Featuring Brenda Waybrant, union organizer and former restaurant worker in “Music City” Nashville, Tennessee, whose story illustrates how our broken healthcare system harms low-paid Americans in particular. This is the first of two pods featuring her.
Why Restaurant Workers are Singing the Blues: Former Nashville Server Speaks Out
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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 health challenges do restaurant workers face as a result of their grueling day-to-day work? 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.
Waybrant: Thank you so much for having me.
Q: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where do you live and what do you do?
Waybrant: So right now I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I used to work in the restaurant industry. I was there for 15 years and then COVID hit in 2020, and that was not an industry that I wanted to stay in. On top of all of the bad ways that employees in the restaurant industry are treated, we didn’t have health insurance really and then the pandemic hit and so now I am a union organizer working with our local government employees.
Q: So I understand you had some injuries and health challenges growing up. Tell me about those and how you coped with them at the time.
Waybrant: Yeah, you know, we grew up on disability. My mom was a single mom. She became disabled and so we got a small stipend every single month — small to the point of, you know once we got disability money the first of the month we would go to McDonald’s and that was our celebration. We would get good Happy Meals. Right at the beginning of eighth grade, I fell 20 feet in a just a childhood accident. I was out playing with my friends climbing a hill, held on to a rope and slipped and fell and swung out and fell 20 feet and I shattered my ankle on a retainer wall, and so had surgery on that. I had done two surgeries on that — one to fix it and then another one, six months later, to take the metal pieces out of it because I was still growing. I was still young enough that my growing, that my ankle hadn’t finished, so that was in fall of 1998 and then summer of 1999 right after my ankle had healed and I was out doing things and riding a bike again.
We lived in a small southern town and so you know, there was not a whole lot to do. So in the summers, we were just out of the house on our bikes hanging out with our friends. My friends didn’t wear helmets at the time. That wasn’t a thing that we talked about, and I wrecked my bicycle. A car came very close to me and I swerved off the side of the road and my bicycle jackknifed, and I had a head injury. It was an acute left epidural hematoma, and so I was lifelined to Knoxville, Tennessee. They did an emergency surgery on my head. They took out 12 ounces of blood from my head and I had a 98% chance of dying and so I know 100% that the reason I’m alive today is because I was on Medicaid. Had we had a little bit more money, we would have been bankrupt from that.
Q: That’s amazing. So you were on Medicaid. Tell me about any follow up you had after those surgeries.
Waybrant: After my ankle surgery, I remember getting like a rubber band and being told that I had exercises and workouts to do but I never really went to physical therapy and I don’t know if that was because my mom was, you know she grew up poor and you become averse to going to the doctor when you grow up poor because it costs money that you just don’t have. So that was kind of ingrained in me, in my lifestyle. And so, after my head surgery, I had follow-up appointments but I never went to therapy, and never talked with a therapist about it. You know I was 16 years old, and literally had just died and I would watch a TV show and by the time commercials came on, a 30-second commercial, I couldn’t remember what TV show I was watching, and that was 20 years ago and I’m 36 now, I was 16 at the time, and I’m just at that point where I’m like you know I’m really grateful for having that because I had a lot of other trauma as a child and I couldn’t remember that until I was old enough to remember that and process it.
Q: So you worked in the restaurant industry for most of your life. What health challenges did being a server pose for you and how did you deal with those?
Waybrant: That’s a really great question. You know, working in food service, you’re on your feet all the time and you’re carrying trays and everybody in the restaurant industry knows which arm is their tray arm, you know, the one that you’re used to balancing all of that stuff on and because I broke my ankle when I was younger, and never really did rehab for it, I put a lot of weight on my other foot, and so I was improperly imbalanced and standing wrong for a long time and I had to go to a chiropractor for a solid three years to straighten my spine out. It was curved sideways, and my neck was curved forward from leaning forward and taking orders and it’s often called “cell phone neck” now. You know when you’re sitting there with your head down, staring at your phone, it’s kind of like the same thing.
It was really hard on my body and then I worked in downtown Nashville for eight years in places where we had to yell over music and bands, and I sounded like a Nana who chain smoked 24 hours a day when I, you know, got off work Saturday night, between Thursday Friday and Saturday and then I couldn’t talk at all on Sunday, and that was normal recoup for restaurant workers in downtown Nashville in these loud bars. I got my degree in theater and I can’t sing anymore like I used to because my throat has just been so exhausted from yelling and forcing it to yell over like very high decibel music.
Q: Wow. So, the majority of the time that you were working in the industry, what kind of health insurance did you have?
Waybrant: Non-existent and then in the past couple of years, I was working at places where I was offered health insurance. My former company, Dick’s Last Resort, I worked both in their restaurant and in their corporate office, and I had health insurance benefits as somebody who worked in their corporate office. It wasn’t great but it was still something. You know, they got to a point where they offered it to their employees, their front of house and back of house hourly employees if you met a certain threshold of working there long enough time but that was in case insurance, right. That was you had it in case you got really sick because the premiums were high and deductibles are high and it’s been a challenge to have affordable health care, and now that I work for a union, I have free health care and you know I still have deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, but they’re clearly delineated and it feels like health care is accessible to me for the first time in a long time.
Q: Wow. What was that like for you when you didn’t have health care and you were working in the industry?
Waybrant: Nervous a lot, I mean, I worked in, especially you know thinking about how the pandemic has affected people. We work in, especially people who are in tourism industries, you have people coming from all over the place and you’re exposed to anything that those other people are exposed to. And, you know, if you got sick and didn’t have really any money like you couldn’t afford to take off work if you needed to… I know so many restaurant workers that have come in to work while they were… you know we have those list of those big seven those things that you don’t come to work with — d diarrhea and vomiting and like some of those other symptoms are listed on there and I know servers who’ve come to work with those symptoms because they have no other choice because if they missed a shift, they didn’t have bills that were paid because we don’t have paid time off in this country either, especially not for people who make subminimum wage.
Q: So the reason that you didn’t have health insurance for much of that time was that because you couldn’t afford it or what was the reason?
Waybrant: Yeah, I couldn’t afford it and I remember when Obamacare came out, and I was so excited and I went and signed up and I made a little bit over the amount of getting any deductions but I was so far in the hole with … I mean I graduated college in 2008 with student loan debt, and I was told when I went to college to just get a degree in something, it doesn’t matter as long as you have a degree and then when I graduated, the rules of the game had changed. The market had crashed and there were very little job opportunities for people fresh out of college, and so I stayed in the restaurant industry because it made more sense to make $2.13 an hour and have unlimited earning potential, you know, based on the tables that came in and be able to pick shifts up and all of that than go and take a job that was $5.75 an hour at the time.
And $7.25 an hour isn’t much different when our living wage in Nashville-Davidson County is $17.40 an hour. And so, you know, at that time, I was making just a little bit too much to be considered for enough of a discount on Obamacare to make it affordable to me, because I had a car payment and student loan payment and car insurance and credit card bills and by the time that life happened, I didn’t have that extra $300 a month pay for health insurance.
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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