A report on the restaurant industry released Tuesday found that approximately 90 percent of women who work in jobs that depend on tips report being bothered at work by some form of sexual harassment. This is particularly a problem for women who work in states where tipped jobs have the lower federal minimum wage of $2.13/hr.
The report included in-person and online interviews with 688 restaurant workers in 39 states. It was conducted between May and August of this year.
“We need to eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in the United States,” says Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the non-profit restaurant worker’s group, Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, which oversaw the 34-page report, “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry.” Only seven states pay the same minimum wage to tipped and non-tipped workers.
“Women who have to live off of tips are subjected to the worst kind of sexual harassment,” said Jayaraman in a phone interview with USA Today. In order to get tips, she says, many women “are forced to dress and act certain ways that make them vulnerable to customer, co-worker, and manager harassment.”
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The National Restaurant Association dismissed the report. NRA’s VP of Communications Katie Laning Niebaum said, “These recycled attacks are part of a national, multimillion-dollar campaign engineered, organized, and funded by national labor unions and their allies seeking to disparage an industry that has no barrier to entry and no limit to what employees can achieve.”
However, the report’s key findings suggest that the NRA might want to take another look at what’s happening in its industry:
[Graphics: USA Today/Janet Loerke]