SARU JAYARAMAN
Sectors:
Target Population:
Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
United States,
Despite being the second largest employer in the United States, the restaurant industry is also home to seven of the ten lowest-paying occupations. Saru is leading a nation-wide effort to transform this industry’s subpar employment practices by aligning worker, employer and consumer interests.
This profile below was
prepared when Saru Jayaraman was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2013.
INTRODUCTION
Despite being the second largest employer in the United States, the restaurant industry is also home to seven of the ten lowest-paying occupations. Saru is leading a nation-wide effort to transform this industry’s subpar employment practices by aligning worker, employer and consumer interests.
THE NEW IDEA
Since 2001, Saru has been leading a national movement to improve the working conditions and upward mobility of people working all along the food chain – most of whom have the lowest paying jobs in the country and no benefits.
Before Saru and her ... Read More [+] team came along, there were small, local organizations (often small unions representing less than one percent of the industry) that served the needs of restaurant workers, mostly through litigation; there were job-training programs that helped low-wage workers obtain jobs in the restaurant industry; and there was a powerful industry lobby focused on furthering the interests of restaurant employers. Each of these groups seeks to have a direct impact on their separate constituencies . However, these disparate efforts do not advance strategies that can change work standards industry- and nation-wide. Most importantly, they do not meaningfully engage one of the potentially most powerful proponents of improved worker rights – the consumers. This is what Saru and her team set out to do.
ROC-United – the organization Saru co-founded – aligns the interests and actions of workers, consumers and employers alike to vastly improve the wages and working conditions of restaurant and food chain employees. She has created the first national cross-sector, multi-racial, cross-class initiative looking after the interests of one of the largest and most marginalized work force in the U.S. Since 2001, ROC has grown into a national restaurant workers’ organization with 10,000 members in twenty-six cities nationwide and has won critical policy battles on minimum wage increases and tip protection in several cities.
Up until recently, Saru’s entire focus had been on mobilizing workers and employers. Realizing the influence consumers can have through their purchasing power, Saru is embarking on the next stage of her work. She is now focused on illuminating how the inner workings of the restaurant industry affect regular consumers to drive them towards action through a new mass consumer organization: The Welcome Table.
Before Saru and her ... Read More [+] team came along, there were small, local organizations (often small unions representing less than one percent of the industry) that served the needs of restaurant workers, mostly through litigation; there were job-training programs that helped low-wage workers obtain jobs in the restaurant industry; and there was a powerful industry lobby focused on furthering the interests of restaurant employers. Each of these groups seeks to have a direct impact on their separate constituencies . However, these disparate efforts do not advance strategies that can change work standards industry- and nation-wide. Most importantly, they do not meaningfully engage one of the potentially most powerful proponents of improved worker rights – the consumers. This is what Saru and her team set out to do.
ROC-United – the organization Saru co-founded – aligns the interests and actions of workers, consumers and employers alike to vastly improve the wages and working conditions of restaurant and food chain employees. She has created the first national cross-sector, multi-racial, cross-class initiative looking after the interests of one of the largest and most marginalized work force in the U.S. Since 2001, ROC has grown into a national restaurant workers’ organization with 10,000 members in twenty-six cities nationwide and has won critical policy battles on minimum wage increases and tip protection in several cities.
Up until recently, Saru’s entire focus had been on mobilizing workers and employers. Realizing the influence consumers can have through their purchasing power, Saru is embarking on the next stage of her work. She is now focused on illuminating how the inner workings of the restaurant industry affect regular consumers to drive them towards action through a new mass consumer organization: The Welcome Table.
THE PROBLEM
With over 10 million workers, the restaurant industry is one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of the U.S. economy, prospering even during the latest economic crisis. Although there are some livable wage jobs in this industry, namely waitstaff and ... Read More [+]
bartending positions in fine dining restaurants, the vast majority of workers suffer below-poverty wages and poor working conditions. In fact, despite being one of the two largest employers in the United States, the restaurant industry is also the employer of seven of the ten lowest-paying occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the two absolute lowest-paying jobs in America. In addition, benefits such as paid sick days and health coverage are an anomaly – beyond the obvious effect this has on workers who handle our food, the public health repercussions for consumers is also significant.
Immigrants, women and workers of color in particular struggle to advance to livable wage jobs, and are concentrated in the industry’s lowest-paid positions. White people have twice the chance of a person of color of obtaining a living wage job at fine dining restaurants for example, while people of color hold 80 percent of poverty-wage jobs, usually hidden behind the kitchen door.
