Free Market
If she’d been a different sort of person, I might’ve worried that Hanbyul would cry. Instead, she was taking quick sharp breaths, in and out and in and out. I imagined her telling herself, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.”
And they will be okay when I quit. It happens there all the time. It was only that I was making a bad morning for my manager worse. I’d heard the hushed anger (customers were around) that my coworker had been expressing for the last 45 minutes, mostly about having had to work the fry station, which does have a tendency to make people angry. The night had been a semi-disaster: the ganache broke when it was being whipped and we’d had to make a new batch around 5am that was just barely finished in time for the store to open. Hanbyul had been dealing with the fallout since she arrived and that was before I pulled her aside and asked to speak with her privately.
I’m quitting for many reasons that compounded over time. The broken equipment that we patch with tape and saran wrap each night when we come in. Small indignities like the $18 I have to pay every week for a family meal that always contains meat, or the kitchen towels that are locked away in the office we aren't allowed a key to. The lack of respect we get from nearly everybody aside from Hanbyul. (“Is it so hard for them to just finish on time?,” I overheard a manager saying to another once.) And the work, the sheer number of doughnuts and kougin aman we're expected to produce every night, which has become increasingly impossible. Sometimes they let us come in an hour early, but they don't like to pay overtime. I’ve gotten fast at my work, among the fastest on our team, but on a good day I can't finish on time. If anything goes wrong, the whole team gets dragged into the failing, flailing frenzy. Things often go wrong.
There are many people who want to work at this bakery, so I imagine they’ll be able to fill my role quickly. Constantly training replacement employees seems to me a more expensive way of running a business than increasing total staff or selling fewer goods, but I don’t know their financials. It might make sense in some quantitative projection. If hourly workers are viewed as expenditures along with the cost of ingredients, then maybe high quality chocolate is a better value-add than another pastry cook. Capitalism looks at both with a dispassionate eye.
I was complaining with my coworker about the equipment and why it took so long for them to buy us new tools. She reflected for a moment, and then said, “But that’s how they make their money. I respect it, in a way.” An immigrant to this country, who worked her way up from nail salons to this night shift work that let her attend college classes and raise her kids during the day, I could both understand and not understand how she was okay with her place at the butt-end of capitalism. To do all that she was doing, you have to have faith in the American Dream. But maintaining that faith must also remind you over and over that you are worth less than the people you’re working for.
I have the privilege of quitting this job. That privilege landed with me due to the random circumstances of my birth and family, my education and the tech bubble I stumbled into prior to this, and the fact that I haven’t really had bad luck. That some of my coworkers have similar privileges and some don’t seems not to determine which of them believe that the system as a whole is working.
In the next two weeks I’ll do what I can to smooth the transition, not for the company but for my coworkers. Recently I identified a technical error in our payroll that was leaving our paychecks half a shift short every week. I could blame my manager, though I know payroll isn’t her job and that she sometimes works from 6am to midnight. Things fall through the cracks when you’re that tired. She tries to be fair and good to us in a broken system, and I will try too.