Principled plate: Diners’ Guide helps make eating out ethical
…the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) has released a Diners’ Guide that rates the 150 highest-grossing restaurants in the country on criteria like living wages, paid sick leave, and opportunity for career advancement.
…ROC collaborated with students from Tulane University and University of California, Los Angeles to investigate the labor practices of the country’s biggest restaurants. The result is a guide that says which restaurants are guilty of common industry behaviors like paying tipped workers less than $5 an hour and non-tipped workers less than $9 (the federal minimum wages for each are $2.13 and $7.25, respectively); not offering paid sick days; and denying employees a chance to be promoted.Jayaraman holds the now ex-presidential candidate Herman Cain to blame for what she calls the “abysmal” $2.13 minimum wage. As a lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association, in 1996, Cain struck a deal with Congress agreeing that his group wouldn’t block a rising minimum wage as long as the wage floor for tipped workers stayed frozen at its 1991 level.
“What that essentially means is the industry and Congress are saying, ‘We expect you consumers to pay the wages of these workers [through tips],’” Jayaraman says. “It’s not fair to workers and it’s not fair to consumers. The industry is thriving, but tipping is not; people are not tipping as much as they used to because people are struggling.”The median wage for the more than 10 million restaurant workers in the U.S. is $8.90 per hour. Jayaraman said only 20 percent of industry jobs pay a living wage, and restaurant workers often live in poverty or are homeless.
…
“Workers know this [abuse] is going on. They’re sick of it. But they’re also incredibly afraid,” Jayaraman said. “This is a bad economy, and employers have beat it into their heads that they should be grateful for their jobs. This is why we do these things, to help people stand up.”