The industry’s low wages can be attributed in part to the fact that the minimum wage for tipped workers has remained stagnant at $2.13 per hour for the last 22 years, dragging the rest of the industry down with it. (The federally mandated minimum wage is set at $7.25 per hour for most other industries). Wage theft and other worker right violations are also common occurrences with few avenues for redress.
The National Restaurant Association – the industry lobby representing restaurant employers – has successfully influenced policymakers to exempt their industry from more stringent hiring standards largely by arguing that it is not economically viable to raise wages or improve benefits. In part, those arguments still stand because up until recently they had not been proven wrong. There had been no concerted effort to recognize or incentivize employers taking the high road to profitability. By demonstrating that it is possible to run a successful business while upholding better hiring standards, Saru and her team are working with like-minded employers to prove that theirs are not pie-in-the-sky objectives.
Finally, if working conditions have barely improved in more than two decades, it is also because it is an unknown issue to most. Consumers are neither aware of the problem nor of the power they have – through market demand – to shift industry standards and policy conversations.
Immigrants, women and workers of color in particular struggle to advance to livable wage jobs, and are concentrated in the industry’s lowest-paid positions. White people have twice the chance of a person of color of obtaining a living wage job at fine dining restaurants for example, while people of color hold 80 percent of poverty-wage jobs, usually hidden behind the kitchen door.
The industry’s low wages can be attributed in part to the fact that the minimum wage for tipped workers has remained stagnant at $2.13 per hour for the last 22 years, dragging the rest of the industry down with it. (The federally mandated minimum wage is set at $7.25 per hour for most other industries). Wage theft and other worker right violations are also common occurrences with few avenues for redress.
The National Restaurant Association – the industry lobby representing restaurant employers – has successfully influenced policymakers to exempt their industry from more stringent hiring standards largely by arguing that it is not economically viable to raise wages or improve benefits. In part, those arguments still stand because up until recently they had not been proven wrong. There had been no concerted effort to recognize or incentivize employers taking the high road to profitability. By demonstrating that it is possible to run a successful business while upholding better hiring standards, Saru and her team are working with like-minded employers to prove that theirs are not pie-in-the-sky objectives.
Finally, if working conditions have barely improved in more than two decades, it is also because it is an unknown issue to most. Consumers are neither aware of the problem nor of the power they have – through market demand – to shift industry standards and policy conversations.
THE STRATEGY
Saru co-founded Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) in 2001 to engage workers, employers and consumers in a movement aiming to transform the restaurant industry by helping it adopt 21st century working standards. Over the last decade, ROC has grown ... Read More [+]
into a national restaurant workers’ organization with 10,000 members in twenty-six cities nationwide.
ROC began its work by launching strategic litigation campaigns against high profile, exploitative employers as a way to shift industry norms. ROC takes on a client when they believe that shifting their employers’ practices will exert an influence on other restaurants. For example, Saru’s team supported workers alleging lost minimum wage, overtime, spread-of-hours pay, and tip misappropriation, as well as charges of race and national origin discrimination and retaliation. The 31 employees worked at a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Mario Batali who eventually agreed to a $1.5 million settlement, and decided to expand the restaurants’ paid sick days and paid vacation policies, enact a promotions policy, and begin cultural sensitivity training for management. Most importantly, the celebrity chef has agreed to collaborate with ROC-NY to become a “High Road Employer” in the industry. Given his influence on other restaurant owners, this is a significant victory. ROC has won thirteen such campaigns against discrimination and exploitation in high profile restaurants, obtaining $7 million in stolen tips and wages and significant policy changes for workers. ROC now has its eyes set on Darden Restaurants Inc. – the world’s largest full service restaurant company and a leader among national restaurant companies. Saru and her team understand that Darden would not only have an impact on the more than 180,000 workers at over 2,000 locations, it has the potential to act as a leader in changing industry disparities.
