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Saru Jayaraman | One Fair Wage Founded:Podcast - Saru Jayaraman | One Fair Wage [00:00:00] Saru Jayaraman: [00:00:00] Tips are inherently biased. And so, the best way to reduce the bias is to actually guarantee these workers all a full minimum wage that they can count on. [00:00:09] ♪ [music] ♪ [00:00:14] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:00:14] Hey, this is Rana Abdelhamid with Women Techmakers and Google for Startups: Founded, chatting with women tech founders from across the globe. And today, for season three, we're sitting with Saru Jayaraman:, who is the founder and president of One Fair Wage, a national coalition that is also using technology to organize and end all sub-minimum wages in the United States. [00:00:38] ♪ [music] ♪ [00:00:40] Thank you for joining us, Saru. I'm super excited to chat with you today and hear more about your work with One Fair Wage, and hear more about your use of technology to create more equity for tipped workers across United States. Do you mind telling some of our listeners a little bit of yourself, and some of the work that you're doing today? [00:00:59] Saru Jayaraman: [00:00:59] Sure, yeah. So, my name is Saru. I am a professor of UC Berkeley at the Goldman School of Public Policy. I have been leading for the last 20 years various organizations fighting to raise wages and working conditions in the restaurant industry and the service sector, more broadly. And the restaurant industry has been part of the pandemic, the nation's second largest, an absolute fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy, 13.6 million workers, but it's also been the absolute lowest paying employer in the United States and that's largely due to a trade lobby called the National Restaurant Association. We call it the other NRA. It represents the chains, the IHOP, the Applebee's. And it's been around-- it turns out 150 years since Emancipation of Slavery when it first amended the right to hire newly freed slaves and not pay them anything and have them live entirely on tips. These were mostly black women at the time, and this was a mutation of the original concept of tipping. [00:02:00] Tipping was supposed to be, since feudal times, in Europe, tipping was an extra or bonus on top of a wage, but because of America's unique and very racialized caste system, in the United States, we mutated the notion of tipping from being an extra or bonus on top of the wage to being the wage itself. And so black women were told, you don't get away from your boss, you work for tips. And we went from a zero-dollar-waged at Emancipation, all the way up to $2.13 an hour, which is the current federal minimum wage for tipped workers today. This is the largest work force of women in the United States. 70% of these workers are women, and a disproportion of women of color. They struggle with the highest rates of sexual harassment and economic instability of any work force in the United States. [00:02:48] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:02:48] Mmhm. [00:02:49] Saru Jayarama n [00:02:49] And they have very different experiences in the 43 states that persist with the sub-minimum wage, versus the seven states that got rid of this system many decades ago. So California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana and Alaska, all have had a full minimum wage with tips on top for decades. And if you listen to the other NRA, you would think, "Oh, those restaurants-- it must have decimated their restaurant industry." And in fact those seven states, for those of us that live in California, we know we have the largest and fastest growing restaurant industry in the country, and it's blooming and it's even doing really well. [00:03:27] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:03:27] So the minimum wage in California is the regular minimum wage? [00:03:31] Saru Jayaraman: [00:03:31] For everybody, it's $15 an hour, going up to $15, and that includes all restaurant workers who get paid a full minimum wage with tips on top, and we have here in California one half the rate of sexual harassment, as the states that have a wage of $2.13. that's because women, waitresses in California, they can reject the harassment from customers because they can count on a wage from their boss, like every other worker in every other industry; whereas, women waitresses, just 2 states over, in New Mexico, where the wages literally $2.13 an hour, they have to tolerate all kinds of inappropriate customer behavior to get those tips to feed their families because a $2-wage is negligible. [00:04:16] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:04:16] Of course. [00:04:17] Saru Jayaraman: [00:04:17] But that was all before the pandemic. With the pandemic, it's been just a devastating situation. About ten million of these workers lost their jobs, 60% couldn't get unemployment insurance because they were told their wages were too low to qualify for benefits. [00:04:33] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:04:33] Oh, wow! [00:04:34] Saru Jayaraman: [00:04:34] And then now, they're being asked to go back to work and risk their lives for a two-dollar wage when tips are down 50-75%. And even worse, they're being asked to enforce social distancing and mask rules with the very same customers from whom they have to get tips to survive. And so, it's a public health disaster. These workers are not going to have any incentive to try to enforce these rules, knowing they have to get tips from those same customers. [00:05:03] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:05:03] Right. [00:05:04] Saru Jayaraman: [00:05:04] I don't know if you've seen any of the news reports, but these servers are getting harassed like crazy by belligerent customers around the country. And so, asking these folks to "please sit apart, please wear masks..." [00:05:18] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:05:18] Wear mask, yeah. [00:05:19] Saru Jayaraman: [00:05:19] It means you don't get as much tips. In fact, we had a member, a woman who told us she got left a note saying, "I would have left you a bigger tip if you had taken off your mask, you'd be a lot cuter." [00:05:31] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:05:31] Oh, wow. [00:05:32] Saru Jayaraman: [00:05:32] And so, it's basically, these women are being asked to, basically risk death in order to entertain these male customers, which is, honestly, unfortunately been the dynamic in the industry for too long, but the pandemic just revealed what was already wrong with system and exacerbated it. [00:05:52] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:05:52] And Sara, what I find so fascinating about kind of the history that you shared is especially in this critical moment in the United States where there is a racial justice movement that is ongoing, that is reckoning with the reality of the court system in the United States, that this is still rooted in a history of slavery. [00:06:13] Saru Jayaraman: [00:06:13] That's right. [00:06:14] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:06:14] And you mentioned also, that the majority of the tipped workers are women of color, brown and black women. [00:06:19] Saru Jayaraman: [00:06:19] There's a disproportion of women of color and we just released a report two month ago, sho wing that women of color and black women particular, because of the sub- minimum wage they make anywhere from $5-8 less per hour than white men as tipped workers. And for two reasons, women of color are segregated into more casual restaurants, they're not in fine dining restaurants. That's where they can get work, and those restaurants have a lot less money in tips. And even when they're in fine dining, there's now irrefutable evidence that there's customer bias in tipping. So white men get tipped a lot more even when the women of color are better servers. [00:06:57] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:06:57] Wow! [00:06:58] Saru Jayaraman: [00:06:58] All of that results in a huge wage gap, which is why we need to pay these workers a wage so they're not entirely reliant on tips which are inherently biased. Tips are inherently biased. And so, the best way to reduce the bias is to actually guarantee these workers all a full minimum wage that they can count on. [00:07:19] Rana Abdelhamid: [00:07:19] That's really, really, really important, and so for a long time, you've been working directly with workers, you've been working with students as an educator, and I'm curious to know when tech came into the picture. Why you decided that building an app would be an important thing to do to create equity in this field? [00:07:40] Saru Jayaraman: [00:07:40] Yeah, so for a long time, people kept asking us, "What can I do?" "What can I do?" "How can I, as a consumer, have some role or voice, how can I support these workers and change?" Because we've been fighting for policy change, we did get this Bill passed in Congress, in the US House of Representatives to eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers.
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