The Bear and the Contradictions of Work

Hulu’s series The Bear, oddly labeled as a comedy, takes viewers inside a hectic, crowded, struggling Chicago sandwich shop that Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen Wright) inherited from his brother, Michael, who committed suicide. The store is a chaotic mess and deep in debt, but Michael’s best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and most of the long-time staffers want to keep his “system” in place. Carmy left his career as a James Beard award-winning high-end chef to try to fix things, and one of his first acts is to hire a young professionally-trained chef, Sydney (Ayo Edibri) as sous chef. The Chicago setting (city of big shoulders, hog-butcher to the world), the shop’s identification as home of the “Original Beef of Chicagoland,” and the gritty, sweaty, noisy work make for a clearly working-class story. The series has drawn acclaim for its writing, performances, and depiction of food service work. Restaurant workers have chimed in on Twitter and in comments on reviews to highlight how well The Bear captures life in the kitchen.

An old, struggling restaurant is an ideal setting for a series about work, and it proves useful for exploring how work has – and has not – changed and how workers feel about their jobs. It captures aspects of both the industrial economy that was long typical of working-class jobs and the service economy that has become dominant in the last few decades. While much has been made of the differences between the two modes, The Bear makes clear that they have much in common. Stress, noise, regimentation and surveillance, physical dangers, and economic precarity make kitchen labor a lot like a factory work.

In a New York Times Magazine essay, Carina Chocano describes the series as a commentary on the problems of many forms of contemporary work – long hours, overwhelming stress, conflicts over control, economic precarity. What we see in the shop reflects the state of an economy where everyone is “in survival mode all the time.”

For Chocano, The Bear demonstrates that “The notion that hustle will eventually pay off is an insidious pipe dream.” That dream drives the gig economy, freelancing, and entrepreneurship, but their promises are often false. The Bear highlights that tension through flashbacks showing the demeaning surveillance that Carmy encountered in elite restaurants and the contrast between Syndey’s vision of being her own boss and the challenges of running an independent catering business. Both still have nightmares about those experiences.

The tension between workers’ desire to control their labor and the efficiency of hierarchical structure, another pattern that cuts across industrial and service work, is a central theme in the series. To fix the mess of Michael’s system, Carmy assigns Sydney to implement a “brigade,” a rigidly-defined set of roles and rules that make the crowded, stressful kitchen operate something like an assembly line. Each worker has a specific responsibility, and the lines of authority are strictly enforced. Whether the brigade represents a speed up or just unwelcome regimentation, long-time workers resist. Like automobile workers at the GM Lordstown plant in the 1970s, line cooks express their disdain through sabotage — though in this they target each other rather than the shop itself.

For Sophie Gilbert, writing about The Bear in The Atlantic, the brigade highlights “the ways in which men and male-dominated cultures are set up to fail.” She views it as a form of toxic masculinity, like boardrooms and criminal gangs. Such hierarchical structures, she writes, “poison” these sites “from within.” Yet in the series, the brigade helps the shop run more smoothly. Gender is involved here, not because of the men’s struggles but because it is a young Black woman who makes the brigade work.

Yet the brigade can’t save the sandwich shop, because it faces bigger problems than chaotic operations or personal conflicts. The building that houses the restaurant is deteriorating, equipment keeps breaking down, the neighborhood is gentrifying, the pandemic disrupted business. As Chocano puts it, “The system has failed. The place is unfixable.”

Read the rest of this piece at Working-Class Perspectives.

Sherry Linkon co-directed the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University for more than a decade. She is a professor of English at Georgetown University, where she directs the American Studies Program and the Writing Program. She is also a faculty affiliate at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

John Russo is an affiliate of the Kalmonovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and the co-author of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work Memory in Youngstown.

Photo credit: courtesy Working-Class Perspectives.