Though litigation is one instrument ROC uses to persuade employers to improve their practices, Saru quickly realized that a purely confrontational approach would unlikely lead to national scale impact. Key to Saru’s success, and a significant differentiator with ‘worker rights’ organizations, including unions, has been her propensity to work in collaboration with every actor in the food industry. Given that restaurant owners are motivated in large part by the bottom line, ROC understood that it needed to also answer employers’ economic concerns to incentivize them to change their practices. Saru and her team are pursuing a three-pronged strategy to achieve this goal. ROC is the first to have ever undertaken peer-reviewed, empirical research to detail the current state of the restaurant industry and the economic benefits of taking the high road to profitability. Saru established the Food Labor Research Center at Berkeley University and is allying herself with several universities across the country to ensure that the claims that ROC has been making can be backed up by strong, academic research. For example, a growing body of research is beginning to prove that earned sick days policies can easily pay for themselves in decreased turnover costs and increased worker productivity. This is the sort of market research that not only can help incentivize restaurant owners to change their individual policies, but it is also highly needed to counter the claims of the National Restaurant Association in the public policy battle that ROC is undertaking at the federal level.
Though research is needed – similarly to litigation – alone it cannot move employers from awareness to action. This is why Saru and her team have focused on demonstrating that the sorts of changes they are advocating for are far from unreasonable. In fact, many employers are already taking the high road, and others would be more than happy to with a little bit of guidance. ROC-United has begun working with roughly 100 restaurant owners across the country who have shown that improved working conditions are not antonymous with profitability. ROC has even opened two worker-owned cooperative restaurants (COLORS) to prove that point, get a first-hand understanding of restaurant owners’ challenges and test-out some of their own hypotheses. For example, when ROC’s research uncovered the extent of racial discrimination in the industry, they developed a national restaurant workers workforce development program housed within COLORS to improve upward mobility for women, immigrants and people of color. It also began including cultural sensitivity training for management at restaurants that choose to take the “high road.” The goal is to create formalized career ladders in an industry that has traditionally hired based on appearance and informal contacts rather than certification. Restaurant employers are invited to join ROC’s local Restaurant Industry Roundtables: regular convenings of employers where information and technical assistance are provided on high road practices. The Restaurant Industry Roundtable in each of the ROC affiliates cities provides a space for sharing and mutual support to help more employers adopt best employer practices. These employers also speak at local, state, and federal legislative hearings advocating for worker-friendly policies and assist ROC-United to improve the working conditions for restaurant workers.
A couple of years ago, Saru began thinking about how she might incentivize many more employers to join this roundtable to ultimately become a powerful enough counterpoint to the National Restaurant Association (the industry’s lobby) to influence the national policy agenda. The answer? Consumers. Saru is allying herself to the sustainable food movement focused on healthy, organic, locally sourced foods. She carefully studied the exponential growth of this movement and realized that much of it was due to the publication of two highly influential, mainstream books. She therefore decided to write a book of her own to inform the general public about the situation of restaurant workers. Called Behind the Kitchen Door, the book was published by Cornell University Press and released in February 2013. The book has been featured on CNN with Soledad O’Brien and Bill Moyers Journal, among other outlets, and was a #1 bestseller for Powell’s books and in several categories on Amazon. Danny Glover’s film company Louverture Films has produced a series of short film portraits based on the workers and employers profiled in the book. Awareness is but the first step in Saru’s consumer engagement strategy. She is also leveraging the influence of the leading ‘ethical food’ organizations in the country, including Slow Food USA, by getting them to include workers within their ethical eating paradigm.
Once consumers become more aware of food workers’ right issues in the U.S., the goal is to mobilize them through a new mass consumer organization Saru is establishing: the Welcome Table. As part of the Welcome Table, Saru and her team have developed a National Diner’s Guide, which reads like a Zagat or Yelp, to help consumers find out about the employment practices of the 150 most popular restaurant companies in the United States, as well as the same practices of high road restaurant partners of ROC. The guide is now available for free download as a smartphone application and is helping diners decide where to eat and communicate their values when they eat, both to restaurant management and ultimately to their Congressperson. Saru is in the beginning phase of building a community of informed foodies that will form a “groundswell” that can reverberate back to Congress.
ROC’s current annual budget is approximately $4 million, and has grown by 600 percent in the last four years. Most of their funding comes from national and local foundations around the country. Moving forward, the organization plans to develop a much more robust individual donor program and to strengthen their dues collection program, from both workers and consumer members.
