Restaurant workers’ activist Saru Jayaraman.
It was a Thursday night in January when Hollywood came calling for Saru Jayaraman, and she had to Google what it was calling her for, exactly. “I’m the last person in the world to even watch the Golden Globes,” she says, laughing. “I’d heard of them but never really watched them. But I couldn’t have been paired with a better person.”
That person was Amy Poehler. As the comedian’s “date” to the ceremony, Jayaraman was one of several longtime activists to appear alongside famous actresses Jan. 7 at the 74th Golden Globe Awards, which this year was set aglow by the smoldering fires of the #MeToo movement. During his opening monologue, host Seth Meyers even name-checked Jayaraman, a woman whose very non-Hollywood title is director of Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center and the president and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United.
Jayaraman sat next to Poehler in a black column dress borrowed from Laura Dern and dangly silver earrings on loan from #MeToo founder Tarana Burke. She spent most of the evening backstage with Poehler, sort of but not really recognizing the famous faces that wafted by. “She mentioned Hugh Jackman,” says Jayaraman, who is slight of frame and unfailingly focused and direct in manner. “And I said, ‘Hugh Jackman, isn’t he some kind of werewolf ?’ ”
To be fair, all of the restaurant industry statistics housed in Jayaraman’s mind probably don’t leave much room for Hollywood facial recognition skills. She has spent the past 16 years advocating for restaurant workers’ rights.
Jayaraman can tell you, for example, that the Bay Area’s $5.50 race wage gap is double that of Houston’s, and also the largest in the country. She can tell you that 1 of 2 American women will work in the restaurant industry at some point in her life, and that Americans spend $16.5 billion in restaurant tips (or what Jayaraman describes as “public assistance”) every year. And the relationship between those two statistics, Jayaraman will also tell you, is encapsulated by one more: The restaurant industry is the source of more sexual-harassment claims than any other industry.
The industry’s sexual-harassment problem is just one of many that Jayaraman and ROC have battled since 2001, when the organization was created to help immigrant restaurant workers left jobless in the wake of Sept. 11. But it’s the one that has resonated the most in this cultural moment, and the one that got Jayaraman invited to the Golden Globes, a turn of events whose seeds were planted in 2014 when ROC published Not on the Menu, a report about the connection between sexual harassment and tipping.
Jayaraman has been fighting injustices large and small for most of her 42 years. Born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she grew up outside of Los Angeles. Her mother was “very passionate and knowledgeable about social issues,” Jayaraman says, and taught her children about what was going on in the world. The family experienced their share of racism — when their car broke down in Utah during a road trip, they were refused service by several mechanics — and that, coupled with the hardship Jayaraman witnessed as a high school student in the working-class, largely Chicano-Latino town of Whittier, made her grow up “fairly angry,” she says. “I needed to find a way to channel my anger into passion to do this work.”
After graduating high school at 16, Jayaraman attended UCLA, where she founded Women and Youth Supporting Each Other, a nonprofit created to help empower young women (the organization has since gone national, although Jayaraman is no longer affiliated with it). Jayaraman went on to Yale law school and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; she was working as an organizer and attorney at an immigrant workers’ center on Long Island, N.Y., when Sept. 11 happened.
Before she co-founded ROC with Fekkak Mamdouh, a Moroccan immigrant who had been a waiter at the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World, Jayaraman had “very little understanding” of the restaurant industry. “We would get cases all the time of workers being exploited at restaurants, but I had no idea of the scale,” she says.
Over the years, ROC has evolved to team up with restaurant owners along with workers. “I think there was a time when we thought there were good employers and bad employers, and now we don’t use those words,” Jayaraman says. “Nobody’s perfect, and nobody’s evil; everybody has the opportunity to change the path they’re on.”
One of the owners who has signed on to work with ROC is Daniel Patterson (Coi, Locol and others). In 2016, he became one of two restaurateurs in the Bay Area to agree to participate in the organization’s pilot program to bring racial equity to the industry’s overwhelmingly white finedining sector. The eight-month project entailed systematically changing the hiring, training and advancement processes at Patterson’s restaurant group. “She’s very direct, so we’re honest with each other,” Patterson says. “We say what’s up, but come from a place of respect and mutual appreciation, so I’ve learned a lot.”
When she’s not occupied with her work at the Food Labor Research Center, Jayaraman has poured a lot of her energy into ROC’s One Fair Wage campaign to eliminate the lower minimum wage for tipped workers. The campaign has been active in several states, including Michigan, where Jayaraman last year campaigned to get One Fair Wage added to the ballot in the upcoming midterm election.
She wasn’t alone: As she traveled around the state, Jayaraman was accompanied by none other than Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
“When you find a leader who is absolutely solid and strong and fierce and brave and strategic, that’s where you want to put your money and energy,” Fonda says. “Saru is all of those things. She’s amazing. So I’m doing all I can to support her.”
Such high-profile support has been a boon to Jayaraman, who has spent much of her career battling not only industry abuses but also the National Restaurant Association, the industry’s trade and lobbying organization. The “other NRA,” as she calls it, has been “trying to shut us down since our inception” with tactics that have included taking out a full-page ad in USA Today accusing ROC of being a labor union front, funding attack websites and lobbying for congressional investigations of the nonprofit.
Still, she can finally see “new openness to change in an industry that’s historically been pretty afraid of change,” she says. And she hopes that some of that change will come from the upcoming Oakland location of Colors, ROC’s small chain of restaurants that double as training facilities and worker-owned business incubators. The restaurant, located across from the Fruitvale BART Station, will be something of a family affair for Jayaraman, who is the mother of two young daughters: It will share building space with a restorative justice center run by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where Jayaraman’s husband, Zachary Norris, is the executive director. Between the restaurant, justice center and a housing clinic that will also occupy the building, ROC hopes to create a pipeline of workers who will “move up the ladder and desegregate this industry,” Jayaraman says.
And will, she hopes, be given new respect. “If we really view restaurant work as professional and treat these people as the professionals that they are, it doesn’t just change their income, their prosperity, their children. It also changes their psyche, their well-being, their willingness to participate civically.
“All the things we want for America,” Jayaraman says, “can come from valuing people.”
“When you find a leader who is absolutely solid and strong and fierce and brave and strategic, that’s where you want to put your money and energy.” Jane Fonda