The Manager on the Line (and the Owners Above It)
How franchising, risk insulation, and labor extraction turn safety into someone else’s problem
By Cherokee Schill
The Swiss bar fire that killed Cyane Panine is being reported as a tragic failure of safety: unsafe materials, a dangerous practice, inspections that didn’t happen. For most readers, it feels distant and exceptional, the kind of thing that happens somewhere else, under different rules, with different mistakes.
But for people who have worked in restaurants or bars, what stands out is something quieter and far more familiar.
It’s the labor structure that was already failing long before the fire.
In food service, a manager is not meant to be another worker on the line. Their job is to watch what everyone else can’t while they’re moving fast: food safety checks, temperature logs, hand-washing oversight, inventory quality, staff training, equipment condition, and the slow erosion of standards that happens when a space is run at maximum speed for too long.
When that role is functioning, customers never notice it. Safety looks like nothing happening.
What customers do notice is the manager jumping in. Running food. Working the grill. Covering stations. Closing dishes. That gets framed as hustle, leadership, or commitment.
Inside the industry, it means something very specific has already gone wrong.
When the manager is absorbed into production, oversight doesn’t get redistributed. It disappears.
Temperature logs stop being filled out consistently because no one is stepping away to check them. Hand-washing becomes assumed rather than observed. Inventory quality slips because receiving and rotation are rushed. Training becomes informal because there’s no time to stop and explain why something matters. Schedules get delayed because the person responsible for planning weeks ahead is standing on the line next to employees asking when the schedule will be done.
I’ve watched that confusion play out directly. Employees asking me about schedules in the middle of service, while I’m on the line, working shoulder to shoulder with them. I was there because regional management wouldn’t approve more labor. Which left me holding two bags. This is what a system meant to run ahead of the shift collapses into. It is a real-time improvisation.
That collapse is where risk enters quietly.
I’ve seen a line cook strain canned beans through a visibly filthy trash can into a strainer that front-of-house staff were using to separate melted ice from customers’ drinks. No one thought of it as a kitchen tool versus a server tool anymore because that distinction had eroded over time. The strainer lived near the dish pit. The trash can was where servers dumped liquid waste. The dish machine was treated as a reset button for everything.
The strainer was run through the machine and put back into use, but it had been used that way for months. Customer drink residue. Garbage runoff. Food contact. All crossing paths quietly, without drama, without malice, without anyone stopping the line to say this is not acceptable.
This wasn’t me observing as a manager performing audits. This was me observing as an employee, inside a system where no one was positioned to see — or empowered to stop — the full chain of risk anymore.
I reported it.
What I got back was a familiar response: a lecture about being a team player and a vague assurance that it would be looked into. No immediate correction. No retraining. No structural change. Just a return to speed.
That response doesn’t come from nowhere.
Above the floor, above the schedule, above the daily improvisation, sits another layer entirely — ownership — and increasingly, that layer is structurally insulated from what happens below it.
Franchising and corporate restaurant models are explicitly designed to separate control from consequence. Brand standards flow downward. Labor pressure flows downward. Risk flows downward. Liability, meanwhile, is fragmented across franchisees, managers, and frontline staff.
On paper, owners can point to policies, manuals, and training modules. In practice, they set throughput expectations that quietly override those policies. They benefit from systems that run lean, knowing that the cost of that leanness will be absorbed by people with the least power to refuse it.
When something goes wrong, responsibility moves down the chain. It’s a training failure. A staffing issue. A manager who didn’t execute. An employee who made a mistake.
The ownership layer remains clean.
This is not hypothetical. It is public record.
Chipotle executives were called before Congress after repeated E. coli, norovirus, and salmonella outbreaks. Investigations documented systemic failures tied to understaffing, inconsistent food safety enforcement, and pressure to maintain throughput despite known risks. The issue was not employee indifference. It was a business model that scaled speed while treating oversight as optional.
The same structural logic appears in manufacturing. In the engineered stone silicosis crisis, upstream manufacturers and distributors insist the material can be handled safely under ideal conditions while pushing risk downstream to workers operating in environments that cannot meet those ideals. When harm surfaces, lawsuits — not the hazard — are treated as the problem.
Different industry. Same move.
Upstream actors capture the profit. Downstream actors absorb the risk. When harm becomes visible, accountability hunts for the nearest individual rather than the system that normalized exposure.
The Swiss bar fire follows this pattern exactly. Indoor sparklers had been used for years. The ceiling material hadn’t been inspected in five. These were tolerated conditions inside a profitable operation. When demand peaked, a young worker was placed into a visible role without being told what risk she was actually carrying.
After her death, responsibility moved downward.
She had done it before. She wasn’t forced. She took initiative.
This language does the same work as the “team player” lecture and the “unsafe shop” argument. It converts systemic negligence into individual choice and keeps the ownership layer insulated.
This is why these events are never one-offs. The country changes. The material changes. The industry changes. The structure remains.
When supervision is treated as overhead instead of protection, and when franchised or corporate owners benefit from systems that run without slack while remaining legally and operationally distant from their consequences, harm stops being accidental.
It becomes a cost that someone else is expected to absorb.
The BBC’s reporting on the Swiss bar fire matters because it makes one version of this structure visible. The silicosis crisis matters because it shows the same logic operating in manufacturing. Together, they describe an economy that repeatedly externalizes danger while pretending it is surprised by the outcome.
When managers are permanently on the line, it is not dedication. When workers are told to be team players in unsafe systems, it is not culture. When owners remain untouched while risk piles up downstream, it is not coincidence.
It is extraction.
And when extraction is normalized, tragedy is no longer shocking.
It is only a matter of timing.
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Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 