let's fucking gooooo https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/chipotle-workers-fair-workweek-law-nyc

Chipotle was my first food service job in college and i didn't realize truly how exploitative that environment was until i moved on to working in different stores/restaurants... so many 8+ hour shifts for $8 an hour with no breaks

on paper any employee working an 8 hour shift got a 30 minute break but we were pressured not to do so if it was too busy, which it almost always was since it was in the middle of Pitt campus

i worked through the free burrito promo too which the execs came up with to win back public support after the E. coli scare, we worked ourselves to the bone on the line trying to make 100+ burritos in an hour. for lunch & dinner every day for a month!!

they pride themselves on "mobility" since most of their promotion is internal, however there's no way to advance in the hierarchy without working 50+ hour weeks and it only gets harder the higher up you go

the whole business model creates such a needlessly cutthroat and high-pressure environment, & wages don't reflect the difficulty of labor until AT LEAST the highest level of in-house management. of which there are 3 or 4 promotions you have to get to reach that point

we had to meet lunch & dinner rush quotas! opening shifts started at 7:30am and closing shifts ended between 1 & 2am! it was not at all uncommon to work a clopen 1-2 times a week especially if you were a manager

i could go on. that place was a nightmare. the silver lining was that i had a social life with my coworkers as a first year college student & newcomer to pgh but that aspect also overshadowed how exhausted & exploited we all were.

last thing i'll say is that the "company philosophy" of "empowerment and quality" or whatever tf buzzwords they threw in there was suspiciously and insidiously engrained in us from the very first day i started that job