The Hands That Feed Us
#1
Taking sustainability to the next level...I applaud the idea of guides to restaurants who treat their employees fairly. I ate at Five Guys in Eugene and it was a great meal served by happy, enthusiastic workers.

======================================


by Mark Bittman


Help wanted: Salary: $19,000 (some may be withheld or stolen). No health insurance, paid sick days or paid vacation. Opportunity for advancement: nearly nil.

This job, or something much like it, is held by nearly 20 million people, 10 million of whom work in restaurants. They are the workers employed in producing, processing and delivering our food, who have been portrayed in vivid and often dispiriting detail in a new report called The Hands That Feed Us. Written by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the report surveyed nearly 700 workers employed in five major sectors: production, processing, distribution, retail and service.

The upshot: Our food comes at great expense to the workers who provide it. “The biggest workforce in America can’t put food on the table except when they go to work,” says Saru Jayaraman, Co-Founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-U).

Many people in the nascent food movement and in the broader “foodie” set know our farmers’ (and their kids’) names and what their animals eat. We practically worship chefs, and the damage done to land, air and water by high-tech ag is — correctly — a constant concern.

Yet though you can’t be a card-carrying foodie if you don’t know the provenance of your heirloom tomato, you apparently can be one if you don’t know how the members of your wait staff are treated. We don’t seem to mind or even notice that our servers might be making $2.13 an hour. That tip you debate increasing to 20 percent might be the difference in making the rent.

It’s true that a bit of attention has been paid to farmworkers — with some good results — and occasionally you read about the horrors of life in a slaughterhouse. But despite our obsession with food, the worker is an afterthought.

The Hands That Feed Us, and the work being done on the ground by groups like ROC-U — which contributed to the report and helped create the Food Chain Workers Alliance in 2008 — may signal the beginning of a change.

Take that $2.13 figure, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers. Legally, tips should cover the difference between that and the federal minimum wage, now a whopping $7.25. If they don’t, employers are obligated to make up the difference. But that doesn’t always happen, leaving millions of servers — 70 percent of whom are women — taking home far less than the minimum wage.

Which brings us to the happily almost-forgotten Herman Cain. What’s called the “tipped minimum wage” — that $2.13 — once increased in proportion to the regular minimum wage. But in 1996, the year Cain took over as head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), he struck a deal with President Bill Clinton and his fellow Democrats. In exchange for an increase in the regular minimum wage, the tipped minimum wage was de-coupled. The result: despite regular increases in the regular minimum wage, the tipped minimum wage hasn’t changed since 1991.

Other disheartening facts: Around one in eight jobs in the food industry provides a wage greater than 150 percent of the regional poverty level. More than three-quarters of the workers surveyed don’t receive health insurance from their employers. (Fifty-eight percent don’t have it at all; national health care, anyone?) More than half have worked while sick or suffered injuries or health problems on the job, and more than a third reported some form of wage theft in the previous week. Not year: week.

There are societal considerations as well as moral ones: Food workers use public assistance programs (including, ironically, SNAP or food stamps), at higher rates than the rest of the United States work force. And not surprisingly, more than a third of workers use the emergency room for primary care, and 80 percent of them were unable to pay for it. These are tabs we all pick up.

Senator Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) proposed Rebuild America Act would raise the tipped minimum wage to $6.85 over five years (and the federal minimum wage to $9.80 by 2014), and allow more American workers to earn paid sick days. But Jayaraman (whose book, Behind the Kitchen Door, will be published next year), justifiably believes that these battles won’t be won at a federal level without a massive shift in consumer thinking.

To that end, ROC-U produced a National Diner’s Guide that rates restaurants based on how they treat their employees. (We have pocket guides for fish; finally, there’s one for humans.)

Not surprisingly, most of the most notable abuses occur at the bigger companies. Remember Michelle Obama’s spotlight on Walmart (the world’s biggest food retailer) and the gigantic Darden Restaurant Company (which owns about 1,900 restaurants, including Olive Garden and Red Lobster), when she famously brokered deals with each that will ostensibly make their products “healthier”?

