Nick Bondi is thankful for the people who walk into Jerry’s Sandwiches during the COVID-19 pandemic. They bring business to the Lincoln Square restaurant that pays his salary and helps him support his family.

Bondi also feels low-grade annoyance with some of them.

“You’re really happy there are customers there and they chose your place to eat and you’re making money,” he said. “At the same time, you’re mad at these people for not staying home and protecting your health. It’s complicated.”

There isn’t just one thing that makes restaurant work difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s the customers who don’t follow mask mandates and offer an eye roll — or worse — when reminded. It’s the bosses — not all of them, but certainly some — who prioritize maximizing business above all else.

It’s the fact that most restaurant workers aren’t yet eligible for vaccines, and likely won’t be until late March at the earliest. There are the personal feelings that it’s not safe to dine indoors, despite livelihoods that depend on it. And of course, there’s the endless specter of exposure to COVID-19.

Ultimately, it is all of the above: the crushing weight of an already stressful job with an extra dose of anxiety. The stress has only grown as restrictions have continued to ease since Chicago returned to indoor dining in late January: from 25% capacity or 25 people per room, whichever is less, to 40% or 50 people per room.

Bondi hasn’t been out to eat in nearly a year. He doesn’t think it’s safe. So why do his customers go out? Why do they sit there, indoors, masks off, in the midst of a pandemic? He regularly serves people who appear to be congregating outside each other’s pods or bubbles — such as a group of six women who had brunch at Jerry’s one recent weekend.

“It’s hard not to have contempt for that, at least from my point of view,” he said. “But I’m a professional and I try to treat everyone as well as I can.”

Bondi said he has taken to holding his breath as often as possible when serving tables, especially since about one-third of customers don’t wear masks when seated but not eating or drinking — as they’re supposed to when dining out under current regulations.

“It’s uncomfortable, but once you’ve done it a couple days, it feels routine,” he said. “It’s just when you’re finished and sitting at home thinking, ‘Logically, am I putting myself in danger to do this job?’ the answer is unequivocally yes.”

In response to recent concerns, a group of restaurant workers and labor organizers are launching a Chicago chapter of the Restaurant Organizing Project, a national effort to raise the voices of the millions of people working in the industry. The group eyes an official launch in the middle of March, starting with surveys to identify core issues of importance.

One of the organizers, Christopher King, launched a similar effort last spring, Chicago Restaurant Workers, based on concerns that “policies at the beginning of COVID were focused around businesses with no worker input,” King said. However, he said, it was difficult to gain momentum, which underscored the challenges of organizing such a large and disparate group of workers.

Among his biggest gripes has been groups such as the Illinois Restaurant Association urging government officials to keep indoor dining open, even in a limited fashion, before vaccines were available. The IRA has since advocated for restaurant employees to be vaccinated as essential workers as part of the 1b group currently eligible for shots. Some politicians have also endorsed the idea.

But King said the well-being of restaurant workers should have been the guiding principle from the start.

“It’s awful that the IRA was pushing for all these restaurants to be open and, at the time, they weren’t pushing for workers to get vaccinated,” he said, noting that the vaccines weren’t approved at the time.

In a statement, Sam Toia, president and CEO of the Illinois Restaurant Association, said the organization has consistently advocated for indoor dining because “restaurants are, and have always been, one of the most highly-regulated segments when it comes to health and safety.”

“When the pandemic hit, the industry quickly and strictly enforced all necessary public health guidelines — implementing face coverings, social distancing, PPE, sanitizing and more — in order to maintain safe environments for their team members and guests,” he said. “The IRA has called for a measured approach to reopening indoor dining, since publicly available data has supported responsible steps in that direction.”

King, however, said bars and restaurants should not serve indoors until workers are vaccinated, and should have been subsidized by the government in the meantime to make up for financial losses.

“They need an economic bailout — we all do,” he said. “I don’t want businesses to die by any means, but I don’t want people to die for businesses.”

King, who worked for five years at Lula Cafe as a server and busser, said the challenges for restaurant workers have only become more pronounced with the combination of cold weather and January’s return to indoor dining.

“Once winter hit and there were still people going out, customers got worse and more obstinate,” he said.

Meanwhile, restaurant advocacy groups continue to push for higher levels of indoor seating.

‘It puts us in a terrible position’

Illinois lost 31% of its leisure and hospitality workers in the past year, dropping from 609,400 workers in December 2019 to 416,000 in December 2020, according to data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, many of the jobs that remain have become more difficult versions of themselves: shifting customer bases, plummeting wages and questionable health procedures and protections.

Restaurant workers and their advocates say the conversation about reopening has largely focused on customers and business owners, leaving servers, bussers, cooks and shift managers largely as afterthoughts.

“There’s an invisibility of the restaurant worker, and that invisibility was there before COVID. But COVID, like it has with everything else, has shaken the foundation and exposed the cracks,” said Laura Louise Green, founder of Healthy Pour, a hospitality industry mental health advocacy group launched in 2019.

Restaurant workers have long been overlooked, she said, all the way down to one of the core industry tenets: “The customer is always right.” While she said she believes many restaurant owners don’t intend to harm their workers, “the dehumanization of restaurant workers is what we’re seeing right now.”

Healthy Pour has surveyed restaurant workers since last spring about working through the pandemic. Green is still formulating results, but said a final section, where workers are able to add additional thoughts, has been eye-opening.

“I had to stop reading because they were so upsetting,” Green said. “The desperation, the sadness, the struggles with substance use.”

In interviews with the Tribune, restaurant workers say they are grappling with both emotional strain and the daily mechanics of working through the pandemic.

