Attitude Mama

Pat describes a waitress as an Attitude mama. From what Pat describes, I see an example of alienation:

Marx went on to show that the specific form of labour characteristic of bourgeois society, wage labour, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. Since wage workers sell their labour power to earn a living, and the capitalist owns the labour process, the product of the workers’ labour is in a very real sense alien to the worker. It is not her product but the product of the capitalist. The worker makes a rod for her own back.

Once a product enters the market, no-one has any control of it, and it sets off on a course which appears to be governed by supra-human laws.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, the waitress has sold her time to the cafe owner for a certain amount of money. All she has to do is the minimum in order to keep the cafe owner employing her. If she does fantastic service and brings more customers into the cafe, the cafe owner reaps most of the benefit. She may get some of that benefit in a future pay rise. Even the cafe owner does not get all of the benefit: some of the extra income will go in taxes, and some will go in a rent increase because the booming cafe business makes the shop more valuable. The cafe owner's labour is therefore less alienated than his staff.

Alienation happens in other ways as well. The cafe owner makes all of the decisions. The staff have little, if any, say in what decisions are made. Even their opinions may not be welcomed. Indeed, the wrong opinion could get the worker fired from the job. When you get employed, you leave your democratic rights at the door. But how can it be otherwise when you have private ownership of businesses? The owner is taking all the risks of the business. If the business goes bankrupt, he will lose everything: his house, superannuation, any savings, his family to divorce, and, sometimes, his life by suicide.

A better way would be to share the risks. In sharing the risks, the decison-making has to be shared as well as the benefits.

... Alienation can be overcome by restoring the truly human relationship to the labour process, by people working in order to meet people's needs, working as an expression of their own human nature, not just to earn a living.