Well, both companies are known for labor abuses: Walmart for erratic and exhausting scheduling and hour-cutting, and Darden — highlighted in the ROC-U report — for low pay, no paid sick days, lack of breaks and even racial discrimination. Those things tend not to come up when we’re focusing on making our food system healthier.

On the other hand, Five Guys (with over 1,000 locations in the United States and Canada) evidently provides paid sick days and the opportunity for advancement.

Where would you rather eat?

That’s a real question. If you care about sustainability — the capacity to endure — it’s time to expand our definition to include workers. You can’t call food sustainable when it’s produced by people whose capacity to endure is challenged by poverty-level wages.


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...illion/?hp
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#2
Oregon, however, does not allow restaurants to only pay $2.13 an hour, they have to pay the full minimum wage PLUS tips. I'm not saying this makes servers in Oregon rich, but they're not as poor as this article makes them out to be, either.
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#3
I made great $$ when waiting tables. & I loved my job. $5.00 hr, plus $100.00 a day (+ or - a bit) in tips. this was in 1990.
IMO, if you're not making good tips, you aren't giving great service, usually.
& one of my sisters waited tables in AZ (a right-to-work state) for decades. She also made good $$$.
Good customer service, for the most part, has gone bye-bye.

Altho, I feel that everyone should make minimum wage (at least) no matter what their job is.
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#4
When I was waiting tables I made $2.10 an hour plus tips, and I did very well. I admit when I started I worked at a coffee house I made about $80.00 a day for the first couple of months then I learned what I was doing by the time I stopped waiting tables it was nothing for me to walk out the door(after about 5 hours of working) with over $400.00 in my pocket after I tipped out my bartender, by busser, and the kitchen.

My brother right now is making very good money waiting tables.

But I do have to say this I do think that waitstaff do need to be paid more than they do, and I do not like the fact the business think that we as consumers should be supplementing the wages of the staff like that
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#5
Lord forgive me for trying to raise awareness regarding the people who serve our food to us.

They all make good money and don't need respect...much less paid sick leave or even medical insurance. My Gawd, what was I thinking???? :wacko:

I should send an email to Mark Bittman, the food writer for the New York Times and tell him he is mistaken; that food servers are receiving a lot of respect, are getting paid handsomely and they're not really on food stamps or child health programs. Right. It's their fault for not providing excellent service. Got it. Laughing
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#6
No, it's their fault for not living in Oregon or one of the other states that mandates restaurants pay servers the same minimum wages as any other employer, and if they get tips well then that's just gravy. You should be happy you live in such an enlightened state for wage earners. Smiling
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#7
(06-13-2012, 10:30 AM)Clone Wrote: Lord forgive me for trying to raise awareness regarding the people who serve our food to us.

They all make good money and don't need respect...much less paid sick leave or even medical insurance. My Gawd, what was I thinking???? :wacko:

I should send an email to Mark Bittman, the food writer for the New York Times and tell him he is mistaken; that food servers are receiving a lot of respect, are getting paid handsomely and they're not really on food stamps or child health programs. Right. It's their fault for not providing excellent service. Got it. Laughing

So how much do you think a food server should get? Yes I do agree they should get paid minimum wage. But how much more should they be paid.
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#8
(06-12-2012, 10:08 PM)Clone Wrote: Taking sustainability to the next level...I applaud the idea of guides to restaurants who treat their employees fairly. I ate at Five Guys in Eugene and it was a great meal served by happy, enthusiastic workers.

======================================


by Mark Bittman


Help wanted: Salary: $19,000 (some may be withheld or stolen). No health insurance, paid sick days or paid vacation. Opportunity for advancement: nearly nil.

This job, or something much like it, is held by nearly 20 million people, 10 million of whom work in restaurants. They are the workers employed in producing, processing and delivering our food, who have been portrayed in vivid and often dispiriting detail in a new report called The Hands That Feed Us. Written by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the report surveyed nearly 700 workers employed in five major sectors: production, processing, distribution, retail and service.

