Episode 46: One Fair Wage
with attorney Saru Jayaraman
Amy is joined by attorney and activist Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage to learn the eye-opening history of tipping culture, how the restaurant service industry is one of our nation's biggest propagators of patriarchy, and why it's time for consumers to say enough is enough.
Our Guest
Saru Jayaraman
Saru Jayaraman is co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, a national organization of nearly 300,000 restaurant and service workers, nearly 1000 restaurant owners, and dozens of organizations nationwide, all working together to end the subminimum wages in the United States and raise wages and working conditions in the service sector. Saru is also the author of the books One Fair Wage,Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, and Behind the Kitchen Door.
Amy Allebest: Let's talk about tipping. 15%, 20%, 25%... How much is enough, and why do these percentages always seem to be getting higher? If you or anyone you know has ever worked a service job at a restaurant, you probably know that by and large, these employees live on these tips. Why is that? Why aren't these workers just paid an appropriate amount for their work? And why do we treat service industries differently from any other form of labor? And how did our tipping culture even get started in the first place? Today, I'm excited to dig into this history and these questions, and the fight for fair wages, figuring out how we inherited this system, what's wrong with it, and how we can find our way out. Our guest today is an activist, an advocate, and the founder of One Fair Wage, which is a nonprofit organization fighting for the rights of service workers across our nation. Please welcome to the podcast Saru Jayaraman. Welcome, Saru!
Saru Jayaraman: Oh, thanks for having me.
AA: I'm so excited to hear all about this topic, which is one that is relatively new to me, so I do have lots of questions for you. But first I'll just read your professional bio, and then you can introduce yourself more personally. Saru Jayaraman is co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, a national organization of nearly 300,000 restaurant and service workers, nearly 1000 restaurant owners, and dozens of organizations nationwide, all working together to end the subminimum wages in the United States and raise wages and working conditions in the service sector. Saru is also the author of the books One Fair Wage, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, and Behind the Kitchen Door. I would love to know a little bit more about you personally. Where are you from? What are some factors that made you who you are, and what are some things that brought you to do the work that you're doing today?
SJ: Yeah, well, my parents are immigrants from India, and although I was born in this country, their being immigrants definitely shaped my life growing up. Also, I grew up in East LA in a 95% Chicano/Latino neighborhood, working class, so the immigrant experience and then the experience of working-class brown and Black people was definitely my creation experience, my growing experience. And everywhere around me, people were working in restaurants. The restaurant industry is the largest employer of immigrants and people of color in the United States, so it felt very natural for me after law school and graduate school to focus my desire for change in this country on an industry that's so huge, impacts all of us, and is so tied to my own personal life and upbringing.
AA: Oh, that's really interesting. So you did law school. Had you envisioned a career in law for yourself through your whole life, or how did that happen?
SJ: No, I definitely was focused on having the greatest impact in terms of social justice. That was kind of a drive that I think maybe my mother instilled in me. And I happened to be in New York finishing up law school and working at an immigrant rights center when 9/11 happened. And on September 11th, there was a restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, Tower 1, called Windows on the World. And on that morning, 73 workers, almost all immigrants from all over the world, died. About 250 workers lost their jobs in that one restaurant, and 13,000 restaurant workers lost their jobs in the months following the tragedy. So I was asked by the union that was inside that restaurant, Windows on the World, to start a relief center for workers from Windows on the World and then for displaced restaurant workers all over the city. And what started as a relief center that we called ROC, the Restaurant Opportunity Center, grew into a national movement for change in the restaurant industry.
AA: Wow. That is so interesting. So you had this background of how you grew up and seeing people in your community working in the food industry.
SJ: That's right. And then it became more real for me after 9/11 when I was brought to meet the workers from Windows on the World, who were from all over the world. And what was so interesting about Windows on the World, for anybody who went there before the towers fell, was that the original founder of Windows on the World, a man named Joe Baum, wanted to create a restaurant where any tourists that came from anywhere in the world would have somebody on the staff of that restaurant from their home country that could talk to them and tell them about wine and tell them about the dishes. So there were workers from the tiny island nation of Curacao, and Bangladesh, and Morocco, and just all over the world. It truly was Windows on the World, not just because it was so high, but because it was so diverse. And it was the epitome of the restaurant industry. For anybody who's ever worked in the industry, you know it is like a melting pot. It's a place where people come together from all over the world, both the workforce and the consumer base, and really formed these very strong bonds working together and really struggling together. And in this case, these were workers who had lost coworkers and family members that day in the restaurant. So they had experienced both joy and real tragedy together. And they say that, obviously, one of the greatest strengths comes from resilience, comes from “we rose out of the ashes of tragedy,” and the workers who came from Windows on the World really co-founded this movement with me. In fact, Fekkak Mamdouh is an immigrant from Morocco, and we co-founded this work together twenty-three years ago, and he's still working with me twenty-three years later as the co-founder and leader of One Fair Wage.
