AT 2 a.m. Sarah and I are clocking off, having just finished an exhausting, stressful and even, at times, terrifying shift spent quite literally "on the run", in a far too trendy but all too typical restaurant in south Dublin. Having started work at 5 p.m., I we will be paid a £15 "appearance fee" by the restaurant owners. Sarah also worked lunch. She was here at 10 a.m. and had two hours off between three and five o'clock. She has worked more than 50 hours in the past five days.
"I need the money," she explains. She studied English at UCD and plans now to join her boyfriend in Boston. "I can't afford to pass up shifts ... The thing about `waitering' is that it is a job anyone can do to put together a bit of quick case."
Despite physical and mental exhaustion, she cannot afford to take time off - there is no such thing as sick pay. Keeping her job demands she at least appears calm, fresh, obliging and always cheerful.
All staff at this restaurant are paid a flat £15 per shift. The waiters' tips are then put into a pool and distributed equally among waiters, bar staff, bussers, cashier and hostess. Of the 12 1/2 per cent service charge on tables of six or more, 10 per cent goes to the staff pool and the remaining 2 1/2 per cent the owners take. So not only are waiters' tips used to subsidise the entire staffs wages, but a cut is appropriated by the owners. There is no sickpay, paid leave or provision to ensure that staff get at least some weekends off.
A member of the Restaurant Association of Ireland, this high class eatery opened for business "about 18 months ago", according to Ann, a waitress who has just left. Of the 30 or so staff who worked there then, only one remains.
"You'd be afraid to go on holiday sometimes," says Anne. "You'd come back after two weeks and half the staff would be gone."
At 5 p.m. there is a staff meal available - pasta with chicken and cream. As it is Saturday night the chefs are too busy prepping to make any alternative. Take it or, if vegetarian, leave it.
There will be no official break until the shift is over. There are glasses to polish, salt and pepper cellars to fill, tables to lay, menus to check and "specials" to be briefed on by the chef, all before 6 p.m., when the fully booked 200 seat restaurant opens for a night's bedlam.
By 11 p.m. the denizens are contentedly toying with teal and sipping Sambuca, oblivious to the finely managed mayhem that reigns between the kitchen, bar, waiters' station and the floor. The "rush" from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. - when most diners are arriving, ordering, changing their minds, complaining, wanting more wine and generally "eating out"
was an alarming three hour assault course, even for an experienced waitress. Waitering is emphatically not a job "anyone" could do in order to "make a bit of quick cash".
"Oh, it's a skilled job all right, not that people in Ireland think of it as skilled," Keith tells me as we wait for coffee to brew. He has worked in restaurants in London and Dublin over the past seven years.
"You've got to have perfect judgement, a brilliant sense of timing and self organisation. You've got to be able to juggle a hundred things in your mind. You have to be able to keep kitchen staff, managers and stroppy customers happy and if anything goes wrong, it's the waiter that gets it", he says. "Restaurants here just expect you to be able to jump right in and do it."
This restaurant does not employ, at the time I am there, any waiters professionally trained in dining service. The only qualification sought is experience.
SIPTU and the Labour Court have been in discussion since January to establish a Catering Joint Labour Committee for Dublin. A JLC has regulated the pay and conditions of catering workers in the rest of the country since 1978. At that time the restaurant trade in Dublin was deemed sufficiently organised not to require further statutory regulation.
The biggest explosion in the Irish restaurant industry in the last five years has been in the east, in particular in Dublin. If effective, the Dublin JLC will radically affect the working lives of 30,000 catering workers in restaurants, bars, delicatessens, fast food outlets and cafes. "Restaurant owners in this city won't know what's hit them," says Norman Croke of SIPTU.
At 2.15 a.m., mug of tea in hand, I feel like I've been hit by a herd of buffalo. I calculate that though I have brought in £96 in tips tonight, I would only get an equal cut of £24 from the pool.
"It's not a job for old limbs," observes Keith. "It's not a job for young limbs," quips Sarah, "not if they want to stay young."
