The “Other NRA” Fighting Restaurant Workers
Mary Harris: Hey, everyone. This episode contains some brief but very spicy language and also a movie spoiler. So that’s fun. Restaurants are having a moment right now. The first way I know this is from my streaming queue. Earlier this year, I and a lot of other people binged the Bear, a show that captures the chaos of a working kitchen in precise, claustrophobic detail.
Speaker 2: Thanks to me. Label that ship, please, Chef. Yes, chef.
Mary Harris: Martin, I fire.
Marcus: Every single chicken we have. Please. Okay. Richie, do you even know how to do fries? I know. We need them now. Okay. I’m Marcus. Where are we on cakes?
Speaker 2: Get in there.
Mary Harris: Getting there is this one episode that is shot almost entirely in one take and the anxiety of the work. You can feel it even as an observer. I’m going to talk to myself.
Speaker 2: Fuck off my bullshit now. Get the fuck off. Thank you. We’re firing 76 beef, 34 chickens. Okay. 12 French fries, 12 mash. Fucking now. Thank you.
Mary Harris: This food service moment is not just about Hollywood, though. It’s about labor more generally. It’s about how we treat the people who serve us. Any time I eat out, I can feel the way the industry is simmering. You probably can, too. Restaurants are short staffed. My local sandwich shop is giving workers ownership stakes in the operation. A few weeks back, the Danish restaurant Noma announced it was closing. It’s been voted the best restaurant in the world five times for the world’s best restaurant. Noma will close its doors next year after nearly two decades in business. But it has also been criticized for the way it’s used unpaid interns to create signature dishes. Owner and head chef Rene Redzepi has cited the pandemic and personal reasons for the closure. Noma will reopen as a full time food laboratory.
Mary Harris: I called up Saru Jayaraman because I wanted to talk to someone who is seizing this moment. Are you your recording? Saru?
Marcus: Yep. I’m on recording on voice memo.
Mary Harris: Fantastic. When I got Sarah on the line, she was in Albany. She’s a labor organizer. She was at New York State House to lobby legislators to raise the minimum wage for restaurant workers. She ducked into a car to find a quiet place to talk. How would you describe the moment that restaurants are having right now? Like, are you exhilarated? Exhausted?
Marcus: I am both, but all for good reason. I’m exhausted because we’re moving this in so many states at the same time. It’s exhilarating. And our only terror is that we don’t, you know, take full advantage of this moment and the incredible gains that workers are and can win right now.
Mary Harris: The thing that I can’t get away from is the fact that we’re in this time of extreme inequality. You hear a lot about that. And restaurants are these places where people at different ends of the privilege spectrum intentionally collide. And it’s not an accident.
Marcus: Right? No, it’s very, very intentional and historical, in fact. The wage structure comes directly from our feudal Europe and from slavery. And so when you say it reflects inequality and it reflects people have very different means coming together. There’s a way in which that’s very actually intentional and historical.
Mary Harris: Saru looks at shows like The Bear as a tool. A few months ago, she wrote an op ed for The New York Times linking the show to what she called a long overdue reckoning for the restaurant industry.
Marcus: You know, for so long, these workers have been just, you know, just dismissed as low wage, low skill.
Mary Harris: Hmm. Yeah. Another piece of media that kind of gets into this in a much more in a sharper way than the bear is the Ray Fine’s movie. The menu where finds plays the chef at an impossibly fancy restaurant. Like, you have to take a boat to an island to get to it, and then you’re paying thousands of dollars to have dinner, this very bespoke meal.
Marcus: Here we are. Family. We harvest. We ferment. We jab. A they. We jell.
Mary Harris: He’s not just a chef.
Speaker 2: He’s a storyteller.
Mary Harris: The game and this chef is set on making his rich customers pay. And it’s really intense. And it’s really of the moment. And I’m going to have a little bit of a spoiler here and just say that, you know, the chef is there to literally burn it all down. And I wondered a little bit, when you see something like that where there are little part of you is cheering like, yeah, we got to burn this all down.
Marcus: I don’t know that I’m necessarily cheering at that movie. I’m cheering at the moment, which in some ways is burning down the ways that these things have been for so very long. There’s no world in which the industry survives going the same way it’s been going for literally hundreds of years.
