How do we fix the restaurant tipping system? with Saru Jayaraman

The TED Interview

TED

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How often do you go back and forth over how much to tip at the end of a meal? Depending on the state, in the U.S. that choice could be the difference between a livable income or financial mayhem for the workers who served and prepared your meal. But why do consumers have such power–and why are labor wages so tied to tips? Saru Jayaraman is a lawyer, activist and President of One Fair Wage. She is organizing a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers in one of the most important labor battles in the country–one that aims to end subminimum wage and tip-based labor. Listen as she talks about the stakes of minimum wage legislation, the surprising history of this unfair practice, and how the pandemic has changed the labor landscape–for better and worse.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you listened to Talk Radio recently?
0:03.0	Let's talk about this war on white people.
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0:07.0	Bill the Keystone pipeline, deport illegals, build the wall.
0:10.0	I'm Katie Thornton, host of the divided dial,
0:13.0	a new five-part series from WNMC's On the Media,
0:17.0	about how the American right came to dominate Talk Radio
0:21.0	and how one company is launching a conservative media empire
0:25.0	from the airwaves.
0:26.0	Listen every Tuesday and on the media feed.
0:35.0	Welcome to the Ted interview.
0:36.0	I'm your host, Stephen Johnson.
0:38.0	For most Americans, it's almost second nature.
0:42.0	You eat a meal at a restaurant, get the bill,
0:45.0	do a little mental math, and add a tip for the server.
0:48.0	But that, seemingly innocuous act, actually has a long
0:53.0	and in many ways troubling history.
0:55.0	It's also at the center of one of the most important labor battles
0:58.0	in the United States right now.
1:00.0	The fight to eliminate the sub-minimum wage
1:03.0	and tip-based labor generally.
1:06.0	Now over the past five or six years,
	...

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