About 20 Cosmos Pizza and Grill waitresses went on strike starting Halloween night. They refused to show up to work because they weren’t receiving the right amount of tips, said the waitresses boycotting the restaurant. Three of those who participated in the strike have been fired, including one Syracuse University student, said Danielle Van Vamer, one of the waitresses who went on strike.

Eileen Roach, the SU student fired by Cosmos, said she’s dissatisfied with how the restaurant’s management treated her and fellow employees.

‘We are valued employees, and we deserve what we’re rightfully owed,’ she said. ‘It was also a message to upper management to show if we’re not going to get paid then we’re not going to come to work.’

Waitresses either did not show up to work or did not answer their phones when Cosmos called on Halloween. They also wrote a letter to the owner, Demo Stathis, explaining their reasons for the strike, Roach said.

The waitresses believe Vivian Alexander, a day manager of the pizzeria, does not distribute their tips properly, Van Vamer and other waitresses said. The cash and credit card tips are supposed to be pooled together during a shift and given to the wait staff equally. Alexander doesn’t do that, they said.

Stathis said his waitresses received the tips they earned, and the tips are properly pooled, counted, recorded and divided.

‘Vivian handles the help quite well,’ Stathis said of his daytime manager. ‘I don’t have any problem at all with her. My feeling on this is that you’ve got a couple disgruntled employees who are trying to slander the restaurant.’

Craig Watters, a professor in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, said the nature of the restaurant business breeds this kind of dispute between wait staffs and owners.

‘I think there’s always going to be an issue,’ Watters said. ‘Where you find a pool of tips, and a small pool of tips, you’re always going to find an issue. It’s an issue of we want more, we need more, and what are you going to do about it?’

Watters added that he thinks allegations of cheating employees out of appropriate wages – particularly tips – goes on in virtually every restaurant. ‘It’s part of the restaurant business. They deal with it.’

Stathis said the complaints are from ex-employees trying to get back at his restaurant. He also said only three waitresses failed to show up to work on Halloween and there was no mass-strike by his wait staff.

‘We had three girls, no show no call,’ Stathis said. ‘I don’t call it a strike. There’s no union here.’

But several waitresses said a majority did participate. Van Vamer, Alexis Luke and Roach said they were fired Nov. 2. Luke previously complained about the day manager to Stathis, who told Luke he would look into it.

‘Nothing ever happened,’ Luke said. ‘And because of that we all pretty much got sick of it.’

Luke said tips to a waitress are important because they compensate for slim hourly wages those in the restaurant industry get paid.

‘That’s what we base our whole spending money on,’ she said. Van Vamer said when she first started working at Cosmos in August, she would take home $80 to $100 a night, but that changed after she continued to work there.

‘All of a sudden, I was making $30-$35, maybe $50,’ she said. Cosmos pays their cashiers $4.60 per hour, Roach said.

Waitresses in New York make between $4.60 and $5.40 per hour, because tips are expected to be included in their final pay, according to the New York State Department of Labor Web site.

The underlying source of the problem might not be Cosmos ownership or the waitresses, said Watters, the professor in Whitman. ‘It’s that under-tipping clientele that decides that the loose change from paper money is enough.’

adbrown03@syr.edu

Published on November 9, 2008 at 12:00 pm