AA: Wow. That is fascinating. I'm so glad you shared that story in depth. That's really, really incredible. And even more broadly, I'm just reflecting since this is not anything I've ever really thought about. But how beautiful it is, like, it's such a solidarity-building environment in the restaurant industry, like you said, this diversity. All humans eat and all humans share food as a cultural, human experience.
SJ: That's right.
AA: I'm guessing people learn each other's languages as they're side by side in the kitchens.
SJ: Languages and cultures. I mean, we literally use the phrase “breaking bread” as we think about food as a way to bring people together, and it truly does. That, to me, is the tragedy, is that you have this industry with such incredible potential to be this beautiful meeting point for people from all over, but it is the lowest paying industry in the United States and maybe one of the most exploitative, and there’s so much potential that's not being met.
AA: Yeah. Wow. Well, that's a perfect foundation on which to build the rest of the conversation, so that's really great. Maybe we can start with a little bit of context in terms of tipping culture. Like I started at the top of the episode, can you tell us where tipping comes from? And you know if you've gone to other countries that it's not the same everywhere you go. It's very, very different, so where does tipping culture come from in the States?
SJ: Yeah. Well, tipping worldwide began in feudal Europe, when centuries ago, aristocrats, kings, dukes, earls, nobles would give extras or bonuses to their servants, but always on top of a wage. This is the thing that gets me. Servants in feudal Europe got actual full wages or salaries. Tipping was always meant to be an extra for a job well done, not a replacement, an extra. It really was the United States that mutated that in a very ugly way because of an ugly history. Prior to emancipation in the US, waiters in the United States were white men, actually, who got full wages, no tips. And they went on strike for higher wages in 1853, and of course the restaurant industry started looking for cheaper labor. At first, they started replacing these white men with white women. But after emancipation happened, 1865, 10 years later, the restaurants felt like they hit upon a jackpot, which was to hire Black women for free, and to tell them, “You're not going to get a wage, you're going to live exclusively on this new thing that's just come across the pond from Europe. You're going to get tips from customers whose meals you serve.”
So you have to understand, we uniquely mutated tipping from being an extra or bonus, as it was always intended to be, to becoming a replacement for wages so that restaurants could continue to access free Black labor after chattel slavery ended. And we went from $0 in 1865 all the way up to $2.13 cents an hour. And the answer to the questions why and how is honestly the focus of your podcast: it is patriarchy. The wage would not be $2, they would not have gotten away with saying no wage, had it not been that this industry from 1865 until today is overwhelmingly guess who? Women. Two thirds of tipped workers in the United States today are women, and they're mostly women who work in very casual restaurants and bars, like IHOP, Denny's, Applebee's, Olive Garden. They mostly don't work in fancy, fine dining restaurants, and they struggle with three times the poverty rate of other workers. They use food stamps at double the rate. We had the occupation with the highest levels of single mothers of any occupation in the United States. And we are the occupation with the absolute highest levels of sexual harassment of any industry, because these women have to put up with so much to get those tips from customers.
AA: Ugh, wow. That's a lot. And we're going to dig into a couple more of those subtopics more deeply in a minute, but that's really gutting. Okay, let's dig into a few things one at a time. I mentioned the term “subminimum wage” a few minutes ago, which maybe some of our listeners will be familiar with, but I wasn't. I think unless you work in the service industry or are following this closely, it's not something that we're taught about or that we hear about. So first, what is the subminimum wage? How is that even legal? And then I'd like to know the actual number. What is the subminimum wage in the United States today?
