Saru Jayaraman talking:
first of all, a little bit of explanation about this system, because it really is the basis for the report. So, the restaurant industry is the second-largest and fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy—it’s over 10 million workers—and one of the largest employers of women in the United States. Unfortunately, it happens to be the absolute lowest-paying employer in the United States. And the real reason for that is the power of the National Restaurant Association, which we call “the other NRA,” which has been named the 10th most powerful lobbying group in Congress and which, back in 1996, under the leadership of Herman Cain, who later tried to run for president, struck a deal with Congress saying that they wouldn’t oppose a very modest increase in the overall minimum wage as long as the minimum wage for workers who earn tips stayed frozen forever, and so the wage has been stuck at $2.13 an hour for the last 23 years at the federal level. And that same deal has been struck over and over and over again for the last several decades in 43 states in the United States.
Now, the Restaurant Association has gotten away with this extraordinary exemption, basically saying, “We should be the only industry on Earth that shouldn’t have to pay our own workers’ wages, because you, the customer, should pay our workers’ wages for us.” They’ve gotten away with this extraordinary exemption by painting the picture of a guy who works at a fancy, fine-dining restaurant in Manhattan, who earns $18 an hour in tips, who’s doing just fine, when in fact 70 percent of tipped workers in America are women who largely work at restaurants like IHOP and Applebee’s and Olive Garden and Red Lobster, who suffer from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce and use food stamps at double the rate.
And what the research has shown is that this actually isn’t just about living the most economically precarious life imaginable, right? If you live off of tips, which you do if you live in a state that pays as little as $2 or $3 or $4 an hour, you’re living completely off your tips. You never know how much your income is going to bring in day after day. But even worse, what the research has shown is that this makes you even more vulnerable to the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry in the United States. The restaurant industry is in fact the single largest source of sexual harassment complaints to the EEOC, and this is exacerbated by the fact that women living off of tips must tolerate whatever a customer might do to them, however they may touch them or treat them or talk to them, because the customer is always right, because the customer pays their bills rather than their employer. And the research shows that in fact women are twice as likely to experience this sexual harassment from customers, also from co-workers and management, in states that pay as little as $2.13 than they are in states that provide the same minimum wage to tipped and nontipped workers, like California. And even worse, even worse, you know, you’re talking about six million women in America who must tolerate this every day of their lives to feed their families, because these are largely mothers, single mothers, right?
Beyond that, you’ve got millions more young women who this is their first job in high school, college or graduate school. And this is how we are teaching young women in America what is tolerable and acceptable in the workplace, so much so that we’ve now been approached by literally thousands of women from across America saying, you know, “I was a tipped worker in college. I now am a corporate executive or a union organizer. I’ve been sexually harassed recently 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.”
you just have to look at government data, which shows that the median wage for tipped workers in the United States, including tips, hovers at just about $8 an hour. As I said, 70 percent of these workers are women. They suffer from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce and use food stamps at double the rate. The U.S. Department of Labor has reported that there’s an 83 percent violation rate with regard to employers actually ensuring that tips make up the difference between the sub-minimum wage of $2.13 an hour—
— source democracynow.org
Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of Restaurant Opportunities Center, or ROC United, which put out the new report, “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry.” She is also the director of UC Berkeley’s The Food Labor Research Center, and author of Behind the Kitchen Door.