Welcome to Government Watch, a weekly Restaurant Business column focused on politics, regulation, legislation, and other governmental issues of relevance to the restaurant industry. This week's edition looks at the combative hearings that were held this week in Congress on eliminating the tip credit, and how the leading force behind the credit's demise found herself on a very hot seat.
After three decades of painting restaurant employers as crooks and cheats, the leading advocate for killing the tip credit drew withering criticism herself during congressional hearings Wednesday. And the most potent disparagement may have come from a restaurant server, the very type of worker Saru Jayaraman claims to champion.
Granted, the setting wasn’t exactly hospitable to the labor activist, president of the advocacy group and longtime industry antagonist One Fair Wage. The House Committee on Education & the Workforce convened hearings on what its Republican leadership termed a war on tipped employees. It invited four speakers, three of them clearly sympathetic to employers’ view of the credit. Jayaraman was presented as the voice of the industry’s server workforce.
Yet her claim to that role was fiercely questioned, including by a server, the very type of employee Jayaraman claims to represent.
“One of the things that is just completely weird to me is that we have Ms. Jayaraman representing voices of the restaurant industry,” said Simone Barron, who waits tables in Seattle. “She’s not an industry worker. She’s not walked a mile in my shoe. For her to claim she’s the voice of restaurant workers like myself, I don’t get it.”
Indeed, she added, “most of the people I know in the restaurant industry don’t know who she is.”
Jayaraman didn’t respond directly to those assertions. But later, she faced similar questions about her qualifications from one of the congressmen on the panel. And that’s when the gloves came off.
Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah, noted that Jarayaman is a graduate of Yale Law School, not someone taking orders tableside. Had she ever actually worked in restaurants? Or owned and operated one, given that she’s quick to judge how restaurateurs run their businesses?
Jayaraman came back at Owens with the assertion she knows what restaurant work is like because of all the research One Fair Wage has done. But Owens pushed back with force, demanding a yes or no answer. The labor advocate admitted that she had not actually worked alongside the 300,000 people she claims to represent.
Owens also dismissed Jayaraman’s contention that she knew what it was like to operate a restaurant because her group had opened one. Indeed, a group that became One Fair Wage had opened a facility in New York City called Colors, though largely as a training facility for workers who’d been put out of work when the restaurants that employed them in the World Trade Center were destroyed on 9/11.
Not the same, barked Owens, a former professional football player. At times, he yelled over Jayaraman as she protested. And in a dash of mockery, he asked her if she worked in the NFL, too.
All three of the other witnesses pointedly expressed their support for keeping the tip credit, portraying the practice of counting tips toward a servers’ wages as a practice that employees want to keep as much as employers do.
“There’s no question that we would have to cut staff and increase prices” if the credit ended, said Tom Boucher, CEO and proprietor of the multi-concept group Great New Hampshire Restaurants. He served at the hearing as a representative of the National Restaurant Association and a proxy for restaurant owners, including the ones he knew who were forced to shut down after they replaced tipping with a straight salary for servers.
Jayaraman stuck to One Fair Wage’s core argument that it had research showing an elimination of the tip credit would diminish rampant sexual harassment of female servers and help more working families afford housing and groceries.
But the input from her fellow witnesses prompted even the longest-serving Democrat on the committee, Alma Adams of North Carolina, to acknowledge how eye-opening Barron’s contradiction of Jayaraman’s take on the tip credit was for her.
“We make rules and sometimes we don’t know a lot about what people are going through,” Adams commented.
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