Abstract
In this chapter, I begin with the dining procedure in the restaurant. The reasons for why I put the dining procedure here are, first, to facilitate the explanation of different job positions in the public area of the restaurant. Second, to briefly explain at what stage each category of workers becomes involved in the dining procedure and how customers and workers interact. This information paves the way for a discussion of the conflict between female table servers and male pantry helpers in the subsequent section and also customer-worker relationships in the next chapter. Third, both the job responsibilities and the dining procedure may be somewhat different from other countries, making it necessary to contextualise the procedure for the reader who is not familiar with dining culture in China.
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- 1.
Manager Tang had been working in the restaurant for 10 years. She said the owners trusted her very much. She had meetings with the owners every two weeks. The owners were very responsive to the market and made strategic transformations to the restaurant chain very often. I heard that the bosses had made huge profits from this restaurant. For instance, they own a Porsche SUV, a Mercedes Benz, and other luxurious cars. Despite this, they didn’t give their managers much of a share of the benefits; as shown in Table 3.1, the wages of the chief manager were 6000–7000 yuan (£600–700) per month in January 2012.
- 2.
Regarding the definition of informal labour, according to the International Labour Organization (2003), ‘Employees are considered to have informal jobs if their employment relationship is, in law or in practice, not subject to national labour legislation, income taxation, social protection or entitlement to certain employment benefits (advance notice of dismissal, severance pay, paid annual or sick leave, etc.)’. According to this definition, workers in the Meteor can be considered informal labour because their employment was not subject to the Labour Law and they were not entitled to benefits such as sick leave and annual leave.
- 3.
This was in sharp contrast to busboys in the US context regarding gender, race and age, because busboys were usually young immigrant male workers of Latino origin (Jayaraman, 2011).
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Shen, Y. (2019). Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical Workplace. In: Beyond Tears and Laughter. New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5817-3_3
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