Low pay, intimidation, and harassment are common at PP. - Teacher Project Place Employee Review

Respectful and supportive colleagues Friendly supervisors

Salary: non-directors are not paid well.

the clients; working at Roxbury Community College and the Reggie Lewis Center

I was hired as a kitchen supervisor in the Working Opportunities For Women program, and told during two interviews that I’d really be needed in 1.) daily kitchen work production, cafeteria and event catering at Roxbury Community College, and 2.) in working with our clients—women coming from different varieties of hardship, and trying to enter the workforce in kitchens—in learning how to follow and implement recipes, and to produce high volume results for daily college cafeteria customers and concessions at the Reggie Lewis Center. I happily accepted—and the women I worked WITH remain the best thing about this program. The women I worked FOR—collectively, a bunch of smug, white, mostly college-educated managerial people who use their good intentions as an excuse to be completely clueless about how to run a kitchen cleanly or produce ServSafe-compliant fresh meals—were an utter nightmare of inefficiency, who wasted unbelievable amounts of time in nitpicking and unnecessarily disciplining the language and behavior of the clients (mostly women of color) and dropping them from this program if they displayed what was vaguely described in circulated evaluations as a “bad attitude,” or “spoke too loudly” or “used inappropriate language” during shifts, or had the temerity to make themselves an off-menu sandwich to feed themselves during or after a shift. I was hired with 6 years of experience in high volume bakeries and kitchens, and a 20-year career in teaching, but if you accept this position, recognize that you will not actually be able to supervise, or train women for kitchen and restaurant work, while utilizing any kind of accumulated knowledge and experience. An uninformed, seniority-obsessed manager with no real food service, cook, or cheffing experience will get in the way, and actively inhibit new recipes, from-scratch meals, and any education from taking place. The goal here seems to be to train women for fast-food work, and in prepping heavily-processed foods, but ironically to train them BADLY for these responsibilities: any of the clients I met would have learned more about clean, organized food production from a first day as a McDonald’s trainee than they learned from three months with this smug, clueless, well-intentioned but fundamentally petty and condescending program.