Multiple workers said they have been offered the chance not to work if they don’t feel comfortable, but have also been told employment may not be available when they do feel ready — hence, they continue to work. They also worry unemployment payments from the state may be affected if they refuse to work when given the chance.

Those working say employers are not always sufficiently communicative about positive COVID-19 cases on staff and don’t always close for thorough cleanings after a positive case is identified. (Some restaurants, such as Logan Square’s Longman & Eagle, cited the high cost of closing and cleaning after positive staff cases as reason to close for the winter.)

“To be frank, I hate that we’re open,” said the general manager of a River North bar and restaurant who asked not to be named to protect her job. “From an operator standpoint, I understand why we are open and fully support us being open, but I wish we had the opportunity not to be.”

That opportunity, she said, would come in the form of government support such as grants, tax forgiveness and rent and mortgage abatement, which would allow businesses to stay closed.

“If people can go out, people are still going to go out,” she said. “It puts us in a terrible position: Close down because it’s the safe thing to do, or stay open to let people who aren’t going to follow the rules have a place to go.”

‘It’s a hard time to find jobs’

There have always been difficult customers, many restaurant workers said. Some, especially those who frequent neighborhood spots, have been particularly respectful during the pandemic. But others seems to operate as if restaurants are the places to break free from their pandemic frustrations.

Eric Anderson, 32, a member of the Chicago Restaurant Organizing Project and a bartender at Italian restaurant Ciccio Mio in the River North neighborhood, said the pandemic has made “people become their truest selves.”

“People who were generous and respectful before COVID are mega-generous and respectful, and people who were jerky before, it feels amplified now,” Anderson said. “A lot of people seem to think we’re making these rules or impeding on their experience. It’s easy to make restaurant workers the scapegoat.”

He said he endures the occasional sneer or smirk when asking customers to wear masks, including one who said, “Cool, thanks Pritzker,” in response to such a request last summer.

Anderson laughed while recounting the story — “That was one of my favorites,” he said — but said such interactions are wearying, especially with his personal belief that it’s too soon to be open for indoor dining. The strain led him to ask to be transferred to a back-of-house position spearheading the restaurant’s cocktails-to-go program.

“It’s hard to pin it on one specific thing that wears you down; it’s just the new normal climate in a restaurant,” he said. “It’s just a lot of people feeling like, ‘Man, I did not sign up for this.’”

Lynnae Voogd, 33, who works 55 hours a week at two large chain restaurants downtown, said her customer base has shifted over the past year: from many business regulars who tip well to a more varied crowd that doesn’t seem concerned by the pandemic.

“You’re constantly having to argue with people about masks,” she said. “You always get people treating you not the greatest — it’s just part of it — but it’s gotten significantly worse. You still have people trying to walk in without masks, but at least (the restaurants) enforce that.”

However, she said, the vast majority of customers remove their masks once seated and don’t put them on until they leave..

Meanwhile, Voogd said, she is earning half the money she made before the pandemic because business is down at both restaurants.

“I’m working in a pandemic, making half what I used to, and we can’t even follow the most basic rules,” she said.

Voogd — also among those launching the Chicago Restaurant Organizing Project — estimated that 5% of customers wear masks when ordering, which is one of the reasons she feels like an afterthought to many of the people she serves.

But hardest, she said, are the personal sacrifices. Before the pandemic, she saw her father, who lives in the suburbs, about once a month.

“I don’t see my dad anymore,” Voogd said. “I don’t see most of my family and most of my friends. That’s a personal decision, I know. But knowing I’m around strangers all day and I could be exposed, I choose not to do those things.”

In many cases, there’s no single solution for the issues weighing on restaurant workers. Even when restaurants were ordered closed for indoor dining in late October, countless businesses flouted the order. Some law enforcement agencies announced they wouldn’t enforce the rule.

Since the spring, Chicago’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection has conducted regular compliance checks of bars and restaurants. But enforcement appears to have had varying degrees of impact.

An employee of a Chicago restaurant cited twice by BACP, who did not want to be named or have the restaurant named for fear of being fired, said the restaurant has repeatedly violated guidelines despite the two citations. The worker said the restaurant seated customers indoors when forbidden, regularly violates capacity restrictions and lets customers sit at tables and at the bar without wearing masks.

The server said they “put the mask on and don’t take it off for anything” while working. Employees don’t complain to management for fear of losing their jobs.

“Nobody says a word,” the employee said. “They put their heads down and they work.”

The server said they refused to work weekend shifts because there were “too many people and you’re too exposed.”

The person said they know of four co-workers who tested positive for the virus and believe they worked with infected staffers. If a worker has had symptoms but no test results, the person has been kept on the schedule, the worker said.

“If somebody gets sick, they don’t tell people,” the person said. “We just know because we hear rumors and the person disappears from the schedule.”

The stressors lead to an obvious question: Why stay in the job? The answers vary. Money, of course. Restaurant work is what they like to do. It’s what they’re good at. And there may not be many other options.

“It’s a hard time to find jobs, so I don’t think anyone wants to lose their job,” the restaurant worker who did not want to be identified said.

That said, most restaurant workers said they have a likely breaking point. Bondi said he would consider quitting if Jerry’s allowed people to sit at the bar, where he spends much of his time. Bar seating is allowed with 6 feet of distance between parties, but Jerry’s doesn’t allow it due to health concerns.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable being that close to a single group of people for an extended period of time,” Bondi said.

He said he also might reevaluate his job if a new strain of COVID-19 turned out to be more contagious, aggressive and widespread.

But Bondi said he is starting to feel more comfortable during his shifts. In late February, thanks to his second job as a grocery store worker, he was finally able to get a vaccination.

jbnoel@chicagotribune.com