When sexism is in the job description

MOVING TO a new city with restaurant experience takes the edge off. As difficult as it is for young college graduates to find jobs, there never seems to be any shortage of signs looking for "experienced waitstaff." This is not surprising in an industry with one of the highest turnover rates. It's also one of those jobs where the employer does not have to pay a real wage.

Service workers who work for tips are only federally bound to earn $2.63 an hour, which means that one is dependent on the popularity of a restaurant and the mood of a patron to make a livelihood. In other words, we servers do "piece work."

What little relief is given to the individual who knows she has training in a trade is balanced out by the sickening objectification that comes with the restaurant application process.

I walk into what looks like a nice establishment in the West Village and inquire about the help wanted ad hanging in the window. I am told to wait for the owner, who is conducting all the interviews himself. Upon sitting down, I hand him my résumé, which I printed on the fancy "résumé" paper that I sprung for, thinking it's an important way to make an impression.

But I stand corrected: it's not my résumé that he cares about, but my body. The interview consists of a stranger looking me up and down and asking questions about my appearance, instead of my eight years of experience.

Am I willing to take out my nose ring? Is my hair long enough to be put back? He tells me that he has a job for me at a different restaurant in midtown. He says, "It's my real money-making business. It's crazy busy, you'll walk out every night with $200...Are you comfortable wearing booty shorts and a white tank top as your uniform?"

Trained in the art of being agreeable to a boss, I stay quiet and nod, but really, I can't wait to get out of there. This man gives me the creeps. He hands me a card with the manager's name on it and tells me to go talk to her immediately, and get trained and ready to go. This business owner's "classy" establishment is really just a front for a sports bar modeled on the Hooters chain.

Being offered a job that would pay my bills should be a relief, but instead, it's a painful reminder of what is expected of workers in an exploitative society, and of how being a woman requires you to sell your body image in order to make a dime. It sets a precedent at a workplace that part of your job is being ogled, and that your boss dictates what you can and cannot do with your body.

In order to undercut any sexual harassment cases, restaurants like this are equipped with a long list of guidelines. At Hooters, for example, women are regularly terminated for rolling the waistband of their shorts, not changing nylons fast enough when they tear or wearing a bra that is white or nude.

Basically, if you have the wrong attitude, if you don't smile and laugh when men sexually objectify you, they will find a reason to fire you and get away with it.

I'VE BEEN lucky enough to have worked in restaurants where being sexualized is not in the employee handbook. And yet, I've had my butt grabbed at work, I've been called (among other things) a "barmaid," a "good girl" and "baby" in ways that were not endearing. I've been asked for my number. I've even conducted a personal scientific experiment that proved I get tipped better if I wear makeup.

All this speaks to the expectation that a female worker in the service industry is up for grabs, both literally and figuratively.

Years of defeats and rollbacks of workers' rights have sharpened the exploitation of workers in every industry and every sector. And within every workplace, women are exploited side-by-side with their male co-workers, while also enduring the additional oppression of sexism. Men and women need to unite and fight for better wages, health benefits, control over the work we do--but also against sexism.

It's not a coincidence that the last 30 years of one-sided class war against the working class has coincided with rollbacks of the gains won by the women's rights movement of the 1960s.

This is why men should be enthusiastic champions of women's equality on the job--because it is objectification and inequality that gives bosses leverage and control over us. Only by making the demands of women workers central to the demands of all workers is unity and, ultimately, victory possible. This is true of all other forms of oppression as well.

The violence and everyday effects of sexism leave painful scars on all women. Men do not suffer the same type of oppression, but sexism still dehumanizes and drags down their living standards as well.

Workers' liberation cannot exist without women's liberation and vice versa. As the main character in The Salt of the Earth--a beautiful film about a miners' strike that was successful because women joined the organizing--said: "I want to rise and to push everything up with me as I go."
Anonymous, New York City