Dine Back Better
Dine Back Better
AS THEY EMERGE FROM THE PANDEMIC, hundreds of restaurants across New York are responding to the Great Resignation by raising wages, advancing racial and gender equity, and building an industry where workers and their employers can thrive.
For years, One Fair Wage has documented the restaurant industry’s multiple challenges, including race and gender inequities, poor health and safety conditions, and most importantly, subminimum wages. Even pre-pandemic, the subminimum wage for tipped workers was a direct legacy of slavery that created economic instability and the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry because it forced a workforce that is in majority women to
tolerate inappropriate customer behavior to earn tips. With the pandemic, workers reported that their tips significantly decreased while customer
hostility, health risks, and harassment increased; when they were asked to enforce COVID protocols on the same customers from whom they had to get tips, millions of workers started leaving the industry en masse. New York has the highest rates of restaurant worker exodus of any state in the US — double the national average.