Mary Harris: Today on the show, Saru has been trying to change the way restaurants work for two decades. The culture has not caught up until now, though. We’ll talk about why. I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around.
Mary Harris: Saru Jayaraman has an organizer, zeal and a professor’s attitude. Earlier in her career, she used her legal expertise to found the Restaurant Opportunities Center in New York. She made sure restaurant workers at the World Trade Center had jobs after 911, and she helped settle lawsuits when restaurants failed to pay overtime. But eventually, she started thinking bigger, and she launched a national campaign called One Fair Wage. The idea was to end all subminimum pay in the U.S.. She also leads the Food Labor Research Center at U.C. Berkeley. That explains why, when I asked how restaurants and their workers had gotten here, she went way back in time for Saru organizing restaurant workers. It’s an attempt to fix something much bigger.
Marcus: So, look, the restaurant industry has been the absolute lowest paying employer for generations, dating back to emancipation. When the restaurant industry first demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves, not pay them anything and have them live exclusively on this new thing that had just come from Europe at the time called tipping. You know, tipping originated in feudal Europe as an extra bonus on top of a wage. So here’s the irony. In feudal Europe, serfs and vassals got a wage and tips were on top of that. But after emancipation, until now in this country, tips have been mutated into a replacement for wages at that time at emancipation, basically as a way to continue slavery, as a way to continue to access free black labor, and in particular the labor of black women.
Marcus: So they hired all these black women post emancipation, said, you don’t get a wage, you only get tips. That was made law in 1938 as part of the New Deal. Everybody got the right to the federal minimum wage except for these black women who worked for tips. And we went from a $0 wage in 1938 to the current federal minimum wage of $2.13 an hour. And that wage every time somebody hasn’t heard it before. It’s outrageous. And I know when I say it, people think, oh, well, that’s horrible, but that just must be a small sliver of America. The truth is, this is the largest and fastest growing employer in the United States, is the largest employer of women. It’s the largest employer, people of color. It’s the largest employer of immigrants. Largest employer. Formerly incarcerated people. It’s the largest employer of pretty much everybody. And it is allowed to pay in most states under $5 an hour with the idea that supposedly these people get tips, which again, is different even than how serfs were paid in feudal Europe. They got a wage and tips were on top.
Mary Harris: I want to talk about the organized forces that are fighting you on raising restaurant wages. Specifically this group you called the other NRA, the National Restaurant Association. Can you just introduce me to this group, like where they came from, who they represent?
Marcus: Absolutely. So I mentioned after emancipation, the restaurant industry wanted the ability to hire newly freed slaves. There was another industry that tried to do that. It was the Pullman Train Company. It was luxury trains that were going from East Coast to West Coast. Rich white people were writing these trains and they hired tens of thousands of black men as porters, Pullman car porters, to work on these trains. And initially, just like the women hired in the restaurant industry, they were not given a wage and they were made to live on tips. In the early 1900s in Chicago, those black men porters started to organize the first black union in the United States and started to win the right to an actual wage rather than living on tips. So the restaurants in Chicago watching that said, Ooh, we cannot let that happen to the women we employ. And they ended up forming in 1919 in Chicago, the National Restaurant Association, as that with its express mission intent and purpose of suppressing black workers wages in both the restaurant industry and the agricultural sector.
Mary Harris: Thanks to NHRA lobbying. When the New Deal codified the concept of the minimum wage, agricultural and restaurant workers got exempted from it. Then the NHRA set their sights on something bigger. Back in 1996, when then President Bill Clinton was working to raise the minimum wage, overall, the head of the NRA approached him with a deal The organization would back the wage hike so long as the minimum wage for tipped workers stayed frozen.
Marcus: It’s been frozen since 1991. It’s 30. Was it now 32 years that we have not seen an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers? We actually, in our membership have two generations, mothers and daughters who’ve worked on that $2 wage their whole lives and not seen an increase. And then in 2009 was the last time the overall minimum wage went up. Restaurant Association managed to keep tipped workers at $2.13.
Mary Harris: When you pointed out to how during COVID, that was a real issue because. Workers in restaurants could get full compensation from the government when they were booted out of their jobs because no one was going to restaurants anymore. So it’s like you created this structural thing, right?
