What was the lowest point of 2020 for the average restaurant worker in downtown Charleston?
Did it happen right after Governor Henry McMaster’s order on March 17, closing restaurant cafeterias across the state, leaving tens of thousands of hospital employees unemployed? In those days when restaurant workers spent hours waiting at the unemployed office, using the wait to devise strategies like stretching the final paychecks to cover the meals they expected to eat at work. Were those the worst?
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Was the nadir sometime in May, when customers rushed back to the restaurants with no masks or concern for the welfare of their servers? Was that when customers insisted that their servers remove their masks so they could see their smiles?
Or was it specifically on May 30, when King Street was engulfed by vandalism and violence, forcing restaurant workers to hide in courtyards and barricade themselves in refrigerators?
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Many restaurant workers would say they are lurking in the depths now, with cases of COVID popping up in the kitchens and their bosses with no legal obligation to disclose positive tests or address the problem with employees.
Obviously, “many” is less than at the beginning of the pandemic. Statistics are not yet available, but restaurant workers in downtown Charleston say their colleagues are now fleeing an industry they thought was their home for life.
It doesn’t get much lower than that.
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