The upshot: Our food comes at great expense to the workers who provide it. “The biggest workforce in America can’t put food on the table except when they go to work,” says Saru Jayaraman, Co-Founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-U).

Many people in the nascent food movement and in the broader “foodie” set know our farmers’ (and their kids’) names and what their animals eat. We practically worship chefs, and the damage done to land, air and water by high-tech ag is — correctly — a constant concern.

Yet though you can’t be a card-carrying foodie if you don’t know the provenance of your heirloom tomato, you apparently can be one if you don’t know how the members of your wait staff are treated. We don’t seem to mind or even notice that our servers might be making $2.13 an hour. That tip you debate increasing to 20 percent might be the difference in making the rent.

It’s true that a bit of attention has been paid to farmworkers — with some good results — and occasionally you read about the horrors of life in a slaughterhouse. But despite our obsession with food, the worker is an afterthought.

The Hands That Feed Us, and the work being done on the ground by groups like ROC-U — which contributed to the report and helped create the Food Chain Workers Alliance in 2008 — may signal the beginning of a change.

Take that $2.13 figure, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers. Legally, tips should cover the difference between that and the federal minimum wage, now a whopping $7.25. If they don’t, employers are obligated to make up the difference. But that doesn’t always happen, leaving millions of servers — 70 percent of whom are women — taking home far less than the minimum wage.

Which brings us to the happily almost-forgotten Herman Cain. What’s called the “tipped minimum wage” — that $2.13 — once increased in proportion to the regular minimum wage. But in 1996, the year Cain took over as head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), he struck a deal with President Bill Clinton and his fellow Democrats. In exchange for an increase in the regular minimum wage, the tipped minimum wage was de-coupled. The result: despite regular increases in the regular minimum wage, the tipped minimum wage hasn’t changed since 1991.

Other disheartening facts: Around one in eight jobs in the food industry provides a wage greater than 150 percent of the regional poverty level. More than three-quarters of the workers surveyed don’t receive health insurance from their employers. (Fifty-eight percent don’t have it at all; national health care, anyone?) More than half have worked while sick or suffered injuries or health problems on the job, and more than a third reported some form of wage theft in the previous week. Not year: week.

There are societal considerations as well as moral ones: Food workers use public assistance programs (including, ironically, SNAP or food stamps), at higher rates than the rest of the United States work force. And not surprisingly, more than a third of workers use the emergency room for primary care, and 80 percent of them were unable to pay for it. These are tabs we all pick up.

Senator Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) proposed Rebuild America Act would raise the tipped minimum wage to $6.85 over five years (and the federal minimum wage to $9.80 by 2014), and allow more American workers to earn paid sick days. But Jayaraman (whose book, Behind the Kitchen Door, will be published next year), justifiably believes that these battles won’t be won at a federal level without a massive shift in consumer thinking.

To that end, ROC-U produced a National Diner’s Guide that rates restaurants based on how they treat their employees. (We have pocket guides for fish; finally, there’s one for humans.)

Not surprisingly, most of the most notable abuses occur at the bigger companies. Remember Michelle Obama’s spotlight on Walmart (the world’s biggest food retailer) and the gigantic Darden Restaurant Company (which owns about 1,900 restaurants, including Olive Garden and Red Lobster), when she famously brokered deals with each that will ostensibly make their products “healthier”?

Well, both companies are known for labor abuses: Walmart for erratic and exhausting scheduling and hour-cutting, and Darden — highlighted in the ROC-U report — for low pay, no paid sick days, lack of breaks and even racial discrimination. Those things tend not to come up when we’re focusing on making our food system healthier.

On the other hand, Five Guys (with over 1,000 locations in the United States and Canada) evidently provides paid sick days and the opportunity for advancement.

Where would you rather eat?

That’s a real question. If you care about sustainability — the capacity to endure — it’s time to expand our definition to include workers. You can’t call food sustainable when it’s produced by people whose capacity to endure is challenged by poverty-level wages.


