Protect and serve
Bartenders take on added duties during pandemic
Outside of frontline health-care workers, few people have felt the impact of the coronavirus pandemic like those who work in restaurants and bars.
Bartenders and servers have seen their hours cut, and their tips along with it. And while a handful are thriving, nearly all find themselves with expanded workloads as they’re asked to take more carryout and delivery orders and wipe down everything customers touch.
And now, the specter of renewed restrictions on bars and restaurants is looming. On Tuesday, Gov. Mike DeWine ordered almost all businesses for the next three weeks to close at 10 p.m., including bars, who have been able to stay open until 11.
Coronavirus restrictions already require bars and restaurants to space tables at least 6 feet apart, severely limiting their capacity. Games and dance floors are off limits, and customers are still wary of indoor dining, which infectious disease experts consider riskier than outdoor dining.
The rules are intended to slow the spread of a disease that’s killed more than 5,700 Ohioans since March.
Employment in Ohio’s service industry dropped by roughly half when Dewine issued a stay-at-home order in the early spring, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While that figure has gradually inched upward as the economy reopened, it’s still nowhere near pre-coronavirus levels.
“Service industry jobs are recovering now, but they have certainly not recovered to the PRE-COVID economy,” said Tian Lou, a labor economist and postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.
Rynea Parsons, a server at Anne’s Kitchen in Powell, typically makes $250 in tips on a busy weekend shift. Since the pandemic began, she now makes as little as $100 on a similar shift. Anne’s is a popular diner that sees long wait times on the weekends, but can now seat only half its usual customers.
“Financially, we struggle,” Parsons said of her family. “Luckily, I have a husband that works. If he didn’t, I don’t know what we would do.”
Parsons has four children and recently told her youngest, who is 5, that Christmas won’t be as plentiful in 2020.
“I told him the elves have to social distance too,” she said.
Manufacturing jobs were the hardest hit during the Great Recession of the late 2000s, but employment in the service industry fell only modestly, said Amanda Weinstein, an associate professor of economics at the University of
menthal threatened to break up Facebook by peeling off Instagram and Whatsapp.
“You have built terrifying tools of persuasion and manipulation, with power far exceeding the robber barons of the last Gilded Age,” Blumenthal said. “You have made a huge amount of money by strip-mining data about our private lives and promoting hate speech and voter suppression.”
He also accused Facebook of caving to pressure from conservatives and backing off increased enforcement of dangerous misinformation and voter suppression tactics before two January runoffs in Georgia that will determine who controls the Senate. Zuckerberg and Dorsey pledged to take vigorous action for the two special elections in Georgia.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, called on Facebook and Twitter to produce data showing whether they disproportionately flag or censor Republicans. Researchers have found no evidence of systematic suppression of conservative voices or viewpoints. The companies deny any politically motivated censorship.