The NYT profiled Saru Jayaraman, a 29-year-old activist for Manhattan restaurant workers, last week (thanks, Ms. World):
She is the executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a little nonprofit that just pulled off a David-versus-Goliath feat. The center extracted $164,000 from two fashionable Manhattan restaurants – Cite and the Park Avenue Cafe – to settle lawsuits that involved charges of discrimination and failure to pay overtime to 23 restaurant employees, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico and Bangladesh.
The ‘pretty people in sales, pimply workhorses in the back office’ model is used by many, many industries (software, consulting, finance). But you can’t put it in employment ads. There’s a euphemistic hypocrisy here, but like blind auditions at symphony orchestras, it at least gives interviewees an honest shot.
“… you wouldn’t believe the ads put out by restaurant employers – ‘good-looking required, send photos’ – to be a waiter. Employers have told us that means they want good-looking white people in the front and hard workers in the back. Hard workers mean immigrants…”
Jayaraman has an interesting background:
A daughter of immigrants from southern India, a graduate of Yale Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she was singled out and honored as one of America’s finest young people in 1995 by President Bill Clinton… Ms. Jayaraman, whose father is an unemployed software developer and whose mother is a school aide, grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles… She teaches… immigrant rights at New York University… She is a soprano who used to sing with a gospel choir at Harvard.
Jayaraman’s organization is opening its own coop-style restaurant on a fashionable street in Manhattan. It’ll be an interesting experiment in a tough biz.
This fall, it plans to open a restaurant, Colors, on Lafayette Street near Astor Place, to be owned and governed by workers.
So glad to see Saru featured here – this woman is absolutely amazing. An inspiration to me and so many others! A note to all that the 29y. old BADA*S (no better word to describe her, really) is the coveted and much-awaited Keynote Address at an upcoming event at Boalt Hall:
Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law and Berkeley La Raza Law Journal present our Joint Symposium,
MAKING MOVEMENT Communities of Color and New Models of Organizing Labor Friday, April 8, 2005 8:30-5p Booth Auditorium, UCB Law School (corner of Bancroft & Piedmont)
Register online at http://boalt.org/BJELL/activities.html
Registration is FREE. Lunch will be served. MCLE Credit Available.
Contact Seema at skpatel@berkeley.edu with questions!
Errr … what’s a BADA?
BADA*S = BADASS
Just read this…she’s a real racist sweetheart that needs to be in prison….
The Restaurant Opportunities Center-New York – ROC – was set up post-9/11 with the goal of helping out former workers at Windows on the World, the eatery atop the Twin Towers. But its executive director, Saru Jayaraman, soon was pursuing a much broader “social justice” agenda.
The group has gotten lots of press. One high-profile initiative: running an eatery of its own. Colors was set up to be a new kind of restaurant – owned by an employee co-op, paying wages far above the industry average and with a menu drawn from staffers’ ethnic culinary traditions. Meanwhile, ROC also stages protests and lawsuits against prominent city eateries – accusing Daniel, Shelly’s, Cite and others of racist workplace policies, failure to pay owed benefits and exploitative working conditions.
Yet former Colors workers say that ROC itself is guilty of those very abuses. Behzad Pasdar, a former director of the eatery’s board, calls Colors “one of the most abusive [restaurants] in the city.”
Jayaraman failed to return several calls asking for comment on these allegations.
Most ex-Windows workers gave up on ROC long ago. The expected lawsuit comes from seven who stuck with it – until, they say, they were expelled for voicing their grievances to Jayaraman.
Arthur Schwartz, their attorney, says he saw it as an open-and-shut case of illegal firings, and expected to negotiate a quick settlement – but Jayaraman rebuffed his overtures. “It’s almost like dealing with a cult,” he says. “They try to destroy anyone who questions the core of their leadership.”
Colombia-born Orlando Godoy, 54, had been a floor captain at Windows. He joined up with ROC post-9/11, and stuck with it even after most other Windows workers left, because Jayaraman was offering a chance for him to realize his lifelong dream: to become a “co-owner” in a new restaurant venture.
Then came a demand to sign a contract in which workers/owners would agree to certain conditions: “paying monthly dues,” “attending protests (at least one per campaign),” “supporting workers [at other restaurants] in any dispute with employers,” “testifying in favor of worker legislation” and “holding my elected representatives accountable to his/her responsibilities.”
