Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers

Question 1: How would you describe social inequality in modern-time America?

The forces that are upholding inequality today are largely covert compared to in the past. The vast majority of Americans are not raging racists, sexists, or xenophobes (to name a few); the same goes for our core institutions. Instead, inequality manifests on an interpersonal level from the way in which people extend opportunities to their close networks and hold cultural preferences for traits that are subtly aligned with whiteness, or upper-middle-classness, or ideals of masculinity. At the organizational level, inequality stems from institutions that embed these same standards in their organizational culture and funnel jobs and positions of prestige to folks situated within these hierarchies. Finally, there is a historical component: People with vastly different access to resources (e.g., wealth is 10 times higher for white families than Black or Latinx families) simply use the power that stems from these resources to slingshot themselves and their loved ones into the higher-class positions that they already start from (this is also known as social reproduction).

Question 2: Has social inequality increased or decreased over the past 40–50 years?

Like many things, it depends on how you measure it. For example, wealth inequality has INCREASED between the poor and rich during this span. As for race, inequality has increased between Black and white families based on similar measures of household wealth. On the other hand, the Black middle class has expanded its ranks in the US, and new research is starting to document a growing Latinx middle class in areas of the country with a large Latinx population (such as Los Angeles). Finally, on gender: Labor market inequality between men and women had been decreasing for decades since the 50s but has more or less flatlined for the past 20 years. Bottom line: It is clear that social inequality in our society will not simply “go away” if we do nothing. A very closely related issue is that the forces that uphold inequality today have not necessarily gone away, only changed. This is what I mentioned in response to question 1.

Question 3: What are the official and unofficial ways of measuring social inequality?

Well, I would say that measurements of income, education, and wealth are the most common measurements that social scientists use to assess social inequality. Unofficially, which I will take to mean qualitatively, we can assess differences in aspirations, perceptions of barriers, and characteristic life experiences (such as interactions with police) as proxies for inequality.

Question 4: Congratulations on your book! Could you provide us an overview on your findings?

Thank you!

My first book, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, explores how everyday forms of inequality get threaded into the very fabric of restaurants. Particularly in higher-end establishments, class-privileged, white men and women get channeled into front-of-house and managerial jobs while working-class people of color, especially foreign-born Latino men, toil behind the scenes.

This social division of labor is the result of both management decisions and the worker interrelations that bosses help to structure. Management sets the stage for this dynamic in restaurants through discriminatory hiring and supervisory strategies. Workers then play out the scenes each and every day, coming to understand their colleagues as members of distinctly unequal “teams” tinged with race, class, and gender differences.