ROC began its work by launching strategic litigation campaigns against high profile, exploitative employers as a way to shift industry norms. ROC takes on a client when they believe that shifting their employers’ practices will exert an influence on other restaurants. For example, Saru’s team supported workers alleging lost minimum wage, overtime, spread-of-hours pay, and tip misappropriation, as well as charges of race and national origin discrimination and retaliation. The 31 employees worked at a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Mario Batali who eventually agreed to a $1.5 million settlement, and decided to expand the restaurants’ paid sick days and paid vacation policies, enact a promotions policy, and begin cultural sensitivity training for management. Most importantly, the celebrity chef has agreed to collaborate with ROC-NY to become a “High Road Employer” in the industry. Given his influence on other restaurant owners, this is a significant victory. ROC has won thirteen such campaigns against discrimination and exploitation in high profile restaurants, obtaining $7 million in stolen tips and wages and significant policy changes for workers. ROC now has its eyes set on Darden Restaurants Inc. – the world’s largest full service restaurant company and a leader among national restaurant companies. Saru and her team understand that Darden would not only have an impact on the more than 180,000 workers at over 2,000 locations, it has the potential to act as a leader in changing industry disparities.
Though litigation is one instrument ROC uses to persuade employers to improve their practices, Saru quickly realized that a purely confrontational approach would unlikely lead to national scale impact. Key to Saru’s success, and a significant differentiator with ‘worker rights’ organizations, including unions, has been her propensity to work in collaboration with every actor in the food industry. Given that restaurant owners are motivated in large part by the bottom line, ROC understood that it needed to also answer employers’ economic concerns to incentivize them to change their practices. Saru and her team are pursuing a three-pronged strategy to achieve this goal. ROC is the first to have ever undertaken peer-reviewed, empirical research to detail the current state of the restaurant industry and the economic benefits of taking the high road to profitability. Saru established the Food Labor Research Center at Berkeley University and is allying herself with several universities across the country to ensure that the claims that ROC has been making can be backed up by strong, academic research. For example, a growing body of research is beginning to prove that earned sick days policies can easily pay for themselves in decreased turnover costs and increased worker productivity. This is the sort of market research that not only can help incentivize restaurant owners to change their individual policies, but it is also highly needed to counter the claims of the National Restaurant Association in the public policy battle that ROC is undertaking at the federal level.
Though research is needed – similarly to litigation – alone it cannot move employers from awareness to action. This is why Saru and her team have focused on demonstrating that the sorts of changes they are advocating for are far from unreasonable. In fact, many employers are already taking the high road, and others would be more than happy to with a little bit of guidance. ROC-United has begun working with roughly 100 restaurant owners across the country who have shown that improved working conditions are not antonymous with profitability. ROC has even opened two worker-owned cooperative restaurants (COLORS) to prove that point, get a first-hand understanding of restaurant owners’ challenges and test-out some of their own hypotheses. For example, when ROC’s research uncovered the extent of racial discrimination in the industry, they developed a national restaurant workers workforce development program housed within COLORS to improve upward mobility for women, immigrants and people of color. It also began including cultural sensitivity training for management at restaurants that choose to take the “high road.” The goal is to create formalized career ladders in an industry that has traditionally hired based on appearance and informal contacts rather than certification. Restaurant employers are invited to join ROC’s local Restaurant Industry Roundtables: regular convenings of employers where information and technical assistance are provided on high road practices. The Restaurant Industry Roundtable in each of the ROC affiliates cities provides a space for sharing and mutual support to help more employers adopt best employer practices. These employers also speak at local, state, and federal legislative hearings advocating for worker-friendly policies and assist ROC-United to improve the working conditions for restaurant workers.
A couple of years ago, Saru began thinking about how she might incentivize many more employers to join this roundtable to ultimately become a powerful enough counterpoint to the National Restaurant Association (the industry’s lobby) to influence the national policy agenda. The answer? Consumers. Saru is allying herself to the sustainable food movement focused on healthy, organic, locally sourced foods. She carefully studied the exponential growth of this movement and realized that much of it was due to the publication of two highly influential, mainstream books. She therefore decided to write a book of her own to inform the general public about the situation of restaurant workers. Called Behind the Kitchen Door, the book was published by Cornell University Press and released in February 2013. The book has been featured on CNN with Soledad O’Brien and Bill Moyers Journal, among other outlets, and was a #1 bestseller for Powell’s books and in several categories on Amazon. Danny Glover’s film company Louverture Films has produced a series of short film portraits based on the workers and employers profiled in the book. Awareness is but the first step in Saru’s consumer engagement strategy. She is also leveraging the influence of the leading ‘ethical food’ organizations in the country, including Slow Food USA, by getting them to include workers within their ethical eating paradigm.
