The Sad Tale Of Bonnie Kimball

This happened last week up in New Hampshire. This story is a powerful lesson in just how much “low level, unskilled” workers mean to large corporations. Here's a time-line.

Bonnie Kimball was a cafeteria worker in a high school in New Hampshire. She was a “lunch lady.”

(Mascoma Valley Regional High School, 27 Royal Road, Canaan, New Hampshire 03741)

The food service, including the lunch ladies themselves, was provided by Cafe Services. At the time of the incident, Cafe Services was negotiating with the school district to renew the contract. The new one year contract was ultimately signed, with the district agreeing to pay Cafe Services $560,000.

(Cafe Services, 749 E. Industrial Park Drive, Dept. CS, Manchester, New Hampshire 03109, Telephone: (877) 375-3246)

Mascoma is a small school in a rural area, and the children are not rich. Parents put money in a lunch account, and the children's lunches are deducted from the running total. It happens sometimes that students have more on their trays than there is money in the account. Ms. Kimball's immediate supervisor instructed her that because of the contract negotiations, if any kids come up short, just let it go. Tell the kid to tell his mom to build the account back up and we'll deduct the money owed later on. That makes business sense. Let's not piss off the school or the parents when we're setting up this big deal for next year.

It happened that a kid presented at Ms. Kimball's register with too much on his tray. Ms. Kimball did as she was instructed. She told the kid he owed $8, and please tell your mom to make it good. And she let the kid go, with the extra food, to eat his lunch.

Somehow, unsurprisingly, there was a snitch in the room, a “representative” of Cafe Services, probably what we'd call a “loss prevention” agent. He witnessed this whole thing and reported Ms. Kimball to the company.

The next day, the kid brought in the money owed and brought the account current.

After all of that, on the same day, Bonnie Kimball was fired.

Cafe Services is a huge corporation, with multiple very large contracts throughout New England. Their website is glossy. But now we know two additional things about them. For one thing, their management is so inefficient that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The lunch ladies' immediate supervisor gave them specific instructions, but the loss prevention guy didn't get the memo. For another thing, Bonnie was fired for one small act of kindness that didn't cost the company A FUCKING DIME. The money was in the till when she was fired.

Bonnie Kimball looks like a nice woman. She seems to me to be the kind of lunch lady that the kids would like. Someone like that is an asset to the school. You'd be surprised. Many times things happen to students, things that make them uncomfortable, and they might tell the lunch lady because she seems much more sympathetic than her teachers. From her photo, I wouldn't be surprised if Bonnie has children of her own, and that she was very happy to have that job. But she gets no consideration at all, no one at Cafe Services (contact info above) even cared to look into it. They got a report from the snitch, and Bonnie got the ax. Some MBA genius learned that in school. (I'm only kidding! An MBA is actually a guarantee that the recipient IS NOT A GENIUS. Like George W. Bush, “I went to Harvard, and all I got was this useless MBA!” Check his business career before you accuse me of being overly harsh.)

This is what we mean to them. Nothing, we mean nothing to them. All of the old covenants between labor and management are long since dead and buried in concrete slabs. If someone were to really examine the business methods of Cafe Services, they'd probably find that the company pays the absolute minimum in wages, provides the absolute minimum in benefits, and bends over backwards to squeeze every possible nickel out of every employee at Bonnie's level. I'd be very surprised if she got any vacation at all, just school holidays maybe. Health insurance? Dubious. How many hours do they offer her? Just below the cut-off for full time? Like thirty-one hours a week? Does she work as a cashier in a gas station at night to keep food on the table for her own children? Can she even afford health insurance?

I have provided the contact info for the school and Cafe Services in case anyone would like to write them a letter expressing their disapproval. Or even better, ridicule, or moral condemnation. I should have included the address for the Manchester Guardian as well, but you can find that easily enough. These bastards should know what we think of them.