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Chinese Restaurant Workers in U.S. Face Hurdles
by Margot Adler
Morning Edition, May 8, 2007 · There are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States - more than the number of McDonald's and Taco Bells combined. Many of the workers in the kitchen are recent arrivals from China - some legal, some not - and many took on significant debts to get to the United States.
by CINDY CHANG
April 4, 2005
New York Times
The Chinese restaurants on Eldridge Street just below Canal do a brisk lunchtime business with their fish-ball soup, duck noodles and dumplings laced with leeks. But the commodity exchanged most in this part of Chinatown is labor. Employment agencies line the narrow block, and even the one shoe store doubles as a jobs center.
Lacking English signs to mark them, the Eldridge Street agencies are impenetrable to non-Chinese speakers. Yet they supply Chinese restaurants throughout the Eastern United States with a limitless stream of cheap labor. An immigrant can walk into an agency on Eldridge Street one day, and board a bus bound for a job in Ohio or Minnesota the next.
"One of the things that's probably true is that the Chinese restaurant in your community or your suburb - there's a chance that person working there got their job in Chinatown," said Robert Weber, director of the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative, an economic development project. Since the Chinatown economy slowed after Sept. 11, many more of the listings have been for out-of-state jobs.
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: October 2, 2005
AT the beginning of every week, a steady stream of Chinese restaurant workers files into the nest of Chinatown employment agencies clustered under the Manhattan Bridge: young men with spiky hair barely out of their teens, smooth-skinned girls who still giggle about their crushes and stocky older men who left their families behind in China years ago.
The workers walk in and out, in and out, checking each of the dozens of dusty single-room agencies. They focus on the white boards and walls of Post-it notes that list the hundreds, if not thousands, of job openings available across the country each week: kitchen helpers, chefs, waitresses, telephone answerers, deliverymen who can drive, deliverymen who don't need to drive.
Among the job seekers one Monday late last month was Xue Qingxi, a 38-year-old immigrant with large, friendly eyes and a bright green T-shirt who arrived in New York City the day before, towing his belongings in two small black rolling suitcases. Feeling it was time for a change, he had just left his job as a cook in a Chinese restaurant in North Carolina. Where, exactly, in North Carolina, he wasn't sure. ''It's all rural,'' he said dismissively. After renting a bed for the night for $15, he was wandering in and out of the employment agencies the next afternoon, looking for his next job. ''I want to leave tonight,'' he said.