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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Restaurant workers live below the poverty level

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One of the largest labor sectors in the U.S., the restaurant industry, has nearly half of its workers living under the income threshold required for a family to make ends meet, among many terrible working conditions according to a new report.

The study released by the Economic Policy Institute, ā€œLow Wages and Few Benefits Mean Many Restaurant Workers Canā€™t Make Ends Meet,ā€ underscores several areas of research on working conditions in which the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) has served as a leader since its founding in 2002. Many of the restaurant industryā€™s most devastating statistics have not improved over the years.

Below are highlights from the reportā€™s key findings:

After accounting for demographic differences, restaurant workers have hourly wages that are 17.2 percent lower than those of similar workers outside the restaurant industry.

More than two in five restaurant workers, or 43.1 percent, live below twice the poverty line – more than double the 19.9 percent share outside the restaurant industry. (Twice the official poverty threshold is commonly used by researchers as a measure of what it takes for a family to make ends meet.)

Women are much more likely than men to be cashiers/counter attendants, hosts, and wait staff and earn less than men in every restaurant occupation except for dining room attendants/bartender helpers, where they make roughly the same. The largest restaurant industry occupation is waiter/waitress, which makes up nearly a quarter (23.3 percent) of all restaurant jobs.

ā€œItā€™s simply not acceptable for one of the most profitable industries out there to provide the absolute lowest paying jobs and keep workers in poverty,ā€ said Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of ROC United. ā€œItā€™s an enormous testament to the power of the restaurant industry and its lobby group, the National Restaurant Association, that the tipped minimum wage has been frozen at the appallingly low rate of $2.13 an hour since 1991, and they get away with passing the responsibility of paying their employees directly onto the customer.

ā€œThere are great restaurant owners out there, many of them are our employer partners and members of RAISE (Restaurants Advancing Industry Standards in Employment), but the prevalence of horrible labor standards has a detrimental and lasting effect, especially with regard to women,ā€ continued Jayaraman. ā€œWomen are more than 70 percent of people getting paid a subminimum wage and living off tips; as a result, the EEOC has targeted the restaurant industry as the single largest source of sexual harassment charges, with a rate five times higher than any other sector.

ā€œWeā€™ve heard from numerous members about putting up with unwanted sexual advances from co-workers, management, and customers, and they are told, too often, thatā€™s ā€˜itā€™s just part of the job.ā€™ Imagine that your ability to make decent pay is directly linked, through earning tips, to your ability to endure sexual harassment,ā€ she said. ā€œThatā€™s an experience a woman takes with her for the rest of her life, and perhaps one of the most important reasons to do away with the two-tiered system of having a subminimum wage for tipped workers.ā€

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