An activist holds a placard demanding a $15/hour minimum wage and tips for restaurant workers during a rally to call for additional relief for restaurants to allow them to pay workers a full minimum wage with tips, at the House Triangle of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on February 8, 2022.
Editor’s Note: Saru Jayaraman is the co-founder and president of One Fair Wage and the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America” (New Press, 2021). The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own. Read more opinion articles on CNN.
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In 2017, a professionally trained chef from India was working as an intern at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has frequently led a list of the world’s best and has announced that it is closing to diners next year to reinvent itself as a food lab. As an intern, the New York Times reported, Namrata Hegde’s only task was to make 120 fruit-leather “beetles” every day. She was told not to laugh or, for that matter, make any other noise. All of which would be bad enough had Hegde been paid. But she was an unpaid intern at a restaurant that charged $500-per-person for its dinner menu.
Her story is part of a much broader narrative about fine dining, and about the restaurant industry at large. As Imogen West-Knights reported for the Financial Times in June of last year, at Noma and other fine dining restaurants in Copenhagen, “two...
Images of the Whitegate fuel protests earlier this month were altered to make it appear gardaí were violent towards protesters. The AI-doctored images were shared widely online, including by inter...