As Arianna Huffington
noted this weekend in response to protests by restaurant workers, the American Dream is in danger.
Huffington was giving the keynote at the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade-show on Sunday when #StopTheOtherNRA activists, including restaurant workers and living wage advocates stood up in the middle of her speech to add some much-needed context on the topic being discussed: the American Dream. We interrupted her speech to highlight the role the Other NRA has played in the abysmal wages and working conditions common throughout the restaurant industry, holding up signs and chanting “$2.13 IS NOT THE AMERICAN DREAM.”
$2.13 is the federal rate for tipped workers; a wage that hasn’t budged since 1991, subjecting countless restaurant workers to live in poverty, forced to depend on the generosity of customers to be able to feed their families. The abysmal wage is due in large part to the extensive anti-worker lobbying led by the National Restaurant Association and its corporate members, including full-service restaurant giant, Olive Garden parent company Darden Restaurants. Darden is the largest full-service restaurant corporation in the world, easily employing the most tipped restaurant workers in the country.
As we were escorted by security out of the convention, Huffington said to the audience “I understand the demonstration. We all need to be cognizant that we are going through a difficult time in this country. Where inequality has grown, where more people are in poverty.”
With the absolute lowest wage and majority of the worst paying jobs in the country, one doesn’t have to look much farther than the restaurant industry to see why the American Dream is out of reach for so many.
Despite working full-time in grueling conditions, erratic scheduling, and often more than one job, nearly half of all full-service restaurant workers still require public assistance programs to make ends meet. That amounts to consumers propping up the poverty wages of the full-service restaurant industry to the tune of nearly
$9.4 billion every year. Servers, the vast majority of which are women, use food stamps at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce and are three-times as likely to live in poverty. Keep in mind, due to the two-tiered wage system, tips aren’t just ‘something extra’ on top of a fair base wage -- they are the bulk of a tipped worker's take-home pay. So, on top of tax dollars going to crucial public support programs that most restaurant workers simply cannot survive without, the full-service restaurant industry gets away with forcing customers to pay their workers’ wages through tips. This is a toxic double-subsidy, especially problematic considering the connection between being forced to get by on tips and high rates of sexual harassment in the restaurant industry: research conducted by ROC and Forward Together shows that
90% of women tipped workers report experiencing sexual harassment at work.
The American Dream certainly isn’t about working full-time, still living in poverty, considering getting groped and harassed at work as “just part of the job” while the CEO of the restaurant corporation you work for gets paid more in a day than you, as a server, would even make in one year. For many, this is an American Nightmare.
Due to the sheer size of the restaurant industry -- it boasts more than 11 million workers -- and the influence of the Other NRA, the lobby’s agenda impacts the entire economy and a vast amount of urgent issues. The NRA’s legislative agenda centers on opposing minimum wage increases, paid sick days, nutritional menu labeling, regulation of sodium, trans fats, and sugars, and other policies. Taking cues from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the NRA has lobbied successfully to pass legislation that prevents localities from getting to vote on paid sick days, stripping states of their right to enact nutrition labeling requirements, and obstructs the advancement of women’s equality by opposing the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Family Medical Leave Act. If the NRA continues to get its way, we can expect more dystopia than American dream.
That’s why #StopTheOtherNRA activists went into the belly of the beast at this weekend’s trade-show. We wanted to show the National Restaurant Association and its president Dawn Sweeney what the American Dream looks like for the millions of workers who are the lifeblood of the restaurant industry -- servers, bartenders, hosts, bussers, dishwashers, and more. To start, we want a good jobs for everyone, including wages that can sustain a family, paid sick days, and one, fair minimum wage. To get there, we need our elected officials to come together and stop taking the Other NRA’s corporate cash.
It's our time for a healthy and just restaurant and food industry.
Co-founded by leading workers’ rights advocate Saru Jayaraman (“One of the top 50 most influential people in the restaurant industry” – Nation’s Restaurant News) ROC United has grown to close to 14,000 worker-members across over 30 cities in the US, winning 15 worker-led campaigns, totaling $8 million in stolen tips and wages.