Once consumers become more aware of food workers’ right issues in the U.S., the goal is to mobilize them through a new mass consumer organization Saru is establishing: the Welcome Table. As part of the Welcome Table, Saru and her team have developed a National Diner’s Guide, which reads like a Zagat or Yelp, to help consumers find out about the employment practices of the 150 most popular restaurant companies in the United States, as well as the same practices of high road restaurant partners of ROC. The guide is now available for free download as a smartphone application and is helping diners decide where to eat and communicate their values when they eat, both to restaurant management and ultimately to their Congressperson. Saru is in the beginning phase of building a community of informed foodies that will form a “groundswell” that can reverberate back to Congress.
ROC’s current annual budget is approximately $4 million, and has grown by 600 percent in the last four years. Most of their funding comes from national and local foundations around the country. Moving forward, the organization plans to develop a much more robust individual donor program and to strengthen their dues collection program, from both workers and consumer members.
THE PERSON
Saru is the child of immigrants from India who grew up with a strong interest in the human condition worldwide. She grew up in a Chicano neighborhood east of Los Angeles, and witnessed injustices faced by her own immigrant parents and the working-class ... Read More [+]
families of her classmates. By the time she got to high school it had become obvious to her that her would be focused on helping to eradicate such injustices.
In college Saru founded Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE), a national organization that sought to reduce teenage pregnancy through mentorship between female college students and middle school girls in various communities around the country. She founded the organization at her own college and then spent much of law school and graduate school replicating the program at various universities around the country. The organization still exists and has grown to more than a dozen college campuses around the country.
After law school Saru founded La Alianza Para La Justicia (Alliance for Justice) at the Workplace Project, an immigrant workers organizing center in Long Island, New York. She created a new program using litigation and organizing to help factory, restaurant, and cleaning workers address exploitation in the workplace. Her initiative attracted attention nationwide: instead of simply providing a needed service, Saru creatively engaged every constituent she met to help them both understand their situation and take collective action.
While at the Workplace Project, just after 9/11, Saru received a phone call from the union that represented workers at Windows on the World (WoW), the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. The WoW workers who had survived the attacks were out of work and therefore could not be represented by the union anymore. Initially, the union asked Saru and her co-founder Fekkak Mamdouh a former worker at Windows on the World to create an organization that would help survivors get back on their feet. When the owner of WoW announced that he would reopen a restaurant in another location but would not hire back its former staff, Saru and her small team mobilized workers to protest against WoW’s owner and won. Many more restaurant workers in New York City learned of this victory and started approaching Restaurant Opportunities Center for help with similar labor issues.
Saru realized at that point that the problem was much larger than she had initially understood. In fact, it was a problem of such large proportions that no single strategy alone would ever even begin to improve the working conditions of restaurant workers. She understood that industry transformation at a national level would necessitate a much more nuanced strategy. ROC-United was born.
In college Saru founded Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE), a national organization that sought to reduce teenage pregnancy through mentorship between female college students and middle school girls in various communities around the country. She founded the organization at her own college and then spent much of law school and graduate school replicating the program at various universities around the country. The organization still exists and has grown to more than a dozen college campuses around the country.
After law school Saru founded La Alianza Para La Justicia (Alliance for Justice) at the Workplace Project, an immigrant workers organizing center in Long Island, New York. She created a new program using litigation and organizing to help factory, restaurant, and cleaning workers address exploitation in the workplace. Her initiative attracted attention nationwide: instead of simply providing a needed service, Saru creatively engaged every constituent she met to help them both understand their situation and take collective action.
While at the Workplace Project, just after 9/11, Saru received a phone call from the union that represented workers at Windows on the World (WoW), the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. The WoW workers who had survived the attacks were out of work and therefore could not be represented by the union anymore. Initially, the union asked Saru and her co-founder Fekkak Mamdouh a former worker at Windows on the World to create an organization that would help survivors get back on their feet. When the owner of WoW announced that he would reopen a restaurant in another location but would not hire back its former staff, Saru and her small team mobilized workers to protest against WoW’s owner and won. Many more restaurant workers in New York City learned of this victory and started approaching Restaurant Opportunities Center for help with similar labor issues.
Saru realized at that point that the problem was much larger than she had initially understood. In fact, it was a problem of such large proportions that no single strategy alone would ever even begin to improve the working conditions of restaurant workers. She understood that industry transformation at a national level would necessitate a much more nuanced strategy. ROC-United was born.
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