“Two thirds of tipped workers in the United States today are women, and they’re mostly women who work in very casual restaurants and bars”
SJ: Yeah, so at the federal level and in 43 states in the United States, employers can legally pay tipped workers, who are overwhelmingly women, a wage less than the minimum wage. Federally, it's $2.13 cents an hour, but in most of those 43 states, it's actually $5 or less. So in most of the country, these women are being paid $2, $3, $4, maximum $5 an hour. And since minimum wage became a thing in 1938, according to the law, employers are supposed to ensure that tips bring workers from that subminimum wage of $2, $3, $4, $5, to the full minimum wage, whatever it is in your state. But the Obama administration found an 84% violation rate with regard to employers actually ensuring that tips bring you to the full minimum wage. The Biden administration found an 85% violation rate with regard to employers actually ensuring. I mean, I feel for employers. How would they know how much workers make, you know, have to go back and count for every hour? “Do the tips bring you to the minimum wage?” It's cleaner and easier to do what seven states have done for decades, which is just pay everybody a full minimum wage with tips on top. That's what happens in seven states, including California, which has the largest and fastest growing restaurant industry in the country.
But it probably is also what consumers think is happening in most of the country. In most of the country, consumers probably think, “My tips are going to the workers.” They are not. In most of the country, your tips are going to the boss, who takes your tip and uses it to cover their legal obligations to their workers. He takes your tips and he uses it to pay workers a wage rather than letting it go directly to the workers on top of a wage. So it is a very serious system of exploitation. And worst of all, it just makes these workers so, so, so vulnerable, because if you earn a wage of $2, $3, $4 to $5 an hour, it's so low, it goes entirely to taxes, and you live off your tips. And when you live off your tips, you have to put up with whatever a customer might do to you. However they treat you or touch you or what they may say to you, because you rely on those tips to feed your family. You don't get a wage to feed your family, you rely on whatever the customer's mood is, their biases, their desire to touch you. You rely on that to pay the bills and feed your family. It makes them so vulnerable.
AA: Wait, so back up for me for a second. In these states, aside from the seven states that you mentioned, if I pay a tip at the end of my meal and maybe I leave it on the table or I put it on the credit card, it goes to the boss of the restaurant, and then he uses whatever he needs to and then redistributes it to the workers? Is that how it works? And then they live on that. Like it goes back to the employee after he takes a cut.
SJ: I know we're using “he” and there are plenty of great women restaurant owners, but the overwhelming majority of restaurant owners in America are men. Like four out of five. So it's natural for us to use “he”. Yes, he is taking the tips, because 99% of tips these days are on credit cards.
AA: Yeah, yeah.
SJ: All of that goes to the employer. They're using the majority of that to pay the actual minimum wage.
AA: Got it.
SJ: And then what's left over is distributed only among the dining room staff, which is not one worker by the way. Your tip gets distributed. Look, a lot of it goes to the boss, and then after that it gets distributed among multiple workers: the server, the boss, the bartender, the bar back, the expeditor. So your tip is not going to the person who serves you, it's going to a lot of people, including the boss. In fact most of it is going to the boss in this system. So what we as consumers should be advocating for is that I want my tips to go to the worker who served me, on top of the wage she really should be getting from her employer, like every other employer in every other industry who has to pay at least a minimum wage. The thing that gets me is, why is this one industry excluded from the obligations of every other industry to pay their workers an actual minimum wage? Well, I'll tell you. It's partly because these are the lowest-wage women in America and they're up against a very powerful trade lobby called the National Restaurant Association, that was founded in 1919 with the express intent and purpose of ensuring that these women never got a minimum wage. They're my nemesis. We call them “the other NRA”. They're tremendous bullies. And it truly is the lowest-wage women in America versus these very powerful men who run large restaurant corporations.
AA: This is blowing my mind. People really don't know this. Wow. And I would've thought, to be honest, this was so interesting to me, but I thought maybe it's a little bit of a stretch to say that it really does intersect with patriarchy, but–
SJ: Oh my God, it's nothing but patriarchy! I mean, and racism. It's those two things combined. But this is about women being devalued. I remember I had a reporter, I was telling her this story, this history, and she said, “Stop, stop. You are telling me that the largest employer of women in the United States gets to pay $2? That's all you have to tell me. That's it. That is patriarchy. That is the epitome of what's happening in this country, that women who serve us can be valued as humans at $2 an hour. That's all you need to know about the value America places on women generally.”
