Bringing Justice, Equality, Equity, and Fair Pay to the Restaurant Industry
By Stacey Lindsay
The restaurant industry is the second largest employer sector in the United States and the lowest paying.
This disparity is directly linked to federal law, which has allowed tipped service workers to earn a paltry tipped minimum wage that is lower than the regular minimum wage. In some states, this equals $2.13 an hour—a number that hasn’t changed in three decades. What this does is put employees in an inferior and subjugated position. When someone is reliant on tips, an act that should be a bonus, they are inadvertently subjected to other indecencies.
That is not the only injustice. The industry—which has been one of the hardest impacted following the pandemic—is rife with abuse of power, harassment, and racial discrimination. Nearly fifty percent of tipped workers (this includes workers in restaurants and other service industries) are people of color, primarily women of color. Research shows that customers discriminate against Black servers in the US.
The entire industry was born out of a racist past, says Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, a social-movement organization dedicated to raising industry wages and working conditions. The minimum wage and the idea of tips replacing wages is a direct legacy of slavery, as is the fact that in restaurants there are mostly white people front-of-house and mostly people of color back-of-house, she says. “You really have to think: Where does that language come from? It comes from plantation slavery.”
Jayaraman, who teaches public policy at University California at Berkeley where she is also the director of the Food Labor Research Center, has dedicated her career to shedding light on the service industry’s egregious imbalances and advocating for the right of all service workers to earn a fair livable wage. Her book Forked, is a dense and keen observation of the industry and the ways in which consumers can rally for change.
To borrow Jayaraman’s writing, we are “forked.” The restaurant industry, that which feeds us, is starving its workers. But there is a shift, or rather a fork in the road, and Jayaraman is on the front lines leading us down the route of humanity. That is, toward an industry that pays every employee a livable, fair wage—whether they earn tips or not. (Currently, seven states mandate that tipped and regular minimum wages are equivalent.)
Jayaraman recently spoke with us over video call, as marches for racial justice echoed in the background. We discussed the plight of the industry, the industry challenges Black women particularly face, and the power employers and consumers have to make an impact.
It’s about pushing for equality, justice, and humanity—something Jayaraman calls taking “the high road.”
A Q&A with Saru Jayaraman
The issues of the subpar minimum wage and discrimination in the restaurant industry speaks to the wider issue of racial injustice and human indecency in America. In light of everything unfolding in our country currently, we’d like to first ask for your insight on this.
The idea of a set minimum wage was made law because during The New Deal when they left tip workers out of the minimum wage, tipped workers were mostly black women. The whole idea of a minimum wage in the United States excludes groups of people of color. Domestic workers were mostly black women at the time and they were left out. Farm workers were mostly black men and they were left out. And then tip workers were mostly black women and they were left out.
Fast forward to the present day: Seventy percent of tipped workers are women. It's the largest workforce of people of color and women in the United States. And almost half are people of color disproportion women of color, and they largely work in casual restaurants. Lots of people work in the industry, but still, even today, it's very racially segregated.
People of color work in more casual restaurants. They earn less money in tips, and often cash tips versus credit cards tips. If they make it into fine dining, they're often bussers rather than waiters, or they're kitchen staff rather than waiters. And even when people of color become waiters, the overwhelming data shows that tips are not correlated in this country with the quality of the service, they're correlated with the race and gender of the server.
Both the origin and the current day impact of a set minimum wage are all factually unequal for people of color, and particularly for women of color.
This information pertains to pre-pandemic circumstances. How has COVID-19 exacerbated this?
With 10 million restaurant workers losing their jobs, you now have a situation where 60 percent of these workers cannot get access to unemployment insurance. They're being told—thousands and thousands of them—that they can't get access because their set minimum wage plus tips is too low to the minimum state threshold to qualify for benefits. Meaning they were paid too little to qualify for benefits that they were paying taxes to get.
That is, again, disproportionately impacting people of color because it was people of color living on cash tips rather than credit card tips, they're more likely to be disqualified from unemployment insurance because cash tips were harder to record and were not reported by employers. They’re much more likely to be locked out of benefits because of low wages and because of their race.
It is important to note that George Floyd was a restaurant worker who was laid off. The anger right now is not just about police brutality. It's about police brutality and all the various forms of structural racism and inequality, and the deep frustration and anger that here we are, we've been working for decades and we can't get any benefits. Our employers are getting tens of millions of dollars in PPP, we're not able to get a dime from the government.
Another critical element you discuss in Forked is the psychological impact. Tipped workers rely on tips, which may make them feel that they have to forfeit part of themselves or put up with abusive behavior or harassment to survive the job and still get paid. How can this have wider residual effects for individuals and society?
