Over the summer, I was looking for work. I’d had a temporary role as the Festival Marketing Copywriter for the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival (you can see some clips from that on my Works page) in the spring and wasn’t able to line something up for right after, leaving my only income earnings from a single shift a week bartending at a gay nightclub. Money was tight, to say the least. I decided that I would pursue full-time barista work at cafes that offered health benefits to supplement my bartending until I was able to secure a writing job elsewhere, figuring that with my four years’ barista experience and a glowing recommendation from my last cafe’s owner, I would be able to find something pretty quickly. There were, after all, quite a few such barista positions being advertised on Poached. But I didn’t account for the widespread prevalence of the ol’ bait-and-switch.

I ended up interviewing with four Seattle-based companies advertising full-time, benefitted barista work. Of these four companies, only one was actually hiring for a full-time, benefitted position. I’m sharing these stories without naming the companies because I’m not trying to invite any legal drama into my life.

75% of cafes in my very small sample were falsely advertising their open positions*

Offender 1: You’ll Always Be Able to Pick Up a Shift

This cafe was the largest of those I interviewed with, had presence in other states and its own roastery. I had a 45-minute phone call with the very charismatic and friendly hiring manager in which she gushed about the company and eagerly booked an in-person interview with me in just a couple days’ time. During the phone call, the hiring manager told me that the role was to work shifts at one, two, or three of the company’s local cafes, and I informed her that without a car, one of those locations would not work for me. At this moment, I realized that the job listing was vaguely worded:

“We are looking for someone interested in working at any of our… locations from [X] to [Y] to [Z]. Flexibility and openness to working at these different cafes is a must.”

Offering full-time work at any of the locations could be read to mean that there are full-time positions available at each of the locations and that they want to bring on people who are open to covering shifts elsewhere as needed (which is how I read it, leading me to apply) or that a new hire could potentially accrue enough hours across locations to reach full-time status (which seems to have been company’s intended meaning). I decided to go through with the in-person interview because at the two locations I would be able to get just under the full-time threshold, and the hiring manager told me that she would check to see if there would be a way to get more shifts at one of the locations, as someone might have quit without her knowing or something like that.

In the in-person interview, she confirmed upon my asking that no, there would not be a way to get me to full-time employment starting at the initial point of hire but that the shops are always needing coverage so I could get extra hours and that eventually someone would quit or reduce hours and I could swoop in and become benefitted. This was a suspiciously canned answer, and I got the sense I was being manipulated, but I resolved to think on it, as four days a week wouldn’t be bad even if it wasn’t ideal, and I did really like the coffee that this shop roasted. Ultimately I was not offered the job, which is for the best.

Initially, I gave the company the benefit of the doubt for the full-time/part-time confusion here. I am capable of misreading, and the people who write job listings are capable of being accidentally unclear. The next interviews, however, cast doubt on my original, more generous interpretation.

Offender 2: A Single Day a Week Schmearing Bagels

This bagel shop chain listed their job as a full-time Team Member and Barista position, so I applied hoping to learn in an interview that the role would mostly consist of coffee work and not so much dodging flying everything bagel seeds as I cut and schmeared bagels all shift long. I met the hiring manager at the chain’s yet-unopened new location, and we had an easy conversation in which he expressed interest in hiring me. (Unfortunately the job was going to be more bagel-focused than coffee-focused, but that’s beside the point.) I mentioned that there was another location that I also applied to, which would be an easier commute for me, and he told me that he would set up a combination interview and paid stage with the manager of that shop. A week and a half later, I arrived at this more accessible location to meet the new manager.

She was friendly, dressed in that quirky Seattle barista style (I think she wore glasses with cat-eye frames and clay avocado earrings or something), and offered me a comp coffee or bagel. We sat down at one of the free tables and within a few moments she said something to the effect of, “Now, you’re aware that this position is just for one shift a week, right?” I replied that I was not, that I had made very clear to the first manager I spoke with that I was looking for full-time work. She apologized, I ended the interview without staging, and as I was leaving with my caraway bagel with vegan schmear, she assured me that she would check with the nearby locations to see if they needed any more shifts covered; maybe we could get me to full-time after all. She never got back to me, despite my follow-up email.

“What an unfortunate lack of communication between the two managers!” I thought. But then I remembered that I had actually applied to this location’s job listing as well, and I was only applying for full-time jobs, so maybe this wasn’t just some oopsie on behalf of someone who’s literal job it was to accurately communicate hiring needs. Hmm.

Offender 3: Sorry, We Just Changed the Job Posting

This final offending cafe and roastery played things a little differently by feigning an attempt at transparency. The hiring manager cold called me for a phone interview, which went well except for when I tried, having learned my lesson (or so I thought), to confirm that the role was truly full-time with access to the company’s health benefits. Her response was that they were still working out the details of that. Okay, that seems like something to figure out before you post a job online, but she said she would find out by the time of the next interview, so I agreed to meet her and the shop manager in person.

I arrived to only the hiring manager—the shop manager was 15 minutes late—so we essentially did an informal run-through of the interview before the actual interview. When the shop manager finally came, with her center lip piercing and cool, smudged-out winged eyeliner, I asked again about the hours of this position. The hiring manager informed me that the role would be part time then apologized for not letting me know before the interview and reiterated that they just didn’t know their own need when they initially posted the listing.

In an effort to help the hiring manager diffuse the situation, the shop manager jumped in with a much more damning explanation, saying that the company doesn’t hire full time right off that bat, that employees are hired part time for a period as a sort of trial run before they can get more hours and access to benefits. The readiness with which she said this betrayed how well established this business practice was for the company.

