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Textbook Forked A New Standard For American Dining 1St Edition Saru Jayaraman Ebook All Chapter PDF
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FORKED
FORKED
A New Standard for American Dining
Saru Jayaraman
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide.Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Saru Jayaraman 2016
First Edition published in 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978– 0 –19–938047–3
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
This material is not intended to be, and should not be considered, a substitute for medical or
other professional advice. Treatment for the conditions described in this material is highly
dependent on the individual circumstances. And, while this material is designed to offer
accurate information with respect to the subject matter covered and to be current as of the
time it was written, research and knowledge about medical and health issues is constantly
evolving and dose schedules for medications are being revised continually, with new side
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Oxford University Press is not responsible for any websites (or their content) referred to
in this book that are not owned or controlled by the publisher.
To the 11 million restaurant workers nationwide.
Acknowledgments ix
Index 225
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was most definitely a team effort. First, many thanks to
everyone at ROC: our amazing restaurant worker members and
leaders; the many fabulous restaurant employer members who
partner with Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), many of
whom are profiled in this book; board members of Diners United,
the new and growing group of consumers who are paving the way
for a new kind of consumer movement; our donors and funders,
especially the Ford Foundation for helping to launch this book; and
our board, allies, executive team, and staff all over the country. For
research assistance, connections to subjects, and general support,
many thanks to Christina Fletes, Teofilo Reyes, Mike Rodriguez,
Michaela Allen, Graham Kovich, ROC Michigan members, Dania
Rajendra, Alex Galimberti, Lauren Jacobs, Kennard Ray, and pro-
fessors and students at the University of California, Berkeley, the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of
Georgia. For fabulous and creative thinking around the book and
getting the word out, many thanks to Ariel Jacobson, Maria Myotte,
and Elspeth Gilmore, and ROC’s filmmaker and creative genius
A cknowledgments
Sekou Luke. Last but not least, many thanks to my co-founders and
co-conspirators Fekkak Mamdouh and Sekou Siby.
Thanks to Oxford editor Chad Zimmerman for his faith and
support throughout the process, to my agent Regina Brooks, and
to my family. Thanks to my parents, sisters, and nephews for their
constant love and support. To Zach, Akeela, and Lina, thank you
for making everything possible!
x
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INTRODUCTION
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both for the sake of the workers and ultimately for the benefit of
employers and consumers.
My restaurant-owning grandfathers were small business owners
who followed the norms, customs, and culture of their day; today,
these surrounding factors have changed and evolved. One hundred
years later, their granddaughter is leading a movement to improve
wages and working conditions for the workers they employed.
I love and respect my great-g randfather. He was a kind and
extremely generous man who took care of his large family, his broth-
ers’ families, and even the families of his employees. Certainly,
through his eyes, I can understand the plight of the small restau-
rateurs in America struggling to understand how they would go
against the norm of low pay and poor benefits in this industry and
still succeed. However, the employers profiled in this book show
that norms and standards can evolve in ways that help workers,
employers, and consumers to thrive collectively. Times are chang-
ing, and the industry—and society—certainly can do better.
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In 2013, I wrote a book called Behind the Kitchen Door, about work-
ing conditions in the restaurant industry, then proceeded to take my
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1. Wages
With almost eleven million workers, the restaurant industry is cur-
rently the second-largest and one of the fastest-g rowing employer
sectors in the United States.4 Nearly one in twelve working
Americans works in the restaurant industry right now. 5 The restau-
rant industry is one of the only sectors to grow amid the economic
crisis of the last decade.6 We have continued to eat out as a nation in
ever-increasing numbers, even when we are unemployed.
Unfortunately, while it is one of the largest and fastest-g rowing
segments of the United States economy, it is also the absolute
lowest-paying employer in the United States. Every year the U.S.
Department of Labor releases a list of all occupations in the United
States, including their hourly wages, and every year the restaurant
industry wins the prize for having the lowest-paying occupations in
the United States. Every year at least six to seven of the ten lowest-
paying occupations are restaurant occupations, with only one or
two of those occupations being fast-food jobs. Currently, restaurant
workers occupy seven of the ten lowest-paid occupations reported
by the Bureau of Labor Statistics; at least four of these are in full-
service restaurants.7
So how is it that one of the largest and fastest-g rowing sectors
of the U.S. economy—clearly a successful sector—is proliferating
the nation’s lowest-paying jobs? Our analysis is that much of this
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and Denny’s. Their median wage, including tips, is $8.77 per hour
in states with a tipped minimum wage. These women suffer three
times the poverty rate of the rest of the United States workforce and
use food stamps at double the rate.18
As a result of the same deal having been struck between the
NRA and state legislators in states across the country, wages for
tipped workers in America range between $2.13 and about $5 in
forty-one states nationwide.19 When you are a tipped worker who
receives between $2.13 and $5 an hour, you don’t actually receive
a wage; your wage is so small it goes entirely to taxes, and you get a
paystub with $0 that says, “THIS IS NOT A PAYCHECK.” As a
result, the vast majority of tipped workers in America live com-
pletely off their tips, which creates extraordinary economic insta-
bility. These workers never know how much they are going to earn
from week to week, day to day, or month to month. Although their
bills and rent do not fluctuate, their income does.