AA: Hmm. Yeah, and that makes perfect sense, too, why that would place women in such a vulnerable spot. If these are the ones who are at the lowest paid and struggling, I can imagine a lot of them single mothers, it would make you incredibly vulnerable. Tell us more about that. If there are some statistics that you could share, I'd really love you to enlighten us further on that topic.
SJ: It's quite ugly and painful, to be honest with you. I'm getting emotional. I mean, one in two American women works in the restaurant industry at some point in their lifetime. For most women, it's their first job. And as a young woman, you know, I have two girls, 15 and 12, and my 15-year-old is starting to work. For most girls, their first job is in a restaurant where they are told, and I'm not making this up, “Dress more sexy, show more cleavage, wear tighter clothing. That's how you're going to do well in this job. That's how you're going to make more money in tips. That's how you're going to do well.” And how do we know these two issues are so connected? We did a thousand surveys of workers across the country, and we found that workers in the 43 states with a subminimum wage were twice as likely to report regular sexual harassment on the job, and three times as likely to be told by their boss, “Dress more sexy, show more cleavage, wear tighter clothing.” Why? Well, because in the seven states where workers get a full minimum wage, they're not as dependent on the tips to feed their family so they can say, “Shove off. I don't need your tip. I get a wage from my boss so I don't have to put up with the harassment from customers.” It's not that harassment doesn't exist in California, it's still quite high in our industry because they're still tipping, but it's half the rate of other states because women are able to stand up for themselves because they can say, “I like your tip, but I'm not going to have to do all the things that a woman in New Mexico who gets paid $2.13 cents has to do to get that tip, because I get a wage from my boss.”
And that early formative experience for young women lasts a lifetime. We've done interviews with women– I talked to Senator Amy Klobuchar, we've talked to senators and CEOs who will tell you, even judges, who've said to us, “I've been sexually harassed later in my professional life, but I never did anything about it because it was never as bad as it was when I was a young woman working in restaurants.” Which means our industry sets the standard for what women and men think is legally and ethically acceptable in the workplace. What is acceptable is that you can essentially sell your body to get a good tip, and you expect it. It's such a fine line between pleasing the customer and sexual harassment. So fine a line that most workers don't even recognize what they're experiencing as sexual harassment. They just think it's part of the job, pleasing the customer. “The customer's always right.” It's not just about the customer. When you are told by your boss, essentially to objectify yourself to get tips, that makes you vulnerable to coworker and management harassment. It is why we have the highest rates of both assault and rape by coworkers and managers of any industry in the United States. Because, again, women in our industry are seen as objects who must put out, who must put up, who must tolerate– honestly, who must encourage harassment, not even tolerate it, in order to get the tip.
AA: Wow. Yeah, this is really sobering. And it is striking me that you're right, I mean, I'm just thinking back. I’m retroactively making connections with college roommates I had, and there's a specific cousin of my husband who told me about working at Claim Jumper, and I was shocked to hear these stories. She's a lot younger than I am, and I was shocked to hear that that was still happening a few years ago, and it sounds like it's ongoing.
SJ: Ongoing. And we work really closely with Professor Catharine MacKinnon, who is the legendary law professor who coined the term “sexual harassment” and fought to make it illegal in front of the Supreme Court. And she has said two things, looking at our research, doing research with us. She said that no industry in the United States has a higher rate of sexual harassment than the restaurant industry, including the military, which she has spent a lot of time studying. Two, she said, “I've never seen any policy more effective at cutting harassment than One Fair Wage, a full minimum wage with tips on top.” Because sexual harassment is fundamentally about power in the workplace. And if you are earning $2, $3, $4 an hour in a system that was literally a legacy of slavery, you have zero power in the workplace. Zero power. In fact, you have zero wages from your boss, because your wages go to taxes. You have no power to push back against anything that's coming at you because you're so dependent on those tips to feed your families.
AA: Yeah. Wow. This is incredibly clear. And we'll get to what we can do about this, because this is really, really crazy to me that this is the way it is still. And I do have to highlight again, and you articulated it so well already, but it hit me so strongly that for teenage girls working in the restaurant industry, this really does perpetuate sexist, patriarchal norms that resonate outward into this young woman's life. It sets the standup for what she thinks is normal for the rest of her life if that's her first job. Oh, it makes me sick.
