Future Hindsight - Ending Subminimum Wage: Saru Jayaraman

Ending Subminimum Wage: Saru Jayaraman

11/25/21 • 38 min

5 Listeners

Future Hindsight

The Legacy of the Subminimum Wage

The devaluation of Black lives and women's work is at the heart of the subminimum wage. Until the 1850s, restaurant workers were white men who were unionized and were tipped on top of a living wage. But business owners started hiring women and black people for free, making them rely on tips to make their living. This means that the customer—instead of the employer—is responsible for paying the worker. A century and a half later, the subminimum wage has increased to only $2.13.

Tipped Work in the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how precarious tipped work is. Full time tipped workers, such as in bars or restaurants, often did not qualify for unemployment benefits because their tips were never reported, and it made them look ineligible for not having worked enough hours or earned enough pay. We have an opportunity to get rid of the subminimum wage by advocating for the Raise the Wage Act, supporting restaurants that pay their workers a livable wage, and demanding the same from businesses that don’t.

Who Gets Paid Subminimum Wages?

The restaurant industry makes up a big piece of the work force, but it’s not alone. Nail salon workers, car wash workers, parking attendants, sky caps at airports all work for tips. Subminimum wage laws also take advantage of a subset of people who are deemed ineligible for a proper minimum wage. Incarcerated workers are often paid even below the subminimum wage per hour; teenage workers produce the same work as adults but get paid less; and people with disabilities also perform the same as other workers but do not get paid the same amount.

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Saru Jayaraman is the President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. Saru has spent the last 20 years organizing and advocating for raising wages and working conditions for restaurant and other service workers. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was listed in CNN’s “Top 10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015, and the San Francisco Chronicle ‘Visionary of the Year’ in 2019.

Saru has written several books, including Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), a national bestseller, Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning (UC Press, 2020), and most recently One Fair Wage: Ending Sub Minimum Pay in America (The New Press, 2021).

You can learn more at onefairwage.com.

You can follow Saru on Twitter at @SaruJayaraman

The Legacy of the Subminimum Wage

Tipped Work in the Pandemic

Who Gets Paid Subminimum Wages?

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You can learn more at onefairwage.com.

You can follow Saru on Twitter at @SaruJayaraman

Previous Episode

Stand Up for Science: Lee McIntyre

2 Recommendations

Our Responsibility to Defend the Truth

Science denialism has existed as long as science has existed. As a part of our social contract, we’re responsible for challenging the spread of misinformation and understanding, especially when it comes to science. If we open ourselves up to these difficult conversations, we can offer up a path into more logical reasoning and avoid a culture where science and truth are rejected.

Science Denialism is Dangerous

All science denialism relies on a flawed blueprint of cherry-picking evidence, trusting conspiracy theories, trusting fake experts, and relying on illogical reasoning. The internet has given denialism a chance to be amplified, which is especially dangerous because it confuses people and muddies the line between fact and falsehood. Science denialism hurts us in so many ways, from killing our planet by ignoring climate change to taking lives because people don’t trust vaccines and masks.

Technique Rebuttal

Content rebuttal is using facts to combat false claims. Technique rebuttal is challenging the logic of the argument. It may seem logical to defend the truth with the facts, but you can make more progress by talking about the core of people’s beliefs. If someone has already made the choice to deny the facts, presenting them with even more facts will not be effective. Instead, build trust by making them feel heard, then point out inconsistencies in their reasoning and use facts judiciously.

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Lee McIntyre is a philosopher of science and the author of the 2018 book Post Truth. His new book How to Talk to a Science Denier, tries to figure out how we can have constructive dialogue with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

McIntyre is the author of several books, including Post-Truth, Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age, and How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. Other work has appeared in such popular venues as the The New York Times, Newsweek, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and The Humanist.

You can follow Lee on Twitter at @LeeCMcIntyre

Next Episode

Exclusions in the Social Contract: Eduardo Porter

Racism Bites Everybody

Creating racist policies and ideologies is short-sighted. In the long run, these practices affect everyone, including white people. In 1978, older white voters in California decided they didn’t want their tax dollars going towards the funding of education for children who were increasingly non-white. To reflect this, Prop 13 capped property taxes and essentially led to a defunding of public education in the state, which families of every race and ethnicity rely on.

Intersectionality

History has shown that when the American social safety net becomes beneficial for people of color, support for the policies and programs diminish. For example, criminal justice started to be used more and more as a tool for social management after poverty programs in the 1960s allowed Black Americans to access it. Today these relationships between race and a social safety affect our entire society, across the landscape of labor, education outcomes, and incarceration.

Abstract Fears

Abstract fears are based on something people believe to be true, even though it is not part of their lived experience. For example, if someone believes that immigrants abuse Medicaid, they will fight against Medicaid as a whole, even if the program would be beneficial for them. Abstract fears and prejudices that are not rooted in reason erode the social contract because they block citizens from making decisions that benefit both their own lives and society at large.

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Eduardo Porter is an economics reporter for The New York Times, where he was a member of the editorial board from 2007 to 2012 and the Economic Scene columnist from 2012 to 2018. He began his career in journalism as a financial reporter for Notimex, a Mexican news agency, in Mexico City. He was a correspondent in Tokyo and London, and in 1996 moved to São Paulo, Brazil, as editor of América Economía, a business magazine. In 2000, he went to work at The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles to cover the growing Hispanic population.

Porter is the author of The Price of Everything (2011), an exploration of the cost-benefit analyses that underpin human behaviors and institutions. His latest book is American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise (2020).

You can follow Eduardo Porter on Twitter at @PorterEduardo