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...illion/?hp

People don't eat at Wal Mart.
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#9
(06-13-2012, 10:57 AM)blondemom Wrote: So how much do you think a food server should get? Yes I do agree they should get paid minimum wage. But how much more should they be paid.

I didn't write the article, but I'll state my opinion.
The OP is not about wages, so much as respect.
There is a sustainability movement happening, and folks are scrambling to learn about their food...to eat well, and appreciate the value of it.
All he is saying is that while growers, purveyors and chefs are in the limelight, the folks who serve it to us are being left in the shadows.

Life isn't all about dollar amounts; it seems as though each time I bring up any kind of minimum wage job you are there to defend it.

I was a server and a pantry chef in Calistoga in the Napa Valley.
I was expected to have a lot of knowlege about different fish, different sauces, different styles of preparing...and this information changed nightly. I also had to intelligently discuss different wine varietals and suggest pairings.
Yes, I made excellent tips..but no, I NEVER received paid sick leave or paid vacations...much less any kind of health insurance.

This article is not about just money...it's about including servers in the whole picture, that's all. As he says, some of us almost worship chefs but ignore the servers who truly add another dimension to dining.
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#10
I've always found it pays to treat servers well, but truthfully I've wondered if they don't get treated better than many other service workers. Afterall, not very many other workers get tipped so freely, and lots of other people labor in minimum wage jobs in total obscurity. And, people that bring us food are especially esteemed, more so than the farmer that grew the food, the person that cooked it, or the person that cleans the dishes up afterwards. Don't get me wrong, I love what servers bring to me too, and I try to keep them richly rewarded for that. But I'm not sure servers in Oregon make very good poster children for underappreciation. There are probably lots better examples than that.
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#11
(06-13-2012, 11:50 AM)Clone Wrote:
(06-13-2012, 10:57 AM)blondemom Wrote: So how much do you think a food server should get? Yes I do agree they should get paid minimum wage. But how much more should they be paid.

I didn't write the article, but I'll state my opinion.
The OP is not about wages, so much as respect.
There is a sustainability movement happening, and folks are scrambling to learn about their food...to eat well, and appreciate the value of it.
All he is saying is that while growers, purveyors and chefs are in the limelight, the folks who serve it to us are being left in the shadows.

Life isn't all about dollar amounts; it seems as though each time I bring up any kind of minimum wage job you are there to defend it.

I was a server and a pantry chef in Calistoga in the Napa Valley.
I was expected to have a lot of knowlege about different fish, different sauces, different styles of preparing...and this information changed nightly. I also had to intelligently discuss different wine varietals and suggest pairings.
Yes, I made excellent tips..but no, I NEVER received paid sick leave or paid vacations...much less any kind of health insurance.

This article is not about just money...it's about including servers in the whole picture, that's all. As he says, some of us almost worship chefs but ignore the servers who truly add another dimension to dining.

You are talking about non skilled workers. My point is if you do not like what a non skilled worker gets paid, get a skill. When I worked fast food there in OR, I got vacation time after my first year after 90 days I was able to get insurance. I decided I wanted more so I went into management. Even now I want to change what I do, I talked with the company I want to move up with and to work in the corporate office in the area I want to I have to have some particular educational skills that I do not have so I have to go to school to get them. So I am doing what I have to do to change my job skill. That in turn will make me more money. I am not sitting here just saying I want to make more money I am doing what is required to make the money.
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#12
Why should a waiter or waitress get min wage when it's a known fact they also get tips?
No one tips the min wage worker who pumps your gas.
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#13
Quote:
Lord forgive me for trying to raise awareness regarding the people who serve our food to us.

Why does it always seem to turn in to Clone being the victim?
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#14
(06-13-2012, 02:25 PM)blondemom Wrote: You are talking about non skilled workers. My point is if you do not like what a non skilled worker gets paid, get a skill. When I worked fast food there in OR, I got vacation time after my first year after 90 days I was able to get insurance. I decided I wanted more so I went into management. Even now I want to change what I do, I talked with the company I want to move up with and to work in the corporate office in the area I want to I have to have some particular educational skills that I do not have so I have to go to school to get them. So I am doing what I have to do to change my job skill. That in turn will make me more money. I am not sitting here just saying I want to make more money I am doing what is required to make the money.

