national restaurant association
Restaurant Workers Are Fighting to End Rampant Exploitation
This movement is growing rapidly as workers across the country demand livable wages.
Growing up, I looked up to my father and aunt, who began restaurant industry careers after immigrating from Eritrea in the 1970s. When I started working, a restaurant job was a natural choice.
While I took great pride in my work, I struggled with the conditions. I was often on my feet for 10-12 hour shifts six days a week, had no access to affordable healthcare, was wholly unaware of my worker rights, and constantly worried about money.
Through laws rooted in slavery, employers are allowed to pay restaurant servers a sub-minimum wage. At the federal level, this wage has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991. If tips don’t raise your hourly pay to at least the regular minimum wage, your employer is supposed to make up the difference. But non-compliance is rampant.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness shows that while Darden was fighting minimum wage increases for their servers, they paid their top five executives a total of $120 million between 2018 and 2022.
When I started as a server in 2018, my hourly wage was $3.89. During the five-month off season, I struggled to make the regular minimum wage, especially if I had a section with empty tables. When I got injured on the job and asked about workers compensation, my manager fired me.
I later experienced what I believed to be wage theft and workplace discrimination. That’s when I joined the movement to end restaurant worker exploitation.
This movement is growing rapidly as workers across the country demand livable wages. Organizers are working to put minimum wage hikes for tipped workers on November ballots in several states, including Ohio, Maine, Maryland, and Massachusetts. A dozen states are considering legislation to do the same.
I can tell you the opposition to these efforts will be fierce.
I live in Washington, D.C. In 2018, I cheered when D.C. voters passed a ballot initiative to phase out the local sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. But the city council blocked the wage hike, forcing organizers to mount another successful ballot initiative in 2022.
D.C. finally began phasing out the sub-minimum tipped wage in 2023. And yet many restaurant owners are still undercutting workers by charging 20% “service fees” that most customers mistakenly think go to their servers, so they’re likely to tip less.
The National Restaurant Association, with affiliates in every state, is the leading driver of these anti-worker efforts. The lobby group’s members include powerful corporations intent on shifting business risks and costs onto employees, customers, and taxpayers.
I used to work for one of them. In 2019, I had a job at Yard House, which is part of the Darden empire along with Olive Garden and seven other chains.
I faced a common challenge for sports bar servers: Groups would come in to watch a game for several hours, only to leave a modest tip on a $30 bill. Inexperienced managers would also often send me home as soon as I arrived because of overstaffing. On those nights, my pay would be less than my transportation cost.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness shows that while Darden was fighting minimum wage increases for their servers, they paid their top five executives a total of $120 million between 2018 and 2022. That’s four times as much as they paid in federal taxes, despite strong profits.
After college graduation, I decided to work full-time as a labor organizer. With so many immigrants relying on restaurants for jobs, this struggle feels personal. But we’d all be better off if corporations like Darden had to share their profits more equitably.
Workers could achieve a better life and restaurants would have less turnover. And for customers, the food will taste even better if they know the hard-working professionals who serve their meals are treated with respect.
'Beyond Outrageous': Bombshell Report Uncovers Restaurant Lobby's Anti-Worker Scheme
A New York Times investigation found that the National Restaurant Association is using mandatory food safety classes to force workers to unwittingly fund lobbying against wage increases.
Labor advocates voiced outrage Tuesday in response to a New York Times investigation detailing how the powerful National Restaurant Association uses mandatory food-safety courses—which workers often pay for out of their own pockets—to help finance its campaigns against wage increases.
The Timesreported that the restaurant lobby and its affiliates have created "an arrangement with few parallels in Washington, where labor unwittingly helps to pay for management's lobbying."
They did so, according to the newspaper, by taking over a food-safety training business known as ServSafe and pressuring states to "mandate the kind of training they already provided—producing a flood of paying customers."
"The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fundraising arm of the National Restaurant Association—the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses," the Times noted. "The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters."
Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage—a national group that advocates for workers earning subminimum wages—said in a statement that "the National Restaurant Association was founded to suppress service workers' wages."
"But this bombshell New York Times investigation exposes something that most people didn't know—the National Restaurant Association is stealing from its low-wage workers in order to fund that anti-worker lobbying," said Jayaraman. "Restaurants like Applebee's and Olive Garden make millions of dollars by paying restaurant workers a federal subminimum wage of just $2.13 an hour. The fact that they fund lobbying efforts to kill laws raising wages by charging workers for food safety training is beyond outrageous."
"It's time politicians stop listening to the owners of major restaurant chains, and start listening to the American people."
Currently, four large states—California, Texas, Illinois, and Florida—require food-handling courses for most restaurant workers. ServSafe dominates the market for offering such classes, providing them for around $15 per worker.
"More than 3.6 million workers have taken this training, providing about $25 million in revenue to the restaurant industry's lobbying arm since 2010. That was more than the National Restaurant Association spent on lobbying in the same period, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service," the Times reported Tuesday. "The restaurant association notes that some employers have covered the costs of getting certified and that employees are given lower rates in certain circumstances. So not all 3.6 million workers paid $15 each."
Jayaraman called on "any elected official who claims to care about workers" to reject campaign cash from the National Restaurant Association and "return those stolen funds to the workers fighting to raise wages for all Americans."
"Across the country, the American people think wages are too low—and want a raise," Jayaraman added. "It's time politicians stop listening to the owners of major restaurant chains, and start listening to the American people."
The National Restaurant Association
spent $2.1 million on lobbying in 2022 alone, according to the watchdog OpenSecrets, and its political action committees donated to the campaign arms of Senate Democrats and Republicans.
The
overwhelming majority of the lobbying group's campaign donations flowed to Republican congressional candidates last year, OpenSecrets data shows.
The One Fair Wage campaign is demanding that lawmakers sign a
new pledge vowing to reject political donations from the National Restaurant Association, which is currently fighting a Biden administration rule limiting when employers are allowed to pay workers a subminimum wage.
"The National Restaurant Association has taken millions of dollars from low-wage workers and used it, without their knowledge, to fund lobbying activities to fight these same workers' wage increases through their PAC," the One Fair Wage pledge states. "These lobbying activities have resulted in millions of families falling below the poverty line, increasing their reliance on public assistance, costing taxpayers money, and hurting state and local economies."