Fox News Hosts Should Try Working One Day in a Service Industry Job Before Mocking Overworked Starbucks Employees
In between Paul Pelosi conspiracy theories and about half a dozen MyPillow ads, Jesse Watters dedicated a segment of his nightly Fox News show Tuesday to mocking a stressed-out Starbucks employee.
The employee in question, Evan (who is also an organizer for Starbucks Workers United) posted an emotional video online from his store’s back room. He says he’s a full-time student who is also scheduled to work 25 hours a week, including 8 1/2-hour shifts on both Saturdays and Sundays. That’s the part of the video Watters chooses to mock, displaying a snarky chyron reading “Starbucks worker distraught over 8 hour work day.”
In reality, what Evan describes in the video is poor management, low staffing (only four workers were scheduled for an entire busy store), and cruel customers. The video is a call for unionization, a movement that Starbucks has been working hard to crush in recent months.
The video was shared on Twitter over the weekend by MAGA mouthpiece Seb Gorka, who called Evan a “trans Barrister” (as in a British lawyer). Watters has now added to the pile-on, claiming that he himself “got where I am today” because of “hard work.” He even noted that “When I started at Fox, I wasn’t good-looking.” OK, Jesse, thanks for that info.
Now, I can’t be 100% sure that Jesse Watters has never had a food service or other low-paying public-facing job. I think that’s a pretty fair assumption, though, given that he was born into a wealthy, well-connected, media legacy family and started working at Fox News right out of college. I’m not saying he’s never had a hard job—he worked for years under Bill O’Reilly, after all—but he’s very likely never been paid $10 and hour or less to be berated by cruel customers looking to blame him for staffing issues out of his control and who definitely don’t even tip in the process.
Also, no matter how hard any of his jobs at Fox News might have been, Watters would have been covered by—you guessed it—a union.
(image: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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