SJ: That’s right. I can't tell you the number of young women who've said to us, “My boss tells me to dress more sexy.” We've had workers tell us, “My boss actually sent me home and told me to go dress more sexy and revealing and come back so that you can make more money in tips, so you can do a better job selling the food and the alcohol and make more money in tips.” So again, the young women are being told that the way to succeed, the way to do well in this job, is to encourage harassment, encourage objectification, self-objectification of you as a woman.
AA: And that's technically illegal, right? You really can't do that. But where's your recourse, like, who would you go to if that's your boss or if he owns the restaurant?
SJ: You know what's crazy? When we used to survey workers and ask them, “Do you experience sexual harassment on the job?” One in five would say yes, and then we realized they don't see it as harassment. We would say, “Do you experience sexual behavior in the restaurant that's scary or unwanted?” And 90% of workers said yes, actually both men and women, but mostly women. And it's because, again, they think, “Yes, it's scary. Yes, it's unwanted, but it's part of the job. It's pleasing the customer. The customer's always right.”
AA: Yeah. And they don't have recourse, I'm just thinking, because the boss will just say, “Find another job if you don't like it.”
SJ: In fact, our data shows– it's so funny. A lot of these big restaurant corporations, IHOP, Denny's, Applebee's, Olive Garden, on paper they have something they call zero tolerance policies for sexual harassment. And the we and the workers will joke that it's zero tolerance for complaining about sexual harassment, because there've been so many stories. The data shows that you are more likely in this industry than any other industry to get fired or retaliated against for complaining about sexual harassment because most restaurants see it as just part of the job. And it gets worse. There's a slippery slope we've seen where there's, you know, the IHOPs and the Denny's, and then there's a whole field that is called, in the business literature, “the breastaurant”. And that is, yes, that is Hooters, but it's also something called Tilted Kilt and Twin Peaks, which refers to breasts. And what we are beginning to see is that the breastaurant is no longer just those kinds of restaurants, it is Denny's and IHOP and Chili's. I remember taking my kids to Chili's when they were young, and the servers were wearing these tight T-shirts with the word “Fresh” across the breasts. So how is that not a breastaurant, you know? We are seeing a real increase, especially under this president, Donald Trump, of customers expecting these women to put up with all kinds of harassment and feeling entitled to treat them and touch them however they want.
“Yes, it’s scary. Yes, it’s unwanted, but it’s part of the job.”
AA: Yeah. Sorry, I'm still just spinning on this, like, “What could they do? What could they do if they're going to get fired?” I think the only recourse legally would be to bring a lawsuit, and then you're like, “Oh yeah, okay.” That's why no one does that, because who has the time or money? If that's the kind of job that you have, if that's how you're making your living, you can't take time off and you can't get money together to hire a lawyer to bring a lawsuit against–
SJ: Well, first of all, you don't even know it's illegal, you think it's part of the job. If you are told it's illegal, you have to figure out, “How do I have the time and the money to find a lawyer, pay for a lawyer, go through a lawsuit?” And three, no other employer is going to want to hire me if I’m suing a restaurant. There are so many obstacles to women pushing back on this, and especially under this Supreme Court, it's not even clear that it would be considered illegal even though there's a long-standing precedent that it is.
AA: Wow.
Well, next topic. You've mentioned a couple times now that this is kind of an outgrowth of the system of enslavement, this whole system. And on your website, which I encourage all of our listeners to go look at, the One Fair Wage website, one of the things you'll see is the slogan “Wage Justice is Racial Justice.” Can we double click on that a little bit to explicitly tie this together? How does tipping and the fight for a fair wage also intersect with the fight for racial justice today?
SJ: Yeah. Besides the fact, as you said, that it's a legacy of slavery, unfortunately, it is an ongoing perpetrator of racial inequity. A Black woman tipped worker will earn $5 to $8 per hour less than a white man, and that is for two reasons. Women of color are typically segregated into lower tipping establishments. They're more likely to be in a Denny's or an IHOP or a Chili's than they are to be in a fine dining restaurant in any particular city. But even when they get into a fine dining restaurant, we have found, and there are so many studies done by a professor at Cornell that show that a Black woman and a white man next to each other in a fine dining restaurant, even if she provides perfect service, she will always be tipped less, and that comes from what we all know as implicit bias. It doesn't even matter who the customer is, whether they're white or a person of color. We all have implicit bias in our heads from growing up in this country, in this society, that we think somehow she provides lesser service, or she is less worthy of a certain level of tip than he is. So she gets paid $5 to $8 an hour less.
