Writing

Your Waitress, Your Professor Publication info: New York Times (Online) , New York: New York Times Company. Dec 18, 2014.

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ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) Why do we draw a line between blue-collar and white-collar work? FULL TEXT LAS VEGAS —ON the first day of the fall semester, I left campus from an afternoon of teaching anxious college

freshmen and headed to my second job, serving at a chain restaurant off Las Vegas Boulevard. The switch from

my professional attire to a white dress shirt, black apron and tie reflected the separation I attempt to maintain

between my two jobs. Naturally, sitting at the first table in my section was one of my new students, dining with her

parents.

This scene is a cliché of the struggling teacher, and it surfaces repeatedly in pop culture —think of Walter White in

“Breaking Bad,” washing the wheels of a student’s sports car after a full day teaching high school chemistry.

Bumping into a student at the gym can be awkward, but exposing the reality that I, with my master’s degree, not

only have another job, but must have one, risks destroying the facade of success I present to my students as one

of their university mentors.

In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those

hours in the classroom are over. A colleague in my department labeled these jobs (food and beverage, retail and

customer service —the only legal work in abundance in Las Vegas) as “survival jobs.” He tells our students they

need to learn that survival work will not grant them the economic security of white-collar careers. I never told him

that I myself had such a job, that I needed our meeting to end within the next 10 minutes or I’d be late to a seven-

hour shift serving drunk, needy tourists, worsening my premature back problem while getting hit on repeatedly.

The line between these two worlds is thinner here in Las Vegas than it might be elsewhere. The majority of my

students this semester hold part-time survival jobs, and some of them will remain in those jobs for the rest of their

working lives. About 60 percent of the college freshmen I teach will not finish their degree. They will turn 21 and

then forgo a bachelor’s degree for the instant gratification of a cash-based income, whether parking cars in Vegas

hotels, serving in high-end restaurants or dealing cards in the casinos.

In a city like Las Vegas, many customer-service jobs generate far more cash (with fewer work hours) than entry-

level, office-dwelling, degree-requiring jobs. It can be hard to convince my 19-year-old students that the latter is

more profitable or of greater personal value. My adjunct-teaching colleagues have large course loads and, mostly,

graduate-level educations, but live just above the poverty line. In contrast, my part-time work in the Vegas service

industry has produced three times more income than my university teaching. (I’ve passed up the health benefits

that come with full-time teaching, a luxury foreign to the majority of adjuncts at other universities, to make time for

my blue-collar work.)

Indeed, for a young academic like myself, the job market is bleak. I’m pursuing advanced degrees and a career in

the academy despite the lack of employment prospects, because my first and true love is learning. However, it will

take earning a doctorate —and thus several more years of work —before I can earn a sustainable income in my

chosen pursuit.

Living these two supposedly different lives, I’ve started to see their similarities. Whenever I’m trying to meet the

needs of my more difficult guests (“Do you have any smaller forks?” “You don’t carry wheat bread? What kind of

restaurant doesn’t carry wheat bread?”), I recite, along with my colleagues, the collective restaurant server mantra:

“I need a real job.” The same thought gets passed among adjuncts in my department: “I need a real teaching

position. I need to publish a book.”

I know this path takes time, and I’m trying to do it right. So why do I still experience a great feeling of shame when

clearing a student’s dirty plate? Embarrassment is not an adequate term to describe what I felt when those parents

looked at me, clearly stupefied, thinking, “This waitress teaches my child?”

It is a shame I share with many of my blue-collar colleagues, a belief that society deems our work inferior, that we

have settled on or chosen these paths because we do not have the skills necessary to acquire something better. It

is certainly a belief I held for the majority of my undergraduate experience.

But not all my restaurant co-workers are college dropouts, and none are failures. Many have bachelor’s degrees;

others have real estate licenses, freelancing projects or extraordinary musical and artistic abilities. Others are

nontraditional students, having entered the work force before attending college and making the wise decision not

to “find themselves” and come out with $40,000 in debt, at 4.6 percent interest. Most of them are parents who have

bought homes, raised children and made financial investments off their modest incomes. They are some of the

kindest, hardest-working people I know, and after three years alongside them, I find it difficult to tell my students to

avoid being like them.

My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only an academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a

dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and “intelligent” work. We expect

our teachers to teach us, not our servers, although in the current economy, these might be the same people.

If my students can imagine the possibility that choosing to work with their hands does not automatically exclude

them from being people who critically examine the world around them, I will feel I’ve done something worthwhile,

not only for those who will earn their degree, but for the majority who will not.

Brittany Bronson is an English instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. DETAILS

Subject: Teaching; Nontraditional students; Employment; Restaurants

Location: Las Vegas Nevada

Company / organization: Name: University of Nevada-Las Vegas; NAICS: 611310

Identifier / keyword: Labor and Jobs Bronson, Brittany Colleges and Universities Teachers and School

Employees Waiters and Waitresses Part-Time Employment Las Vegas (Nev)

Publication title: New York Times (Online); New York

Publication year: 2014

Publication date: Dec 18, 2014

Section: opinion

Publisher: New York Times Company

Place of publication: New York

Country of publication: United States, New York

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Last updated: 2019-04-23

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