Saru Jayaraman took a red-eye from California, arriving in Washington D.C. in time to meet Thursday morning with members of Congress. By midday, she was in Hartford, testifying before the Connecticut General Assembly.
Jayaraman, 47, a Berkeley professor and Yale law graduate, is in demand as labor’s best-known advocate for ending the sub-minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers, an issue approaching an inflection point.
Connecticut is one of 13 states considering applying the minimum wage to restaurants, ending a special status that reaches back to the origins of the federal minimum wage in 1938. Seven states have ended their sub-minimum wage.
“We are winning. We are winning across the country,” she told the Labor and Public Employees Committee. “We know Connecticut can lead on this issue, and, in fact, you have to. You’ve already lost a 10th of your [restaurant] workforce.”
Jayaraman insists she is trying to save the industry from itself, an assertion accepted by a minority of restaurateurs who voluntarily are paying the full minimum wage and are scoffed at by the National Restaurant Association.
The industry insists that paying the full minimum wage would be ruinous, coming off three years of trying to cope with the disruptions of COVID-19 and an exodus of workers from the service industry.
But Jayamaran, who leads the advocacy group One Fair Wage, said that exodus is rationale for accepting the minimum wage as a stabilizing force in an unstable time.
“The only thing...
North Korea on Sunday rejected US allegations of cybercrimes originating from there, calling them "absurd slander" and denying it poses a cyber threat, state media KCNA reported. In 2024, a United...