Now, we've looked at what that adds up to over a lifetime. It's in the realm of $650,000 of loss, just because of race and gender discrimination combined. And that is the ability to buy a house, the ability to send your kids to college, the ability to come out of generational poverty. So many impacts on women's lives, and particularly women of color, come from the biases that these women experience. So, when you are so vulnerable to biases and harassment, part of it we've already discussed at length is the sexual harassment you experience from customers. But the other part of being vulnerable and having to rely on tips is that you are having to put up with all of the biases and moods and thought processes of customers, that unfortunately in this country, ends up reflecting in this horrible pay inequity for women of color in this industry.
AA: Wow. Well, that highlights it so explicitly as well, and it seems like there would be no argument why you would want to keep a tipping system. How could anybody argue for that? That's kind of horrifying.
SJ: Even more horrifying, the Restaurant Association is so powerful, has so much money – $80 million a year minimum in lobbying dollars that they have – and they fund, unfortunately, electeds from both parties. I mean, look, this still exists in 43 states. A lot of those states are trifecta blue states, meaning the governor and both houses are blue. Why would Democrats go along with this if they are supposedly the party of women and working people? Well, they too have been bought by the Restaurant Association and funded to believe and to perpetuate the idea that these workers don't need a raise, they're white guys who work in fancy fine dining restaurants, they are doing fine. And the Restaurant Association loves to perpetuate this myth that somehow tips go away if wages go up, which we as consumers know is ridiculous. None of us knows how much the worker is getting paid, and we tip regardless. I mean, many of your listeners live in these seven states and have no idea the difference between their state and another state that they travel to. They tip pretty much the same everywhere. So tipping has nothing to do, it's not like anybody walks into a restaurant and ever says, “How much do you earn?” before they decide how much to tip.
Sadly, tipping is more correlated with the gender and race of the server, and there's all this data that shows that for a woman, she'll be tipped more if she allows herself to be touched or touches the person. And that her breast size and her hair color and her eye color have everything to do with the tip and nothing to do with how much she earns. So the arguments against it are that these workers don't need it, they're doing fine, the tips will go away. Or they love to paint this doom and gloom that the restaurant industry will collapse if they have to pay a full minimum wage, which you only have to look at the seven states, which are California, Oregon, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, Washington, and Alaska, to know that you can do fine. In fact, in those states are Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, all restaurant destination locations that are booming faster than the rest of the country and they have to pay a full minimum wage with tips on top.
AA: Okay. I'm trying to make sure I understand completely. Those seven states have to pay minimum wage. The other 43 can pay what you described as subminimum wage. They're not required to comply with minimum wage requirements for their state, and minimum wage is different in each of the 50 states.
SJ: Right.
AA: Okay. So that is what One Fair Wage is advocating for, is bringing everybody up to whatever the state requirement is for minimum wage, right?
SJ: Right. And let the tip be on top of that rather than a replacement.
AA: Yes. And each restaurant has the prerogative to pay above the minimum wage, and I'm sure many do.
SJ: Yeah, yeah. We have a thousand small business restaurants across the country, in Texas and New Orleans and Atlanta, that pay a full livable wage with tips on top and are doing quite well.
AA: Yep. That makes sense. Another question is that you've written about how tipping culture and the subminimum wage shape our current politics, and you note that in the 2024 election, Trump won voters – this blows my mind – Trump won voters making less than $50,000 a year. That's the first time a Republican has won the lowest income demographic since the advent of reliable exit polling. I'd love it if you could shed some more light on that data and tell us, I mean, maybe this is a little bit tangential, but how is it that our working class and specifically tipped workers are being pulled farther to the right? What is it that they're seeing that's being offered to them? Are they being helped by promises that are being made on the right? What is happening here?
SJ: It's not tangential at all. It goes to the crux of the problem, which is control of our democracy by corporations and the 1% and big donors, honestly in both parties. Because, look, I have been trying to get the Democratic Party, every time they run a presidential nominee, I have gone to that person and I have said, “I'm sitting on 14 million workers who are the lowest paid workers in America who are low propensity voters, they have about a 12% voter turnout rate. But I know and I have evidence to show that they will show up to vote if their wages are on the ballot, meaning somebody's running on a wage increase, or we put a minimum wage increase directly on the ballot. If you run on this issue and make it a signature issue, people will show up for you.” It's happened over and over and over again. We have so much data to show it, because let's remember who we're talking about. Michigan is a battleground state. A server woman in Michigan earning, until recently, $3.70 cents an hour, she has to work three jobs to survive. Literally. Is she going to take time away from one of her three jobs to go vote when she has not seen her wage go up under either Democratic or Republican administrations? No. She'll lose tips. She might even be retaliated against by her boss for taking time to go vote. And what impact does the vote have? Very little, when her primary issue is, “How do I feed my kids and keep the lights on?”