Yep, fuck those unskilled workers.
Mark Bittman wasn't talking Waffle House here.
I'm fairly skilled...can you open a $85 bottle of wine with an ah-so and go through the whole ritual of the buyer smelling it, tasting it, approving it and then serving it to everyone else at the table?
But that doesn't even matter...we are all proud of your accomplishments and wish nothing for the best for you.
It's not flattering, however, for you to look down your nose at others who haven't chosen your path.
The OP was intended to open eyes a bit...so, fugghedabbouddit.
I knew steakhouse waiters in NYC who have done it for 40 years and raised a family on their work.
Unskilled workers my ass.
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#15
(06-13-2012, 02:36 PM)tvguy Wrote: No one tips the min wage worker who pumps your gas.

I do, almost every time.. One dollar.. When I'm going to gas up one of the cars, I make sure I have a dollar with me..
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#16
(06-13-2012, 02:46 PM)hillclimber Wrote:
(06-13-2012, 02:36 PM)tvguy Wrote: No one tips the min wage worker who pumps your gas.

I do, almost every time.. One dollar.. When I'm going to gas up one of the cars, I make sure I have a dollar with me..

Thank you...it drives me crazy Freddy's pumpers won't accept it!
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#17
(06-13-2012, 02:37 PM)tvguy Wrote:
Quote:
Lord forgive me for trying to raise awareness regarding the people who serve our food to us.

Why does it always seem to turn in to Clone being the victim?

That's your perception.
Why does it always have to get personal with you?
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#18
Clone, I do not give my respect lightly, and it varies to a great degree.. A great deal of respect isn't required for a server, but I expect respect from them. I pay the server for not screwing up, and keeping my drink filled and steak sauce on the table.. And out of my tip, he or she takes care of the cook. Or not..
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#19
(06-13-2012, 02:53 PM)hillclimber Wrote: Clone, I do not give my respect lightly, and it varies to a great degree.. A great deal of respect isn't required for a server, but I expect respect from them. I pay the server for not screwing up, and keeping my drink filled and steak sauce on the table.. And out of my tip, he or she takes care of the cook. Or not..

Sounds reasonable to me!
And know what? Servers, especially bartenders, remember generous tips and will treat you even better the next time they serve you.
It's how the serving world goes around.
You have a much more generous attitude than those who refer to them as unskilled labor.
Thank you.
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#20
(06-13-2012, 02:40 PM)Clone Wrote:
(06-13-2012, 02:25 PM)blondemom Wrote: You are talking about non skilled workers. My point is if you do not like what a non skilled worker gets paid, get a skill. When I worked fast food there in OR, I got vacation time after my first year after 90 days I was able to get insurance. I decided I wanted more so I went into management. Even now I want to change what I do, I talked with the company I want to move up with and to work in the corporate office in the area I want to I have to have some particular educational skills that I do not have so I have to go to school to get them. So I am doing what I have to do to change my job skill. That in turn will make me more money. I am not sitting here just saying I want to make more money I am doing what is required to make the money.

Yep, fuck those unskilled workers.
Mark Bittman wasn't talking Waffle House here.
I'm fairly skilled...can you open a $85 bottle of wine with an ah-so and go through the whole ritual of the buyer smelling it, tasting it, approving it and then serving it to everyone else at the table?
But that doesn't even matter...we are all proud of your accomplishments and wish nothing for the best for you.
It's not flattering, however, for you to look down your nose at others who haven't chosen your path.
The OP was intended to open eyes a bit...so, fugghedabbouddit.
I knew steakhouse waiters in NYC who have done it for 40 years and raised a family on their work.
Unskilled workers my ass.
I am not looking down my nose at them how dare you think that. Just to let you know I have waited tables at coffee houses as well as fine restaurants. I know people that make very good money waiting table. I have also had some very undesirable jobs. My point is if you do not like your lot in life do something about it. Stop complaining about it.
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