Marcus: So March 13th, 2020, was when restaurants shut down. And that weekend, the 14, 15/16, we launched a relief fund. And just literally in a matter of days, we just were blown away. 300,000, basically 300,000 workers came to us for relief from all 50 states. And two thirds of them told us they couldn’t get unemployment insurance because in most states they were told that some minimum wage was too low to qualify for benefits. So we started at that moment, March 2020, hearing from so many workers. I had never heard this before in 20 years of organizing say I will not go back without one fair wage. None of us should go back without one fair wage.
Mary Harris: I think the thing that’s been powerful about this breaking point for someone like you is how it’s lasted. It’s not just that things were bad when people weren’t getting paid and then they went back and it was awful. Really, really kept going because you saw, you know, the great resignation across all industries. Right. But you especially saw it with restaurant workers and people working in the service industry who were just feeling the intense trickle down of the pandemic and then people bouncing back from the pandemic and expecting a level of service that they’d had before. But of course, they couldn’t get it because the staff wasn’t there. And so it creates this cycle where a job that was really hard before is even harder now.
Marcus: We say it went from being unjust to becoming unlivable. It just it reached a breaking point where people were just reached. So I can’t live on this anymore. I cannot make this work. I can’t actually afford to work in restaurants anymore. Look, our industry is mostly women. Highest rates of single moms of any occupation, mostly women working in very casual restaurants. They really reached their limit. The harassment was already so high, higher than any other industry because they had to put up with so much to get those tips. But with the pandemic we heard from so many women, I regularly told my customers, Take off your mask so I can see how cute you are before I decide how much I want to tip you. It was a breaking point and so many of them left.
Marcus: So you’re right. And it’s not just that it’s lasted longer than other industries. It’s that people are winning significant wage increases in this industry. So we created this big database and started tracking, indeed, job postings from indeed. And we’ve seen literally over 5000 restaurants in all 50 states. I’m talking Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, Texas. We’re seeing restaurants that are now that used to pay two and $3, now paying 15, 20, 25, 30. We heard from some folks in Dallas, Texas, where the wages $2.13 that many restaurants are saying you can’t find people for less than $25 an hour plus tips. That’s a more than 2,000% wage increase.
Mary Harris: But here’s where organizing restaurant workers gets sticky. The lower minimum wage for people in food service has always been justified by the tipping system. And there are real questions about who tipping works for and why. Years ago, Saru wrote an op ed that was slapped with the headline Why Tipping is Wrong. At the time, some fancy restaurateurs in New York City were trying to get rid of tips. Saru laid out why that move made sense and explained how tipping was a vestige of slavery. But the truth is there are restaurant workers who like getting tipped. And now Saru talks more about raising the salary floor for everyone.
Marcus: We were always fighting for a full wage with tips on top. And frankly, California and seven states have done that for 50 years. So it’s not even like it hasn’t worked. It’s happened for 50 years, very successfully in blue and red states California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, and Alaska. And we actually just wanted in Michigan last year, too. So now it’s eight states plus Washington, D.C..
Mary Harris: But doesn’t it create a tension where people are going to tip less if their costs are going up as consumers because you’re paying your staff more like it’s it’s creating pressure on the consumer and the restaurant in terms of where the money goes and how.
Marcus: Now it just hasn’t happened. That just hasn’t been borne out by the evidence. So San Francisco and Seattle are the cities with the highest tipping averages of any cities in the United States. They’ve had full wages with tips on top for 50 years. Alaska is the state with the highest tipping average of any state. It’s had a full wage with tips on top for decades. And the reason there’s two reasons for this One is that actually when you pay workers more, guess what they do restaurant workers, they go and they spend it. We all for some reason, we think these work. Our workers and nothing else. Oh, no. They’re a huge population of consumers. And when they get paid more, they’re finally able to take their families out to eat. And as restaurant workers, when they eat out, they tip better than other people because they know what it’s like to live on tips. So tipping is actually higher in the states with a full minimum wage with tips on top than it is in New York and the 43 states with the sub minimum wage.
