Working for a Better Life

By Johanna Barr

Shantel Williams. Photo: Johanna Barr.

Whoever said New York City was a big, anonymous place where no one knows anyone else has never walked down Broadway in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with Shantel Williams. In the three blocks between the Papa John’s where she works as a manager and Terry’s Cafe & Grill, the Spanish-American restaurant where she’s going for dinner, she greets no fewer than six people. She seems to know everyone: her co-worker, a local DJ, the guy who works in the bike shop. She sees a teenage boy coming out of a store on the corner. “You see that kid? I’ve known him since he was in a stroller,” she says. “Guess what grade he’s in now? 10th grade!”

She usually gets her dinner at the taco truck down the street from Papa John’s, stopping there before her evening shift, but it rained earlier and the taco truck hasn’t arrived yet. She walks in the door at Terry’s and leans her bike, which is tricked out with brake lights, turn signals and a rubber-band harness for her portable speaker, against the wall near her table. She orders a cheesesteak with a side of fries, and pauses for a moment, before deciding to order a lemonade as well.

Williams ordered a cheesesteak and fries at Terry’s Cafe & Grill. Photo: Johanna Barr.

Williams, 32, was born in Brooklyn and has lived in various neighborhoods in the city for most of her life. She’s worked at Papa John’s since 1999. She started in Atlanta, where her family had relocated and where she went to high school, and transferred to the location where she currently works in 2003.

“Everybody in fast food says, ‘Oh, I’m not going to stay there,’ but at the end of the day, nobody has an idea where they’re going to be in their life,” she says. “That’s the thing with this fast food situation. You say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be here for that long,’ but you end up there for a long time.”

Williams is the only female manager at the restaurant. She earns just above minimum wage, $8.50 an hour. She says the male managers she works with make more than she does, and she doesn’t know why.

“You work all them hours and you see the check, and you feel like, ‘All that, for this?’” she says. “No matter how much you earn, no matter what you do, you know you can’t pay for this, you can’t pay for that.”

The Papa John’s where Williams works. Photo: Johanna Barr.

But she loves her coworkers, and she also loves pizza. “I got sick of it for awhile, when I was a rookie in the pizza game,” she says. Now she likes having it with all the toppings — the works.

Though Williams wishes she could work every day, she’s only on the schedule for three days a week, a total of 24 hours. On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, she grabs dinner near Papa John’s before clocking in for the night shift. On her days off, she cooks at home. She lives with her grandmother, aunt and uncle, but she usually just cooks for herself, since she’s always on the go. Her favorite things to make are steaks, shrimp and spaghetti.

Williams is involved in Fast Food Forward, a labor-backed coalition to improve working conditions for people like her. The campaign has two stated goals: to unionize restaurant employees in New York City chain restaurants, and to raise the minimum wage to $15.

“There’s a lot going into this. It’s not just us chanting. It’s about our livelihood, and what we represent,” she says. “We represent people of pride. We like to have nice things, and live life normally, and we just want our community to understand why we’re here every day and what we’re about.

“We want to change the poverty wage,” she says. “We want to abolish it. We all have a common goal.”

Williams, pictured outside Papa John’s. Photo: Johanna Barr.

Williams hopes to go to college some day and study video editing. She raps under the name Bed-Stuy Diamond, and she shoots music videos for herself and her friends in her spare time, editing them on Final Cut Pro and posting them online.

But for now, she’s focused on the campaign. And she says she’s optimistic that it will lead to real change.

“I don’t even feel like we’re going to win,” she says. “I know we’re going to win.”

See Shantel Williams’ recipe here.

Johanna Barr