I politely brought it to their attention that this full-time to part-time bait-and-switch seemed to be a trend in the service industry, one which—intentionally or not—their company was participating in. The two managers, of course, apologized again for this completely accidental mistake, with the hiring manager adding that she had changed the listing as soon as she learned of their true hiring need and should have reached out to me. That concluded our interview.

Before we get started with the interview, would you introduce yourself with your name and pronouns?

So, where do gender pronouns come into all this? The hiring managers from the first and second offending cafes both made sure to enquire about the pronouns I use and offer theirs in return before getting to the meat of our interviews. This is becoming increasingly common in social and professional spaces, as is listing pronouns on name tags and in email signatures. Since I moved to Seattle from Washington, DC, in August 2020, I’ve noticed that sharing gender pronouns is particularly popular here, although this could be attributed to a number of things. It could be that Seattle is a very liberal city that boasts great queer visibility and gender nonconformity in public spaces. It could be time, with pronouns having arisen as a hot topic in news and entertainment media as well as in politics in recent years. It could be both and then some. Point is, pronouns are unprecedentedly popular. And I am definitely not arguing that we shouldn’t share gender pronouns, although the practice is by no means unflawed—but that’s a topic for another day. What I am doing here is taking issue with company representatives initiating the exchange of pronouns as the entry point to a manipulative and particularly unfair negotiation between a company that needs laborers to generate revenue, hopefully for as cheap as possible, and an individual who needs income and access to healthcare to survive.

Businesses desire to portray the inclusivity of their company cultures as a way to attract a larger and more diverse pool of applicants, and there are certainly many companies that have decision-makers who genuinely care about respecting the identities of queer people. An easy (and uncostly) way to signal these values is to spend the moment that it takes to exchange pronouns with potential new hires. Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign, the US’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, recommends that companies “create a place to declare preferred name and pronouns” during the application and interview process. Being that the HRC is for many liberals the premier resource for information on US LGBTQ+ issues, many of these LGBTQ+-sympathetic companies have undoubtedly encountered this recommendation. Others need not pay a lick of attention to the HRC or any of the other advocacy organizations that make similar recommendations with the “Pronoun Debate” so ubiquitous in our culture right now. Regardless of where they picked up this practice, lots of companies now care about gender pronouns in a way that aligns with mainstream LGBTQ+ advocates’ vision for a queer-tolerant society.

Surprise, surprise: That’s not enough. In a country where queers are still poorer than their non-queer peers, the pronouns chat can easily amount to no more than lip service, particularly when companies engage in unethical hiring practices like this bait-and-switch from full-time to part-time work that keep people poor.

Three out of the four cafes I interviewed with this summer advertised full-time, benefitted positions in their online job postings then revealed in subsequent interviews that they were actually only hiring for part-time positions without benefits. Each of these three offending companies employed enough vague language, miscommunication, and/or performances of transparency to appear as categorically ethical organizations suffering from unfortunate but unavoidable human error. Maybe they are. But that three out of these four companies accidentally misrepresented their hiring needs seems to me too high a percentage for coincidence. Considered as a group, I think it’s far more likely that at least some of them, if not all of them, knew exactly what they were doing. Service workers want access to full-time work, good wages, and health insurance, so why wouldn’t companies entice us with an advertisement for compensation that makes affording life’s necessities possible then, once we’re close to securing employment, offer us something less livable knowing that the full-time, benefitted service work we seek is so hard to come by? We might just accept the worse offer out of desperation, increasing the company’s bottom line. And if one applicant doesn’t, another surely will.

This actually might be illegal under WA state law. RCW 49.44.050 states,

“Every employment agent or broker who, with intent to influence the action of any person thereby, shall misstate or misrepresent verbally, or in any writing or advertisement, any material matter relating to the demand for labor, the conditions under which any labor or service is to be performed, the duration thereof or the wages to be paid therefor, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”

…but I’m no lawyer, and I imagine proving intent is very difficult given the companies’ tactics stated above.

To connect things back to gender pronouns, two out of the three cafes I interviewed with that bait-and-switched the hours and access to benefits of their open roles sought to make their hiring practices more inclusive with interviewers asking my gender pronouns and offering theirs in return. That these companies gave the impression of acknowledging that a person’s understanding of their own gender identity is incontestable, taking precedence over normative expectations of appearance or stereotypes of behavior, can be argued as a step in the right direction. But if this veneer of progressivism is adhered to a shitty MDF board of ramped-up exploitation of employees queer or not, I would disagree with that argument. Further, if the goal of these companies is to hire more queer people but then they’re hiring those queer people for fewer hours than their stated need and with no access to benefits, those ostensibly pro-LGBTQ+ hiring practices are, in an ironic twist, actually anti-LGBTQ+. Striving to hire more of us isn’t enough; you’ve got to hire us for positions whose pay and benefits allow us to actually afford to live our queer lives.

Working class people in the US live in a state of increasing economic precarity and desperation for the stability of living wages and health insurance benefits, among other things. Some applicants in situations like those I have described will no doubt feel that they must accept the bait-and-switch against their own best interests because who knows when that next job offer will come around, and after all the company representative was reassuring that eventually some of their well-advertised benefits might become available. Oh, and the friendly, quirkily dressed manager made sure she would get my pronouns right, so at least I’ll worry a little less about being misgendered by my team while I worry about making my rent each month. In these scenarios, the powerful are using gender pronouns as yet another manipulation tactic to further exploit the subjugated, and there’s nothing progressive about that.

So to my prospective employers: Don’t ask my pronouns then offer me poverty, don’t perform respect for our identities then show us inhumanity.

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*Obviously, the sample size of four here renders this percentage statistically insignificant and inadequate for describing the general population in the sense of “75% of cafes in Seattle falsely advertise their open positions.” My small sample is still useful, however, as the anecdotes I share reveal several ways companies might try to manipulate applicants to accept positions against their best interest.