And Democrats have not helped me do that. Let's be real. The subminimum wage for tipped workers has stayed federally at $2.13 cents an hour over over 30 years through both Democratic and Republican administrations because of the power of the Restaurant Association. Cycle after cycle, I've gone to candidates, I've said, “You should run on this issue,” and they've said no. Largely because they're worried about their donors who are restaurant owners and the Restaurant Association. So this guy came along last year and he announced, “I'm going to do no tax on tips,” and it's not the right solution. Two thirds of tipped workers don't even earn enough to be eligible to pay federal income tax, so it's not the right solution. It's not like most tipped workers are like, “This is the panacea.” But they do feel seen and heard and recognized as important enough to pander to. I mean, when it happened, I went to the Harris-Waltz campaign and I said, “Please pander. Just pander. Say you care about these people. Say you understand what they're going through. Say you're going to raise their wages.” Because Democrats have left these workers out, and let's be real. Who are these workers? These women, left out over and over again. Election cycle after election. Every time the minimum wage has gone up, you all heard about the fight for 15. In most states, the fight for 15 threw these women under the bus. The Restaurant Association said in most blue states, “Sure, we'll let the wage go to $15 as long as you leave the tipped workers out. So let's throw the women under the bus. Everybody else, majority men, get $15 an hour.”
That has happened over and over again. These workers feel ignored, they feel disposed of, and rightfully so. And this guy comes along and says, “At least I recognize your pain. I know you're struggling. I'm going to give you a tax cut.” And as problematic as this man is, and so problematic on so many levels, he is going to deliver a tax cut for 14 million restaurant workers. Not all of them are going to benefit, but it is for them and they are going to say, “This man gave me a tax cut. What did the Democrats give me? They left me out over and over again.” So we are putting out a plea. If you don't want these folks to go the way of fascism and authoritarianism, let's deliver for them. Let's run on raising their wage, giving them a full minimum wage with tips on top, so that they can feel like they're important enough to be included in the pro-democracy side.
AA: Wow. Yeah, wow. Well, you've sold me. I want to get involved. First, I do have a question really quickly. Let's say I do want to get involved, and there are maybe a few different ways that I could do that. If I now have my eyes open and I realize that tipping culture is such a problematic culture, then how do I address that if I know that it's bad to give a tip? I do tend to be a very generous tipper, and I tell my kids that it was just my personal feeling to make the decision once that I will always tip as generously as I can afford. You just make that decision. That's the kind of person I am. But now that I know that I'm playing into this really problematic system, what do I do? What should I do?
“If you don’t want these folks to go the way of fascism and authoritarianism, let’s deliver for them. Let’s run on raising their wage...”
SJ: Yeah. I mean, we still need you all to tip as generously as possible, because nowhere in the country, frankly, is the minimum wage enough to live on. So, tips are absolutely necessary on top of wages to get us closer to addressing the actual cost of living. And one thing that is a really useful tool for any listener is to go to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, you can literally Google “MIT living wage calculator” and you'll see in your county how much you need to earn per hour to just cover the basics of life. And there's actually no county in the country, even the cheapest county in the country, McClellan, Texas, at this time you need $20 an hour as a single person with no children. You need closer to $30 if you have kids, to cover the basics of life. There's nowhere in the country where even $15 is enough, and the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 cents. So, tips are necessary right now to get people closer to an actual living wage and a wage that allows them to live.
Tipping is necessary, but what would be so helpful is when you eat out, wherever you eat out, to tell employers, “I want my tip to go to the workers, not to the restaurant. I want you to pay a full minimum wage. For me to keep coming here, I want to see you pay a full minimum wage and that my tips go to the workers, not to cover the minimum wage.” And we have a directory of the restaurants that are part of our Good People's Association, which is highroadrestaurants.org. We want you to let us know if there's an employer who agrees with you and is willing to pay the minimum wage, but we also want you to communicate wherever you eat out, that that's what you want to see as a consumer. So that's one piece of it.
