How Fort Worth restaurant workers are coping with coronavirus closures
So much of Fort Worth’s charm is tied to its restaurant and bar scene: The famous Stockyard steakhouses. Outdoor dining tables beside the Trinity River. Authentic Mexican in the city’s south neighborhoods.
But nobody will be dining at any restaurants for the near future because of the coronavirus, and the people sustaining much of the damage will be the hourly employees who make and serve the food and drinks. By today all restaurants and bars in Fort Worth must scale back to delivery and take out, joining Dallas, Houston and Austin, which have made similar changes (Arlington, for now, has ordered restaurants and bars to cut their occupancy levels in half). The disruption in business is already leading to severe cutbacks in hours for restaurant industry employees and could lead to widespread layoffs. The Texas Restaurant Association warns as many as 500,000 jobs statewide could be at stake in the coming weeks.
“Most (service employees) are living on the economic margins anyway and to suddenly have that rug yanked out from everybody — it’s pretty terrifying,” said Steve Steward, a bartender at Boiled Owl Tavern on Magnolia Avenue.
To people who patronize restaurants and bars, going out is a diversion. But for a large proportion of the Dallas-Fort Worth population, restaurants are their livelihood. Some 322,000 people in DFW — one out of every 10 workers — are employed in food prep and service, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making it the third-most common profession in the region. In Fort Worth and Arlington alone, there are about 100,000 food prep and service employees.
The average annual salary for these workers, who are often hourly employees, is around $25,000. They regularly lack benefits like health care and paid sick leave. It’s a “paycheck-to-paycheck” life, said one server, who recently started working at a popular downtown Fort Worth restaurant and asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his job security.
After recently completing training, he was scheduled to work six shifts this week. His manager cut him down to zero shifts. Even with the potential for carryout and delivery business, he said, “I don’t expect to be seeing any shifts in the next few weeks.”
His financial situation is even more precarious because his wife is between jobs after recently being laid off, and his backup income from Uber driving has also declined precipitously. Together, he and his wife had been making around $5,000 to $6,000 a month. Now they don’t know where they will get enough money to cover rent — they just signed a new apartment lease last month. One utility company let them delay a payment for a month, but he knows that means the bill will be twice as high next month.
To mitigate the effects of the coronavirus shutdowns, the Texas Restaurant Association has joined a chorus of people and organizations calling for a federal stimulus plan for restaurants that would help owners stay in business and offer emergency wages to employees. Gov. Greg Abbott will allow the coronavirus epidemic as a qualifying event for small business loans. For people who lose jobs, Abbott has waived the normal waiting period of a week to become eligible for Texas Workforce Commission unemployment benefits. Steward, who took out a loan to support himself the next few months, recommends that people who can afford to help restaurant workers donate to the U.S. Bartenders Guild, ShiftDallas.org or the Fort Worth Artist and Service Worker Relief Fund.
The wider economic impact of restaurants struggling or closing for good because of losses sustained from coronavirus would be enormous. It would affect producers and suppliers, not to mention tax revenues for the city. “The restaurant industry is extremely important to the whole scope of the economy,” said Robin Milton, president of the Tarrant County Restaurant Association.
Relief cannot come soon enough for the workers. In north Fort Worth, a teenage restaurant employee who asked to remain anonymous because of fear of losing her job has seen her weekly hours go from about 37 to 10. She’s been working nearly full time to save for college and help her parents, who also work hourly jobs. She is trying to find another part-time job outside of the restaurant industry to earn money while Texans are quarantining and social distancing, but she is not hopeful.
Yet despite the income she will lose, she understands why restaurants must close. Last week, she started getting nervous as customers lined up close to each other and handed cash to employees. “I think if I got the virus it would be OK, but I don’t want to transmit it to anybody else,” she said. ”It’s just not something I think is personally safe to have a bunch of people coming in.”
Amanda McCoy contributed reporting to this story.
This story was originally published March 18, 2020 at 11:15 AM with the headline "How Fort Worth restaurant workers are coping with coronavirus closures."