Nonplussed – what did any of this have to do with running a restaurant? – Godoy refused to sign; he was subsequently forced out of ROC altogether.
The problem, he said in a recent interview, is that being a part of ROC and its offspring Colors requires a total embrace of Jayaraman’s radicalism – even including trips to D.C. to protest the Iraq War.
“Saru thinks of herself as a workers’ Che Guevara, but she’s really a Stalin,” says Behzad Pasdar.
Indeed, Pasdar charges, Jayaraman used ex-Windows staffers as a “golden goose.” “She dragged them around town to [raise money from] foundations. But she wouldn’t even pay them as promised.”
Nereda Pena’s story seems to confirm that. The Mexican-born former Windows worker, whom ROC used to fund-raise for Colors, spoke recently to The Post in Spanish. “I came to ROC everyday, sometimes as early as six. I worked all day. I was told I would get paid, but they never gave me anything. Instead, I’d get back to ROC at the end of the day and ask for enough to buy a subway fare home. They refused even that,” she said. This, she says, went on for months.
Another outrage: ROC supposedly helps its members learn English, yet Pena says Jayaraman told her not to do so – thus to be a more sympathetic case for donations.
Pasdar says that, over three years, he put thousands of hours of “sweat equity” into ROC and Colors, believing Jayaraman’s assurances that it would all pay off once Colors opened – and his own personal “American Dream” was realized.
He even ignored troubling signs: “She would often say, ‘We don’t want white people here. We don’t work with white people.’ We would argue that as a social-justice organization, we can’t distinguish between races. But she said we use whites and then leave them.”
The final straw came when workers learned they wouldn’t be enjoying the full ownership and profit-sharing rights they’d been led to expect. Instead, these “co-owners” would earn salary, nothing more, for Colors’ first five years. After that, they would receive a 20 percent stake, with ROC management taking another 40 percent and the investors who’d provided seed capital getting the remaining 40 percent.
“She threatened that if we don’t sign the contract, we could be kicked out of our co-op,” Pasdar said. “We were forced to sign, without translators [for non-English speaking members], without lawyers, without members even being allowed to talk to each other.”
Pasdar complained – and got the boot.
Eventually, he and six other ex-ROCers found Schwartz, who’s representing them pro bono. Within a month, he plans to file a claim alleging that the ousted workers were “improperly kicked out of ROC, in violation of ROC bylaws or in retaliation for their speaking out in opposition of the plan ROC proposed in profit-sharing.”
The relief requested in the suit, says Schwartz, is reinstatement, with an alternative of “repayment for what we call sweat equity.” He said they would likely win reinstatement, but then – like a successful sexual-harassment suit, where the litigant doesn’t want to work for a former employer – the successful parties can seek “lost pay.”
Meanwhile, ROC has already shown it doesn’t want these “troublemakers,” and they’re hardly eager to go back. “I’ve spent my whole life working in city restaurants,” says Pasdar, “but nothing was as bad as the three years I spent with ROC.”
In case anyone’s wondering where the above report came from, here’s the URL: http://www.nypost.com/seven/03222007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/social_justice_hypocrites_opedcolumnists_tom_elliott.htm?page=0
I don’t know anything about this dispute, but considering the source (which for some reason the previous poster chose not to cite) I’d take the charges with at least a grain of salt. It’s an opinion column, not a news story, that appeared in the New York Post– a paper whose antagonism to workers and people of color is equalled only by its reputation for being careless with the facts. The writer is described as “a member of the Post editorial board.”
Schwartz is an pro-labor attorney with a good track record, so I wouldn’t dismiss the lawsuit out of hand. But no one with a brain should take the Post’s word on anything.
Saru, what’s all this negetive propaganda about ? Regards Pankaj – Germany
I’m very proud of Saru. She’s one amazing person. Let’s bring capitalism down!
Babak and Behzad sound like Iranian names. I think that’s horribly sleazy. But then again, what do you expect of capitalists?
OK — lets be reasonable here and look at the comments of the person that is posting in ALL CAPS.
This just comes across as a lunatic ranting int he wind. Much of her comments don’t even make sense. The fact that these guys as the subject of her rants “speak fluent english” or “have two cars” is irrelevant and I can only surmise that she is not their accountant and does not really know the source of their income. It comes across that the person has a personal bone to pick with these folks and has taken a sleazy means to do it. So Boston_Mehesh, before you go passing judgment and indicting Iranians as sleazy capitalists check your source!