Promoting the Next-Generation Workforce Strategies

In the Headlines

24 February 2012

Report Highlights Workplace Issues for Waitresses

A new report from Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), a grantee, looks at the workplace issues facing female restaurant servers. Among the report’s findings: Women servers earn only 68 percent of what male servers do, while black women earn only 60 percent. And women in the restaurant business are five times more likely to suffer sexual harassment at work than the average woman. ROC and other grantees of our Promoting the Next Generation Workforce Strategies initiative are working to raise the minimum wage, require employers to provide paid sick days and enact other policies that help all low-wage workers.

Published in In These Times

Tip Big: Restaurants Aren’t Good to Workers—Especially Women

February 14, 2012 By David Moberg

Just in time for the restaurant industry’s biggest day of the year, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United delivered an anti-Valentine to the industry for its systematic mistreatment of women in the business, from fast service joints to fine dining establishments. The report—“Tipped Over the Edge: Gender Inequity in the Restaurant Industry”—shows the business has delivered no tangible love to its workers and a healthy dose of discrimination towards women in the restaurant workforce.

ROC, an organization with more than 9,000 restaurant worker members in 19 cities, started in New York City a decade ago. It serves as a worker rights center, a research-oriented advocate for better public policy, and an organizer and supporter of “high road” restaurants that demonstrate, as ROC director Saru Jaramayan says, that “you can pay good wages and have a thriving business and industry.”

But instead, most restaurants thrive—and the industry continues to grow and rack up record profits, even during these hard times—by paying workers poorly. ROC’s report—supported by a dozen groups focused on women’s rights—notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified seven jobs in the restaurant industry in its 2010 list of the ten lowest-paid occupations. Including tips, the average server made $8.81 an hour. But the average is misleading because of huge variations in the industry.

Read the complete article »