SEARCH
Restaurant Industry Serves Up too Many ‘Low Road Jobs’
With 13 million workers, the U.S. restaurant industry is the nation’s largest private employer. But far too many restaurants provide “low road” jobs with low wages, hazardous working conditions, long hours and few benefits.
A new report by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an advocate group for restaurant workers, reveals that up to 90 percent of restaurant staff is not offered health insurance or sick days and, as a result, many report to work sick.
A substantial number are forced to work “off the clock” and the national median hourly wage for food preparation and service workers is only $8.59, including tips, which means that half of all restaurant workers nationwide actually earn less.
The report surveyed more than 2,500 workers and 150 employers in five cities: Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, New York and Portland, Maine.
The report also finds that low wages and lack of job security among restaurant workers leads to
increased reliance on social assistance programs resulting in an indirect subsidy to employers engaging in low road practices and fewer such public resources available to all those in need.
One recommendation to improve restaurant jobs is to raise the federal minimum wage for wait staff, which has been at $2.13 since 1991. In theory, the workers earn enough tips to bring them up to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Worker advocates tried to boost what is known as the tip credit, when legislation to raise the minimum wage was passed in 2007. But the restaurant industry and Republican lawmakers were able to block the effort.
Click here for more information from ROC.
Meanwhile, Young Workers United has produced a guide to worker-friendly restaurants in San Francisco. Unlike traditional restaurant guides, Dining with Justice highlights food establishments that follow labor laws and treat their employees with dignity and respect.
The group says its guide, unlike traditional restaurant guides,
highlights food establishments that follow labor laws and treat their employees with dignity and respect. We believe that good employment practices and good food go hand in hand. Restaurant owners who care not only about the food they serve but also the people they employ should be commended.
For more information, visit Young Workers United here. The San Francisco Bay area group is a multiracial, membership organization dedicated to improving the quality of jobs for young and immigrant workers. It played an instrumental role in making San Francisco the first city in the nation to require employers to offer paid sick leave.
 |
Become a Fan on Facebook |  |
Follow Us on Twitter |  |
Subscribe to YouTube |  |
Subscribe to Blog RSS | ||||
2 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
We need Unions in the restaurant business. Union restaurants are heaven. In restaurants the oppression is about relationships. In Union restaurants we have a voice in those relationships with you know who in non-Union hellholes we have to take it day after day after day after day and if we try to alter our relationships with you know who then we are very nicely shown the door. Paid sick leave and employers who follow labor law are good things but more than anything else we need to be able to have even productive relationships with our supervisors and managers. When we don’t we feel like crap every single day. The only way working people can have a decent life is with a Union period. Will the Labor Movement PLEASE organize us in the restaurant industry.
There are several reasons that the vast majority of working people are never organized into unions that can provide “living wage” incomes and benefits.
One reason: When unions make a cost/benefit determination on what group of workers to organize, they calculate what is the cost to the union to organize and to what is the economic benefit to the union treasury.
Thus, small independent businesses are not profitable enough to cover the organizing, contract negociation expenses, etc. Even the restaurant chain business is scattered into single locations throughout a region, country, and even internationally, making it very expensive to organize.
There are other more important reasons today why simple trade unionism is continually on decline thanks to the bankrupt “leadership” of organized labor.
Globalization has moved millions of labor intensive manufacturing jobs (once highly unionized) overseas to China where “slave wage” conditions flourish.
The capitalists forever search for the most profitable (less labor intensive) places to invest. Speculative investing has reaped billions and trillions of dollars profit. War is highly profitable to defense contractors. The manipulation of insurance premiums is so profitable, the industry has spent hundreds of millions
to bribe politicians to prevent an affordable “Medicare for All” system. Formerly government functions like public education, public health care, public utilities are all supported by taxes. By privatizing these essential needs of the public, the need for the taxes on corporations and wealth are greatly diminished. They become sources of profit to investors rather than taxes to be paid, which diminishes the wealth of capitalists.
The capitalist system in the U.S. has been on the decline for the last 30 years and has now essentially collapsed.
Working people are now realizing that increasing impoverishment being experience by us all is NOT A PERSONAL PROBLEM. But without any serious political leadership from organized labor, we must start to develop a new collective political strategy for the entire working class.
The benefits once won by economic struggle (strikes, etc.) and secured through a union contract are no longer possible given the above. The struggle to secure “living wage” economic conditions must be expanded to political struggle. The major protections and benefits to working people are today secured and maintained from federal, state, and local governments.
Social Security, Medicare, Minimum wage legislation, OSHA health and safety benefits, section 8 housing supplements, food stamps, etc. etc. are all government programs, not trade union benefits.
But today both political parties, Democratic and Republican Parties, are completely owned and controlled by corporate money and agendas. This last year under Obama is a terrible example of how completely corrupt the Democratic Party has become. The AFL-CIO “leadership” has completely supported Obama and the Democratic Party. Thus the expansion of war and in every area corporate profit is expanded at the expense of the needs of American working people are destroyed.
Thus, working people need a new political party that is dedicated to promoting the economic needs of working people. It is an ongoing tragedy that the AFL-CIO and Mr. Trumka refuse to even consider developing a new political strategy to reach out to the vast unorganized working class. A new anti-capitalist and socialist political party is now desperately needed. Only the organized labor movement has any financial and personel resources to start this political strategy.
For further reading and study, check out the daily
World Socialist Web Site at http://www.wsws.org