Sympathy for Mr. Bailey
When I was a young woman with long legs, tall shoes, and a very short skirt, I briefly did a stint as a waitress in a typical diner. You know, Formica tabletops, short order kitchen, schlepping morning coffee to locals on their way to work. We waitresses had to wrap cutlery, fill ketchup bottles, cut pies, make the coffee—as well as milkshakes and hot fudge sundaes—and tote hot plates from the kitchen to the customers. We had to tolerate men calling us “Babe,” and pinching our bottoms if we expected to earn the tips that made up for the lack of base pay. The work required massive short-term memory and long hours on one’s ill-shod feet.
You might have guessed that I didn’t last very long. I could work in the kitchen or mopping the floors, but please leave me off the wait-staff roster. I admit it. I simply wasn’t cut out for that kind of work.
I was reminded of this when I read a Washington Post article last week about Andrew Bailey, the Missouri Attorney General who has filed a lawsuit against Starbucks for engaging in “systemic racial, sexual, and sexual orientation discrimination.” It is Bailey’s contention that because of Starbucks’ bogus hiring practices that consumers are forced to “pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services,” because making hiring decisions “on non-merit considerations will skew the hiring pool towards people who are less qualified to perform their work.”
He is disturbed that Starbucks’ discriminatory hiring practices have led to its workforce becoming “more female and less white.”
I don’t quite understand how this discrimination forces consumers to “pay higher prices,” but point well taken on people unqualified for the job. Clearly I wasn’t.
I didn’t work for Starbucks, of course—they weren’t invented yet. But I get it! Who was I to think I could carry a cup of coffee as well as a man? I had no business putting on that frilly little apron that held my pad and pencil and the loose change I was so lucky to receive from important men, like Bailey, getting caffeinated on their way to work.
In fact—I admit it—I had fantasies about a man bringing me coffee while I ogle his backside and call him some belittling term of endearment, then slip a quarter under the sticky egg-yolk coated plate onto which I’d smashed my cigarette butt in the midst of the discarded wheat toast crusts.
I do not doubt that Mr. Bailey could have delivered hot meals and steaming coffee to tables with greater finesse than I. (Although I question whether he could have done it in high heels and a miniskirt). And to think—all the waitstaff in that little diner was female. What were any of us thinking?
Of course, Almighty Google tells me that then—as now—there were more females than males in our country. And Starbucks had apparently “committed to having female representation in at least 55 percent of all retail roles, 50 percent of all corporate roles and 30 percent of all manufacturing roles.” Seems fair, but—oh, yeah—we can’t presume women to be as competent as men.
And then it occurred to me—maybe Mr. Bailey simply wants his coffee to be served by a white man, but in today’s political climate is not at liberty to say so. Mr. Bailey, I wish you could come to Eureka Springs for your morning coffee—a place where men are notably free to publicly display their preference for men. (And Eureka’s population is predominantly white, so chances are you wouldn’t have to make excuses for racial preference.)