Discrimination at the Local Sandwich Shop
         For over two years now, I have been working at the Hero sandwich shop in my hometown.  Hero is a small, franchise owned business in a small town so, needless to say, it constitutes a small work force.  The store owner, Jeff, is a middle aged male entrepreneur.  Second to Jeff is our manager, June.  She is a 70-year-old female who has been working there since the store opened in 1993.  The rest of us at Hero share generally the same job duties, which include serving customers, baking bread, and cleaning.  Everyone employed at Hero, excluding June, is 21 years old or younger.  We all come from middle class families in Bethalto, and we are all white.  For the most part we have a pleasant work environment, but there are some issues involving sexual and racial discrimination that I would like to discuss.
         The present Hero crew is 50% male and 50% female, but it has not always been that way.  In the two years that I have been employed there many workers have come and gone.  Altogether I have worked with 6 males and 17 females.  Out of this particular pool of former employees, at least 5 of the females were over the age of 30.  However, none of the males were over the age of 21.  I believe this serves as an example of cultural division of labor, which is a result of society channeling minorities and women into certain occupational roles, in this case, service jobs.  Jeff has actually said in the past that he prefers hiring females.  This is evidenced by the fact that the males who are currently working at Hero, Travis and Matt, both acquired their jobs through the referral of another or former employee.  Both Colleen and I were hired through the usual process of turning in an application and being called for an interview.  Since Jeff  is preferential to females in the hiring process, it logically follows that he would be preferential to us in promotions and salary increases as well, but, as I will explain, this is not the case.
        Male and female employees at Hero have very different and unequal job ladders.  Since everyone except our manager has basically the same job duties at the store, wage differences are determined by seniority and the amount of responsibility that an individual worker holds.  The two main responsibilities at the store are opening and closing.  Opening is considered by Jeff to be a less valuable skill than closing, therefore closers get a more significant pay increase than openers do.  The problem is that only males can close the store.  Jeff  instated this rule even before I began working there.  According to him it is too dangerous for girls to be at the store by themselves at night.  So, being female, I have never had the chance to get a “closing raise”.  Matt and Travis take turns closing, and June and I take turns opening.  Colleen, who has the least amount of seniority, does neither.  This exclusion of females from the position of a closer affects our salaries not only in the dollar amount we make per hour, but also in the number of hours we accumulate on our paychecks.  During the winter months, business at Hero slows down a lot, so to avoid paying workers for hours that are not needed Jeff cuts back the hours that we work.  During our busy months on a typical night we have two people working, either a male and a female or two males.  The person who is not closing leaves their shift at 9:00, and the closer stays until 11:00.  During our slow winter months, the female who is not closing leaves at 7:00.  This gives the closer, who is always male, an extra 4 hours of work every night than the person who is not closing, who is most often female.  This creates a lot of tension in the crew because we all want as many hours as we can get.  The non-female closing rule isn’t the only way that the male and female workers at Hero are pushed into unequal job ladders.
        As I said before, wage increases are based on seniority and amount of responsibility one carries.  This may seem like a fair system of promotion, but upon examination it becomes clear that the way in which a worker gains responsibility, and therefore wage increases, is not fair.  Since the crew at Hero is such a small one, we get to know each other, including our boss, very well because we often work with only one other person.  Jeff demonstrates subjective criteria by using his personal relationships with his employees to determine who he wants to handle extra responsibilities.  There is a big inequality here because, just as girls aren’t allowed to close, girls also aren’t allowed to work with Jeff alone.  From what I’ve heard this is because of some rumors that Jeff had an affair with a former employee.  Apparently, after discussing it with his wife, Jeff decided that he would be better off to avoid working with any female employees alone, for fear of a sexual harassment charge or something of that nature.  This inhibits the promotion of female employees because, as I said before, Jeff decides who takes on responsibilities according to what he thinks of them personally, after he gets to know them.  And much of these personal relationships are developed through working and talking to him one on one.  An example of this unfair system of promotion can be exemplified by Travis’s recent wage increase.  He received a raise when he began doing the weekly paperwork because after a conversation that he and Jeff had when they were working together, Jeff decided that Travis was mature and dependable enough to get the paperwork done every week.  My argument is that I never have had the opportunity to prove my maturity and dependability to Jeff because I never have had the opportunity to talk to Jeff one on one because I am female.
        Jeff’s promotional practices at Hero demonstrate homosocial reproduction.  Homosocial reproduction occurs when a person in a position of power chooses others who have a lot in common with them for other positions of power.  Recently Jeff decided to expand his business to the St. Louis area.  He decided that he would buy a Hero near Edwardsville and he wanted Matt to transfer there as store manager.  He explained to Matt that he would pay him $20,000 every year for three years, and at the end of the third year Matt could start making payments to Jeff and, in return, sharing the profits of the store.  Matt is not the first in seniority, and does not carry the most responsibility, but he shares a lot in common with Jeff.  First of all, Matt is a white male like Jeff.  They both enjoy hunting and sports, and I imagine that they talk about these things a lot when they work together.  They also share similar views on political issues.  I believe it is these similarities, and not Matt’s qualifications, that led Jeff to choose Matt as a co-owner for his new store.
        Females are not the only legally protected group of people who are discriminated against at Hero.  Race discrimination is much more obvious than sex discrimination.  Any regular customer can notice that there are no employees there who are not white.  Bethalto is a predominantly white town, so it could be argued that this is due to demographic reasons, but I have witnessed a few incidents that serve as evidence of calculated and intentional race discrimination at Hero.  Not long after I started working at the store, I was working a night shift with one of my former coworkers named Jason.  A group of African American boys came to turn in their applications and as soon as they were out of the door Jason threw the applications away.  He justified it by saying that Jeff would never hire them anyway.  He never actually said that it was because of their race, and I never asked, but that’s how I understood it.  Another time, I was working with June and an African American girl came in and asked for an application.  June gave her one, and when she left June said, “I hope Jeff doesn’t call her for an interview, he’ll get a real shocker when she walks in!”  Again, she didn’t actually say why she thought this, but I took it to be that it was because she was black.  These are just the incidents that I have witnessed personally, I’m sure that there are many others that I have not observed.
        Although Hero is an overall pleasant place to work, there are some structural inequalities built into the systems of hiring, scheduling, and promoting that keep me, as well as the other two female workers, from feeling like I’m being treated fairly.  These inequalities would perhaps be worse for an African American working at the store, if one was ever to be hired.  These inequalities would also be very hard to prove as discrimination because they have a lot to do with Jeff’s personal opinions.  To me, it’s not worth bringing up because I know that I would only be seen as a “cry baby”, and I will be moving on to a better job soon.  Until then, I will continue to put up with the increasingly clear fact that, at Hero, a worker won’t be treated fairly unless they are white and male.