But the real answer to your question is that nothing will change unless we get everybody communicating with their legislators. And in particular, in this moment, when nothing seems to be moving that's any good at the federal level, we especially need you to be communicating with state legislators and letting them know, “In my state–” if you're not in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, or Alaska, we need you to tell your state legislators, “I want my tips to go to the worker. I want employers to pay the minimum wage. I want my tips to go to the worker on top of the wage.” We need your help, and for those that are willing to get more involved, please email us at info@onefairwage.org, because there are so many additional ways to help spread the word and get involved and join us when we go to the state legislature. I'm so glad to be talking to you, because we are missing the voices of consumers. We have workers and great restaurant owners who come with us to state capitals, but we need consumers to say, “Enough is enough. I don't want my tips being used in this way. As a consumer, I want tips to be on top of the wage.”
And can I just say one more thing on how this affects you all as consumers? I am sure you are seeing tipping everywhere right now, not just in restaurants. We are being asked to tip in airports and kiosks and coffee shops. Everywhere we go, suddenly we're given the screen for how much to tip. And that is because of the subminimum wage for tipped workers. As long as there's a subminimum wage, more and more and more businesses are going to want to introduce tipping via a screen or something else so that legally they're allowed to pay workers that subminimum wage. So a coffee shop can go down from paying $15 or whatever the statement of wage is, down to $2 or $3 if they introduce tipping and the workers start relying on tips. So if we don't want to be tipping everywhere all the time, we all have to fight to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
AA: Yeah. Wow, I had no idea. Makes perfect sense. Maybe you could tell us just a little bit more, because I'm so curious about One Fair Wage and what it does, what you do, in case there is a listener here that 's like, “I really want to get involved.” You show up at state capitals and you're talking to legislators. What are some other things that One Fair Wage does?
SJ: We're running legislation and ballot measures in a lot of states. There are some states, half the states, where you can put this directly on the ballot. States like Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Washington, DC, there are lots of states where you can put wage increases directly on the ballot. And there are many places like that where we are collecting signatures to put the issue on the ballot and then turn everybody out to vote Yes. But in half the states, you can't actually put it on the ballot. States like New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Maryland, where the issue is moving through the legislature, can't be put on the ballot. In states like that, we need your help to come with us to state capitals, to write letters to legislators, to call legislators, so it'd be great if you can email us at info@onefairwage.org from wherever you are, and we can tell you what's happening in your state and how you can get involved. There is one more thing that's really exciting that's coming up. Soon we're launching something called Solidarity Restaurants, where restaurants around the country who believe in their staff and want to stand by them, particularly in the face of both immigration raids and Medicaid cuts, have come together to launch this Solidarity Restaurants Network, and it'd be great to get your help as consumers to get more restaurants to sign on to that.
AA: Oh, fantastic. Well, I have a great list of to-dos. I just have to say, because I didn't say it before when you mentioned it, but how easy it would be really anytime we're dining out to talk to a person or even write a note on the receipt or something to make our voice is heard to the management of the restaurant and just say, “Hey, this is what I would prefer as a customer. I will be a loyal customer coming back, I'd love to support your business if you're complying with this ethical code of conduct.” You know what I mean? And I've never even thought to ask that. Then it would be such an easy thing to do, to make a habit of when I go out to eat.
SJ: And we know that's impactful, because if you think about the whole move around things being sustainable and organic, that happened because consumers kept asking, “Is this organic? Is this vegetarian? Is this sustainable?” So employers change their menus as a result. We know consumers can have power. Just please don't talk to your server, she doesn't have power.
AA: Yeah. Right, right, right.
SJ: But talking to the manager or the owner at the end of your meal and saying, “I loved the food, I loved the service, and I want to keep coming back here, but I want my tip to go to the worker on top of the wage. I want you to pay the worker a full minimum wage with tips on top.” Maybe not you alone, but consumers saying that over and over again, it will have an impact on employers.
AA: Oh, that's wonderful. I'm incorporating that into my practice. Thank you so much. This has been just mind-blowing and enlightening, and I am so, so impressed with the work you're doing. Thank you so much for joining us on Breaking Down Patriarchy today, Saru. I really enjoyed having you.
SJ: Likewise.
