it took two months for me to get unemployment insurance approved and so luckily my roommate was still working at the time, and I had started shopping in January because I could see things just turning awful and so you know I didn’t have to go grocery shopping for a while which was comfortable, because I didn’t have any money coming in for two months.
Q: Wow. And so what was your health insurance like at the time?
Waybrant: So the place that I was working for is owned by Mariott so we got to keep our health insurance at the time, but it was all up in the air, and we had to keep paying in our portion of health insurance. And so, you know, not getting money for two months, I didn’t pay that portion in. I went to the ER towards the end of May and I would have had to pay my premiums by May 31. I went to the ER by the end of May, and they found a fibroid that was as big as two fists and so I came back. I borrowed money from my roommate so that I could send a certified mail because we couldn’t pay our health insurance and premiums online yet at the time and so I sent a certified letter in with my check to make sure that it got to them on time so I that I kept my health insurance, but it really was all up in the air and we didn’t have a say in that.
I got several communications from, you know, higher ups that were like we don’t know when we’re going to come back because everything was up in the air at the time. You know we didn’t know how long the shutdown was going to last or when people were going to come back or anything like that. And so it was like we might let you keep your health insurance. We might take it away and literally I had no control over whether or not I was going to have health insurance because it was tied to my job before I had surgery in August of 2020. I had no idea and that uncertainty is exhausting.
Q: Wow and so then what happened?
Waybrant: So luckily they let us keep our health insurance but I closed out a mutual fund that I had last year because I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to work throughout most of August. I had a C-section light to take that fibroid out. That’s not a technical term, that’s just a fun term, and I took most of August to heal and recoup and I found some jobs for October and November and then I got hired by this union in December and it’s because I started questioning last year during the pandemic the worth of labor, you know, being told that we weren’t even in a real job that my job wasn’t worth anything, but my back hurting was worth something. That was real. My feet hurting after a 12-hour shift was real. The conversations that I had with people, the joy that I brought people that came to visit Nashville was real, you know, hospitality workers were really what made Nashville, part of the “it city.” People come to Nashville for the hospitality workers. Yet when the pandemic happened, we were ignored and forgotten and nobody cared to check up on us and say, are y’all doing okay? There were some small people but our government certainly didn’t, our city tourism certainly didn’t.
Q: So how do you feel Brenda about Medicare for All?
Waybrant: I feel that Medicare for All is a good step. One thing I hope this pandemic highlights is the fact that anything can happen to us at any point in time and we’ve really taken on this pull yourself up by the bootstraps individualistic approach to our own personal care, but without realizing that there are systemic things that hurt us, like we’re seeing that with the black and brown community. They’re more likely to live closer to landfills or to air pollutants. And, you know that’s going to cause a lot of issues with your lungs and with breathing and, you know, we’re seeing that climate change is happening and buildings are falling apart because we haven’t taken care of our infrastructure and so we’re really going to need this collective approach to making sure that we’re all as healthy as possible so that we can have a productive society, so that we can continue to have a great country, or to work towards having a great country.
(5-minute stinger)
Thank you, Brenda Waybrant.
Find more Code WACK! episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV App. You can also subscribe to Code WACK! wherever you find your podcasts. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for health care reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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