Will This Restaurant Owner Offering Paid Leave Spur Change in the Hospitality Industry?

Will Meyer’s move herald more paid leave for restaurant workers? (Photo: Getty Images)

Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group has just announced that beginning next year it will offer full-time employees one of the most generous parental leave packages in the hospitality industry: four weeks at 100 percent of wages, plus another four weeks at 60 percent. While this is less than many office jobs give employees, and less than the 12 weeks presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is proposing, it’s considered quite generous for the restaurant industry.

According to Eater, the USHG policy would cover both mothers and fathers who have worked full-time for the company (whose properties include famous New York City restaurants Blue Smoke, the Modern, and Gramercy Tavern) for a year or more. Meyer’s Shake Shack chain is a separate company and would not be subject to these changes. Last year, Oregon restaurant chain the Laughing Planet Café also made headlines by offering 12 weeks of paid leave to full-time employees and a partially paid leave to part-time workers.

The move not only eases the financial burden for families taking time off, it also removes one of the obstacles preventing many women from staying in the industry and achieving higher positions if they also want to have a family.

“Six percent of the most prominent chefs are women, and I don’t think that’s acceptable,” Erin Moran, USGH’s chief culture officer, told Eater earlier this year, when the company was still testing out the plan on its home office staff. “We need to do more.”

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires employers to give new mothers in full-time jobs 12 weeks of unpaid leave with the guarantee that their position or an equivalent one will still be there when they return. Still, many feel that the culture of the restaurant industry punishes employees for taking time off. Which raises the question of whether things would truly change if yet another leave law were put in place.

“Male or female, the term that comes to the top of my head is machismo,” Kevin, who’s worked in restaurant management in Philadelphia and Orlando, told Yahoo Beauty. “No one that I ever saw who had children was ever out. If the kids were sick, they had someone else take care of them. They were there working because they had to be. Especially in the kitchen, it’s that culture of ‘You show up and you work hard.’”

Photo: Getty Images

A waitress from Florida who had a child recently told us that she had to return to work in order to make sure the managers continued to give her good shifts. “[Y]our seniority goes away,” she said. “You’re not going to get the good sections. You’re not going to get the good tips. … A good shift and a good station is the difference between $40 and $200.”

Related: “I Was Pushed Out of My Job for Having a Baby”

For chefs, taking leave means risking that your replacement could somehow damage your reputation. “Everyone’s always in fear of a review, as social media and Yelp grow, and everybody is afraid of the feedback that they’ll get if they’re not in the kitchen,” Kevin said.

Then there’s the complaint of the small business owners, who don’t have the benefit of USHG’s financial resources. “As a small restaurant owner, I can’t afford to provide paid maternity leave,” chef Alexandra Raij told Open for Business. “The margins are too small and the reliance on the human hand is too strong. It would sink the restaurant. You can’t just disappear and not make food for three months.”

In the absence of paid-leave laws, there are still plenty of parents who remain in hospitality, of course. They work in shifts, letting one parent work while the other stays home, if there’s no family around to provide late-night childcare. “They just make it work,” as one waitress in Brooklyn put it to Yahoo Beauty, with a shrug.

The restaurant employees we spoke to made one thing clear: You need more than those first few weeks of time off to get any kind of work/life balance in this business.

“For me, I wouldn’t have left my baby to go back to the crazy, stressful hours of the hospitality business,” Sarah, a former New York restaurant manager, told Yahoo. “I worked 60 to 70 hours a week, a lot of those being very late hours. And there is no part-time option to being a general manager of a restaurant.”

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