Is the Denny's restaurant chain such a fiendishly evil corporate empire that it is unfair to mention it in a post about Minneapolis Public Schools?
Despite its notoriety as a restaurant chain that refused to serve blacks, it seemed to me (a Denny's employee in the early 1980s) that Denny's restaurant employees were generally not more "racist" than the employees at most other restaurants. I also got the impression that Denny's top management did not promote or encourage the type of racist practices I described in my post. And unequal treatment of customers on the basis of race was against company policy. The problem is that you cannot change attitudes by decree. How can you change behaviors that clash with prevailing attitudes? Waiters generally treat their customers unequally if they think some customers are better than others. Illegal discrimination is generally done covertly. And it is not necessarily the case that if someone is black and gets bad service they are the victim of racial discrimination. Curiously, it seems that white men believe black people rarely get bad table service in most restaurants because of racial discrimination. I once opened a speech on this topic by asking "Did you ever notice that some people are more likely to get good service at a restaurants than others: Whites get better service than blacks, white men in business suits get better service than women in McDonald's uniforms, etc.?" When I put the question to a vote by a show of hands, all of the white men in the audience, and only the white men voted no. WORK PLACE POLITICS In the early 1980's I waited tables at a Denny's restaurant in Atlanta, Ga. I ended up in change of a shift that usually didn't have a manager on duty (except on my day off). I had prior experience as a cook & floor manager at a similar type of restaurant in Minnesota where the table service was consistently good. At Denny's I became an extremely good, efficient waiter after I familiarized myself with the Denny's policy and procedures book. When I learned how to do my job "by the book" my coworkers began to complain, and soon asked the management to make me change my ways. I eventually won over the most of the waiters and retrained the cooks. The management initially stayed out of it, then backed me up at one point (I threatened to quit if they didn't). The management was pleased that customers had stopped complaining about the service on my shift (the afternoon shift). However there was a downside from the management's point of view: Our tip income increased dramatically. According to at least one textbook on industrial psychology and the general manager I worked for, most workers are not happy to work unless they are one paycheck away from the streets. What happens when you pay them too much? They are not happy to work overtime. Not happy to work when they are sick. Not happy to work hard. Not happy to make the boss happy. The management undermined my efforts to see that the quality of service was consistently high in a number of ways, especially by short-staffing. I pointed out that the management was not in compliance with company guidelines when it came to staffing the afternoon shift. Immediately after I resigned the corporate HQ started to get a huge number of complaints about about the quality of service between the hours of 3 and 11 PM, which triggered an investigation that led to the firing of the manager. The moral of the story: You have to engage in politics to fight institutional racism, but politics isn't about being for or against racism. Politics is about money, power, control. And it's easier to get along and get ahead if you go along. -Doug Mann, King Field MPS Board candidate <http:educationright.tripod.com> In a message dated 5/17/2002 6:59:05 PM Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > Anyone who reads the papers knows that Denny's, particularly in the period > referred to by Mr. Mann, was one of the most notoriously racist service > companies in American history. Even if they didn't know this, Mr. Mann's post > goes into some detail about this, referring to one colleague who thought of > black customers as "niggers" and referring to another one of his worker > colleagues who quit rather than wait on black people, and apparently tried to > get Mr. Mann fired because he wanted to institute a policy where all people > are treated equally. _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