Marcus: The second reason it’s higher is because, frankly, customers do not think at all. It’s so been proven over and over again. So many studies customers do not think about how much people make when they tip. It doesn’t even cross your mind. It’s not the reason or the basis for which people tip. People think they tip based on the quality of service. The data is now irrefutable insurmountable. There’s a professor at Cornell who spent his whole life looking at this. Really, tipping is truly correlated in the United States with the race and gender of the server. If you’re a man, you get tipped less. If you touch the person, if you’re a woman, you get tipped more. If you touch the person, it’s correlated with the woman’s hair color, eye color, breast size. Whether she allows herself to be touched, it has nothing to do with the wage. In fact, most consumers, it’s not like any of us sit down when we go and eat out and say, How much do you make? I’m going to think about that before I tip. It just doesn’t happen.
Mary Harris: Yikes, though, that, you know, tipping is so variable based on things like hair color, eye color, breast size. It just doesn’t it’s not making me feel great about tipping.
Marcus: No, it’s it’s been correlated with implicit bias among consumers for forever. Forever. Frankly, since emancipation, there’s a wage gap of at least $6 an hour between white male servers and black women servers, even when they’re in the same restaurant standing side by side. And the black woman is providing what we call perfect service. And there have been tests we’ve done testing the two people standing side by side, providing exactly the same service, and the black woman gets tip always less, and she ends up across the economy with a $6 wage gap per hour over a lifetime. That is like $600,000 over a career. That’s the difference between buying a home or sending your kids to college.
Mary Harris: So why wouldn’t you want to get rid of tipping in that circumstance?
Marcus: Well, what we know is that as a first step, paying everybody a full minimum wage significantly decreases those inequalities. Because when you get a full wage as a worker, you are not completely dependent on the tips. You actually get tips. You get more tips than people in other states, but you’re not as dependent on the tips to feed your kids. And so, you know, when you’re not as dependent, that means you can say buzz off to the person trying to harass you. It also means that your wages are entirely dependent on the biases of the customer. So we believe the first step has to be and this legacy of slavery pay everybody a full wage. Let’s start there and then we can work on everything else. But if we don’t start, there will never be able to get rid of these inequalities.
Mary Harris: After the break, what it would take to see an eradication of the tipped minimum wage nationwide.
Mary Harris: Saru is not just lobbying in state houses to boost restaurant worker pay. She’s also looking for other ways to change how the food service industry works. Her group recently helped launch a new kitchen safety training program for restaurant workers. But even this effort takes aim at that trade group, the National Restaurant Association, for years. Saru says the other NHRA has charged restaurant workers for this kind of mandatory instruction.
Marcus: So 2010, 2011, they took a monopoly food safety training company that they created called Serve Safe. And they went around to the largest, most populous restaurant industry states California, Texas, Illinois. And they got bills passed saying not only are workers required to take this training, but they have to pay for it.
Mary Harris: So once the workers were paying for this training, where did their money go?
Marcus: The restaurant association would then take that money and use it to lobby against those same workers interests. In fact, The New York Times reported it’s been about 25 million. I’ve seen nine 9994 last year for the National Restaurant Association was $80 million that came in from workers paying for food and their drinking. When one year it’s an incredible amount of money that then they’ve used to turn around and pay elected officials kind of campaign contributions to then vote against those same workers wage increases, which means these workers are funding their own wage suppression without knowing about it. It’s totally fraudulent, deceptive. It’s a deceptive business practice. There’s all this litigation that’s now underway against the Restaurant Association for engaging in fraud essentially for decades.
Mary Harris: All of this work makes Saru into a convenient target.
Mary Harris: I did notice that some of the attacks against the work that you do are quite personal, like this Economic Policy institute, which seems to be associated really with like some public relations people, published a Web site that attacked you directly.
Marcus: Absolutely. And just to clarify, it was the Employment Policies Institute, which was use that acronym purposefully to confuse people because the Economic Policies Institute is a wonderful, very unbiased institution that’s published a ton of data that supports everything I’m saying. So Richard Furman is if you go on YouTube, you can type in 60 minutes.
Marcus: Dr. Evil calls himself Dr. Evil to hired. He’s a hired gun. He was a hired gun for tobacco. Then he became a hired goon for the restaurant industry. And he created this created an attack website to attack us and also a fake organization called the Employment Policy Institute, with the same acronym as the Economic Policy Institute to confuse people and set up an attack website where he put my children’s pictures up on this attack website. My baby, when she was two years old, she’s now dead. But, you know, I put her up on that website and they went to our funders homes to tell them not to fund us. And of course, there have been innumerable death threats, just so many I can’t even count.