Half of all Americans have worked in the industry at some point in their lifetime. About a third of all Americans worked in the industry as their first job. When you start out and it’s your first exposure to the world of work, and you are told that your worth is dependent on how much you can please the customers, regardless of what that means, you are going to do whatever it takes. As a woman, you are going to learn that your ability is measured by showing cleavage and dressing sexily. And you are going to learn that your willingness to tolerate harassment is essentially a measure of your worth.
The importance is knowing that those early experiences end up impacting you for a lifetime. We've heard from so many older women who say, "I've been sexually harassed on the job, but I didn't do anything about it because it was never as bad as it was when I was a young woman working in restaurants." And so that doesn't just impact those individuals; that ends up setting the standard for our whole society. Given that half of America works in the industry when they're young, it ends up setting the standard for what's tolerable and acceptable for men and women across the economy, in all different jobs and aspects of life.
We have data that shows that paying people a full livable minimum wage in California cuts sexual harassment in half. That's a very, very, very clear indication that we know the solution: Pay these women an actual wage so they don't have to feel like they have to put up with all of that from the customer; so they don't feel like their only source of merit and worth comes from pleasing customers.
How is this magnified for women of color?
Everything I'm talking about is gender related. Now you take it a step further when it's race; when it’s women of color putting up with all of that for far less money in tips. For women of color, it's generally not just about the worth of how much you're making versus your coworkers, it's about survival. It's about feeding your kids. You have to put up with it because those are the tips you need to feed your kids, and your body is then not yours. It belongs to the customer because they're the ones feeding your children.
It's also magnified because there's sexual harassment and there's also racial harassment. People not only tip servers of color less because of the bias of this country. They also tend to harass people of color as servers in different ways. They make inappropriate comments. I remember Tom Colicchio, a famous celebrity chef, once told me that quite often, if he had a brown server who spoke perfect English, he'd have customers in his fine dining restaurants who would say, "Get me somebody who speaks English. I can't understand this person." And Tom would say, to his credit, "No, I'm not changing the server. You either have this server or you leave."
That is what we need from employers. Part of why we don't have that is because workers don't have the power to say no to the customers, because they're so reliant on the tips. If they got away from their boss, they'd have the ability to reject the harassment, to reject the racial comment, to reject the outright biases that resulted in a white man making so much more than a woman of color.
The pandemic has unveiled a reason for restaurants to reinvent themselves to better care for their employees. In this light, One Fair Wage launched High Roads Kitchen, a program that provides workers jobs and independent restaurants a subsidy if they commit to following equitable and ethical practices. What momentum have you seen through this?
What’s extraordinary is that you'd expect in this moment, with the industry struggling, for there to be no chance of moving One Fair Wage—and it's actually been the opposite. Since the pandemic, I've had so many employers come forward, people who had fought us on their wages in the past, and say, "actually, I believe in One Fair Wage and I've seen how it's impacted tipped workers. And I want to move in this direction post pandemic." Why? It's three reasons:
One, a lot of them saw their tip workers devastated in a way that they didn't understand before. They saw how untenable it was to pay people a set minimum wage and have them live on tips. When they saw them without tips and not getting put on employment insurance, I think it was a reckoning for employers.
Two, they're having to rebuild their entire model from scratch. They're having to rethink everything about their business, and so they're saying, "Well, if I'm having to rethink everything anyway, I should probably do the right thing by my workers and come out of this pandemic with a reinvented business model that actually takes care of people." I'm not talking about chains, but there are a lot of independent industry leaders who have decided that now is the moment to make change. To support that moment of change, we created High Road Kitchens because we felt that people need relief, so let's get cash to restaurants that need relief, and let's do it in a way that supports change. Let's do it in a way that supports moving to higher wages and better working.
How can consumers push for change?
Consumers have incredible power right now. As they're ordering takeout, delivery, or going back to eat in a restaurant, what they can do is say: "I want to eat here. I love the food and the service, but I want you to take the high road in terms of paid sick leave and PPE and adjust wages. I want to see you join The High Road."
The most impactful thing we've seen consumers do is recruit employers to join forces with us. That's how Alice Waters joined forces with us, that's how Blue Bottle Coffee joined forces with us. It's consumers who've talked to those employers and said, "You really should be part of this effort for change." On the High Road Kitchens website, there's a button to click, Adopt a Restaurant. It’s the ability that you as a consumer have.
To learn more about Saru Jayaraman, One Fair Wage, and High Roads Kitchen, visit: onefairwage.com and highroadkitchens.com.
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