Waffle House Workers, At the Front Lines of Disasters, Demand More

Jamal Gleason, 25, practically grew up at Waffle House. He remembers tagging along as his mother clocked in for her 7a.m. shifts at a location in Cayce, S.C.. He’d kill time before school by chatting with her regulars, who in turn kept an eye on him and his siblings. Now Gleason works at the same Waffle House where he spent all those frantic mornings as a kid. His mother is still there, too, slinging the same hash browns and pouring the same strong black coffee. 

Earlier this month, anxieties across the Southeast flared as Hurricane Helene gathered strength just off the coast. State officials were aware that South Carolina was in its path and made preparations, while many residents evacuated. But the intensity of the storm still came as a surprise, leaving swaths of the state without electricity, water or power. 

Gleason’s mother, however, went to work as usual that morning.

The power was already out, so she and her coworkers worked by candlelight for as long as they could, serving a limited menu and doing what they could to help the frightened people who streamed through the door. After they left, the store manager and a relief manager who’d come in to assist during the storm kept the location running themselves. ​“They did maybe 1,800 [customers] with no power, just candlelight,” Gleason says. ​“When I came in for the second shift at 2p.m., when I walked through the door, it was like God said, ​‘Let there be light,’ and the lights came back on!”

Even with power restored, he says, the situation remained ​“nerve-wracking.” Customers who had just lost everything — or were afraid that they still might — took out their emotions on the workers and complained about the limited menu. Nevertheless, for days afterwards, they kept on coming. There were precious few alternatives, as most other restaurants and stores remained closed. As the only server (“salesperson” in Waffle House parlance) working the floor, Gleason could barely keep his own head above water. 

“Every day, I did 2,000 plus,” he says. ​“I was exhausted. Everybody stared at me, like I was just supposed to make things better, and I didn’t know what to do. I’m not the savior. I’m not the Messiah. I know why y’all here. Y’all know why I’m here. I’m trying to accommodate everybody, but at one point it just was too much.”

The hectic situation at Gleason’s store has calmed down, but Helene’s aftermath continued to impact his community and his customers. For days, locals whose homes (and kitchens) were damaged by the storm still come to his Waffle House for meals, to charge their phones, to fill up on water, to grab to-go cups of milk for their kids, or just to sit somewhere brightly lit and friendly for a couple of hours.

Gleason was happy he could provide that for them, but admits it is frustrating for workers like him to see the lack of respect and acknowledgement that he and other service workers receive from their employers and the public writ large, even after stepping up during a literal disaster.

“We were really providing so much for the community, and people do not think about that,” he tells me. ​“They belittle it, they downplay it, as if it’s not a lifesaver, and it literally was.” 

Endless ​“Waffle House Fight” memes and hours of video footage of carb-fueled brawls make light of the matter, but for the people who actually work there, though, there’s nothing funny about the prospect of having to handle drunk, disorderly or violent customers with no backup. ​“It’s not necessarily that you have to know how to fight, but you have to be tough,” Gleason sighs. ​“Waffle House is not for the weak at all. They will eat you up and spit you out if you let them. … People and alcohol don’t mix. They come in belligerent, they come in irate, they come in just being disrespectful, and they feel like it’s owed to them. We’re supposed to just take it, and it’s unacceptable.” 

She didn’t feel she had much of a choice. ​“If you don’t show up for those shifts, you can actually get in trouble or get fired because they’re considered emergency situations,” she explains. ​“Your job kind of depends on it; you have to be in there, and then once you’ve done it, there is no recognition.” Giede has chronic bronchitis, and had already noticed smoke and a distinct odor in the air when she left her house earlier that day. She wore a mask to protect herself, but it could only do so much. After the news broke, her location on Flat Shoals Road stayed open but moved to a limited, takeout-only menu. Cranky customers who saw that the restaurant was open and assumed that meant everything was normal took out their disappointment on her and her coworkers.

“The customers are angry they’re not getting what they want,” she explains. ​“When it’s an extreme situation like that, everybody’s nerves are on edge, the customers blame the servers, and we end up making less because of it. I had to leave early on Tuesday because it had got so bad I could barely take any orders, I couldn’t breathe, and from the time I’d got there at 6:30 a.m. that morning until 12:30 p.m., I made $12 [in tips].”

Days after that shift, Giede was still struggling with her breathing. After six hours of work and at a base wage of $3 an hour, she had taken home a grand total of $30 — before tax.

She’s been working at Waffle House on and off for the past decade, and experiences like that have only hardened her resolve to bring about change. This wasn’t even her first disaster. Years ago, when she was still new to the company, a tornado swept through her neighborhood. As she stared out the restaurant window at the dark sky, debris flew by. No customers were coming in, but she was told she had to stay in the building. ​“I arrived home that morning and there was a tree through half of my house,” she recalls. She was working the second and third shifts at the time, so there was little time to deal with it. ​“I would have had to be back at work at two o’clock that afternoon.”

That memory must have been at the top of her mind when a coworker told her about the USSW last year; she eagerly jumped right in. ​“These corporations don’t realize what us on the bottom are going through,” she says. ​‘I’m a single mom, and my nieces are coming into the workforce, and I don’t want them to have to deal with this same kind of stuff that we’re dealing with as women, as minorities, as just humans in general. We need to be treated better, and it’s time that it happened.”

As the climate crisis intensifies and extreme weather events become even more frequent, Waffle House workers like Jamal Gleason and Katie Giede will continue to be thrust out onto the front lines of disaster after disaster. Waffle House is many things — a roadside institution, a dependable purveyor of waffles, FEMA’s favorite restaurant, a comforting sight after a long road trip, a deeply American inside joke — but above all, it is a $4 billion company that can absolutely afford to properly compensate the people who make all those damn waffles in even the most extreme conditions.

“People treat it like it’s a joke, ​‘Oh, if Waffle House is closed, you should be scared,’ but these are real people with real lives and real families that they’re forcing to still be inside these businesses, just so they can try to make a profit out of these situations,” Giede emphasizes. She hopes that she and her fellow USSW members will continue to be able to push the company in the right direction — and to win the respect they so deeply deserve.

“It’s not a joke to us,” she says. ​“It might be funny to you, but we’re literally out here fighting for our lives and for our families.”