Marcus: So, yes, it’s all been incredibly personal and very gendered. And because I’m a woman of color, it’s become like, you know, I’m I’ve I’ve been a boogie man or boogie woman that somehow I’m out to kill the industry. And what’s so incredible is that through the pandemic, the restaurant owners that work with us, it grew from 800 pre-pandemic to 2500 today. And so everything they’ve done to try to say we want to shut down the industry now looks just ridiculous given the amount of restaurant owners who have joined forces with us saying, no, actually this is the only future to for the industry to survive. It’s not going to kill the industry. It’s actually the only way we’re going to survive.
Mary Harris: But here’s the thing. As someone who likes eating out quite a bit, I do feel like there’s this issue, which is over the last, I don’t know, 50 years, eating out has become something more people do more of the time. People feel like they should be able to go to restaurants and businesses, meet them there. You know, chain restaurants have driven down the cost of eating out and people have come to expect they’ll be able to afford to eat out. Yeah.
Marcus: You know, I work really closely with Mark Bittman. You know, New York Times columnists, really famous chef. And and I like the way he puts it, which is when you have an unsustainable situation, you know, people aren’t paid enough to afford to eat out the way they want to. You have two solutions. Either you can artificially suppress the wages or the cost of eating out.
Mary Harris: Which is what’s been happening. Right?
Marcus: Or you could just raise people’s wages across the board so that they actually can afford to consume and eat out. And then there’s a virtuous cycle, not a not a kind of race to the bottom, but a virtuous cycle of people getting paid more and spending more. And that’s supporting business and that continuously supporting a growing and thriving economy. And you really don’t have to buy it from me. You know, in 2021, there was real hope of a federal bill to raise the minimum wage to 15 and end the seven it wage for tipped workers. Biden was behind it. Congress was behind. It was going to move. And the NRA kept telling everybody it can’t be done. It can’t be done if we pay more than $2 will go out of business. In that same moment, the CFO of Denny’s told shareholders on an analyst call. Actually, it’s going to be okay because we pay this already in California and Denny’s. California has grown faster than Denny’s anywhere else in the country because we pay people better and consumer spending is higher.
Mary Harris: Do you think that this fair wage for restaurant workers, do you think it’s going to move federally in the next little bit?
Marcus: I do. I do. We’re moving this right now in 25 states. We just won it, as I said. Last year, Michigan became the eighth state last year to do this. D.C. voters, 76% of them voted to do this in November. We’ve got 12 states doing it. Moving legislation this year, another four states. It’s on the ballot next year. I think by 2025, 20, 26, half the country would have done this. And at that point, it’s totally plausible for the federal government to do it because half the country would have done it already.
Marcus: So, yes, we are headed in this direction. I think the real question for the Restaurant Association or for anybody who’s scared or thinks this is terrifying is to say, look, this is the future. Workers aren’t coming back without this. So how how can we help you do this? Not yes or no, will we? But how? And so that’s why we’ve created all these programs to provide small business restaurants with money, training, support, technical assistance. We’ve got a loan fund for restaurants to help them make this transition. We’ve got a calculator. You can input your menu prices and staff size, and it shows you how to make this transition profitably.
Marcus: So we aren’t just saying, do this and we’re going to make you do it. We’re actually helping right now. Literally hundreds of restaurants do this across the country, and we’ve created an association of restaurants to help each other learn from each other as they do it. So it’s the future. And again, the question is how how do we support small business to do it? Not well.
Mary Harris: So I’m really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show.
Marcus: Thank you.
Mary Harris: Saru Jayaraman is the president of One Fair Wage and the director of the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center. And that’s our show. If you’re a fan of what we’re doing here at what next, there is a way to show us some love. Join Slate Plus. That’s our membership program going over to Slate.com. Slash, what next? Plus, to find out how. What next is produced by Elena Schwartz, Carmel Delshad and Madeline Ducharme. We are getting a ton of support from Anna Phillips, Jared Downing, and Laura Spencer. We are led by Alicia montgomery with an assist from Susan MATTHEWS, Ben Richmond. Make sure I read these ads. And I’m Mary Harris. You can go track me down on Twitter about Mary’s desk. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.
