by Frances Nguyen This story was originally published at Prism. While restaurant owners, pro-business lobbyists, and the New York Post were convinced that taking away restaurant workers’ option to “rake in cash from unemployment checks” would force them to return to work en masse, many workers had no intention of going back to a notoriously exploitative and abusive industry after COVID-19 forced them out. The truth is that it will take far more than a loss of unemployment benefits to get restaurant workers to return without substantial, lasting change, and that’s especially true for back-of-house (BOH) staff—positions that are heavily filled by BIPOC and undocumented people and had the highest risk of death during the pandemic due to the demands of their workplace environment “For an industry that already is operating in survival mode at all times, to throw a pandemic in it, everything becomes so much more horrifyingly apparent,” said Lily Nicholson, a restaurant worker who’s also an organizer with Memphis Restaurant Workers United. “We were left with this feeling of, ‘Well, what else do we have to lose?’ This [the pandemic] was what it took us to get here after decades of exploitation.” Many workers see the current crisis as an opportunity to demand remedies for long-standing ills, including wage theft, the lack of a livable wage, unsafe and unforgiving workplaces, and abusive management. But they face an uphill battle. Claims placing the blame on a purportedly lazy workforce and its reliance on “big government” for the stalled restaurant recovery persist, despite having been debunked by multiple studies. Still, more workers are refusing to accept a “return to normal”—instead, they’re making demands for better pay and safer working conditions, and they’re looking to collective bargaining, labor organizing, and federal policy changes to remake the industry into one worth returning to. Read more