During my 2013 book tour, women approached me at the end
of book talks and shared stories that illustrated how our nation’s
system of requiring certain workers to live off tips is not simply a
matter of economic instability; it’s a matter of human indecency.
Women related stories of having to objectify themselves to earn
enough tips to survive—and since the customer was paying their
wages, rather than their employer, the customer was always right.
This meant that these women had to tolerate whatever a customer
might do to them—however they might touch, treat, or talk to
them—because, again, the customer was always right.
This dynamic was eloquently summarized by a restaurant
server member of ROC, Amber, who spoke at a Senate press confer-
ence in Washington, DC, in 2013. She testified, “Senators, imagine
if your income depended on the happiness of the people you serve.
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having their first jobs in the restaurant industry means that they are
introduced into the world of work in a situation in which they
are encouraged to sell themselves and their bodies to earn their
income. It is the industry through which they learn what is tolerable
and acceptable in the workplace—an industry in which they must
tolerate the most extremely inappropriate behavior from customers,
co-workers, and managers—in order to be able to feed their families.
For all these reasons, over the last few years, ROC has led a cam-
paign to eliminate the lower wage for tipped workers, called One
Fair Wage. To be clear, our campaign is to eliminate the lower wage
for tipped workers, not tipping altogether; unless and until employ-
ers can provide a professional, livable income to their workers, tips
are absolutely necessary on top of a full base wage to get workers
closer to a wage that will allow them to support their families. Some
restaurants have chosen to eliminate tipping altogether; we applaud
them if they do so in a transparent manner and ultimately pay their
workers a full base wage that is equivalent to what they would have
earned through tips.
In this book, we give a restaurant a point if it provides nontip-
ped workers with at least $10 as a starting wage, and another point
if it provides tipped workers with more than their state’s tipped
minimum wage. We also especially commend restaurants moving
toward One Fair Wage—eliminating the lower wage for tipped
workers altogether.
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that they are forced to come to work while sick or risk losing their
job. Workers report that they are told that they will be fired if they
do not come to work, even if they are sick. Even among those work-
ers who are not told they will be fired, without receiving pay when
they are sick, the vast majority of workers prefer to work when sick
rather than cutting into an already too-paltry income. As men-
tioned earlier, too many of these workers live completely off tips,
which can only be obtained by physically coming to work.
Of course, the issue is also a public health concern. Sick restau-
rant workers infect co-workers and, of course, customers. The
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 50–90 percent
of all norovirus (stomach flu) outbreaks can be traced back to sick
restaurant workers.22
Recent efforts across a broad coalition of organizations have
pushed paid sick days legislation in states and cities across the country,
with tremendous success: seventeen cities, including Washington,
DC, and the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California
have passed paid sick-days laws.23 Of course, these victories have
not been achieved without intense opposition from the Other NRA,
which argues that restaurants will be forced to close, shed jobs, or
not grow as quickly if they must provide paid sick days. In fact, in
2013 the Other NRA joined forces with Darden, the world’s largest
full-service restaurant company and owner of the Olive Garden,
Capital Grille Steakhouse, and LongHorn Steakhouse, among other
brands. Darden helped write the preemption legislation in Florida,
and the Other NRA, where Darden plays a leading role, pushed pre-
emption bills around the country prohibiting any localities in those
states from passing local paid-sick-days ordinances. Such preemp-
tive legislation was passed in eight of the fourteen states in which it
was introduced, undermining citizens’ ability to pass local paid-sick-
days legislation even if it was democratically approved by a majority
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3. Internal Mobility
Two-thirds of restaurant workers surveyed nationally reported
never receiving a promotion to a higher-paying position, and even
fewer reported ever being offered training necessary to move up
the ladder to higher-level positions.27 Although there is a myth of
mobility in the industry—the idea that a dishwasher could one day
open her own restaurant—the reality is that the vast majority of
workers see very little advancement in their careers.
Such lack of advancement has serious racial implications,
because the restaurant industry is highly racially segregated.
Workers of color are segregated into lower-level segments—fast-
food and casual restaurants as opposed to fine dining—and even
lower-level positions—k itchen and busser positions rather than
server and bartending positions—especially in fine dining restau-
rants. This results in workers of color earning $4 less per hour than
white workers in the U.S. restaurant industry overall.28
ROC research shows that although 80 percent of restaurant
worker occupations provide poverty-level wages, up to 20 percent
of the jobs in the industry can provide a livable wage.29 These are
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novelty, and I do not see why Catholics should not keep to it and
leave the outline of history alone. I do not say that it is a line of
apologetics that would convince me altogether, but it is one that
would need far more arduous discussion and merit, far more respect
than Mr. Belloc’s a priori exploits, his limping lizards and flying pigs.
But it is not my business to remind Catholics of their own
neglected philosophers, and clearly the publication of Mr. Belloc’s
articles by the Universe, the Catholic Bulletin, and the Southern
Cross shows that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to
treat the fall of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact,
even if they are rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities
of modern biology and anthropology to the last ditch.
So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man
and thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain,
is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it
beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. Go back in time
or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the same. You
will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like Mr. Belloc,
on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to the spectacle.
There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just a flow of individual
lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth and damnation. That, I
extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary writers, is the
Catholic’s vision of life.
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