Nakima Jones is done staying quiet.

She doesn’t want to wear ‘sexy’ shirts to work, to have her young son plead with her to change out of the tight shirt that’s her uniform as she leaves for work. She is done worrying about her looks, fretting about whether she looks sexy enough to attract attention – and tips.



“I don’t have time for that,” says Jones, who works as a waitress in New York. “I am here to make a career out of the restaurant business, which I truly love. I’ve been a restaurant worker for 13 years. I am here to make a stand for the people who are afraid to talk [about sexual harassment] because they think they are going to lose their jobs. And sometimes that happens – they talk and they lose their job.”

Taking a stand, in Jones’s case, meant participating in the ‘Not on the menu’ rally organized by Restaurant Opportunities Centers-United, a nationwide group of restaurant workers and advocates who are fighting for better wages and treatment of all restaurant employees. Besides New York, similar rallies were held in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, DC, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Philadelphia.

“I am not on the menu,” Jones said into a megaphone on Tuesday morning outside New York’s city hall as sun shone on the group of about 40 protesters.

Restaurant workers, who in some states get paid as little as $2.13, often get treated as objects included in the dining out experience – by both the consumers and their employers. Having their sub-minimum wages go towards taxes, most waitresses and waiters survive solely on tips, which are paid by the customers.

“When you are a woman living off tips, you are forced to tolerate whatever a customer might do to you, how they touch you, treat you, or talk to you. Because the customer is always right. Because the customer pays your income, not your employer,” explains Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of ROC-United.

Nakima Jones, center left, holds the megaphone as Ashley Ogogor, center right, gives a speech at the Not on the Menu rally in New York City

Such work environment emboldens some customers and employers to take liberties. Four out of five female restaurant workers have experienced some form of sexual harassment from their customers, found a recent report from ROC-United. Two in three experienced sexual harassment from their management on monthly basis. Yet, majority of them ignore it or look the other way, because they are afraid that by speaking out, they’d get stuck with bad shifts or even risk losing their job altogether.



The issue of sexual harassment in the restaurant industry is not a minor one. More than a third of all sexual harassment charges filed by women with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission come from the restaurant industry, “which is more than five times the rate of the general female workforce”, according to the Shriver Report.

Solutions are rare and difficult. Getting rid of a system with tips and sub-minimum wage could help reduce sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, advocates say. If workers were not dependent on customers and their tips for their livelihood, they’d be more likely to speak out against inappropriate behaviors.

“We found that states that pay the same wage to tipped and non-tipped workers, like my state of California, have been able to cut the rate of sexual harassment in half,” Jayaraman told the small crowd gathered in New York. As of July 2014, all California workers, including tipped employees, are to be paid $9 an hour.



“Which means that women in New York State suffer from twice the rate of sexual harassment and are told by managers to dress more sexy, show more cleavage, wear shorter skirts, at three times the rate of women in California.”

Ashley Ogogor, who has previously worked at boutique New York bar, is no stranger to short skirts and corsets that show off her “assets”.

“You have to wear something that’s revealing and appealing to the eye, because sex sells, that’s the bottom line. Sex sells and they want us to look the part,” she says of her work outfits. “It puts us in a vulnerable position where we are looked upon as these sexual objects and it’s crazy that our employers are objectifying us and we are doing it for money.”

Jones, who describes herself as “big-breasted”, says that thanks to her chest, she has had her pick of sections in restaurants. A better section often means better tips, which means a better paycheck. Yet instead of being rewarded for being curvy, Jones would like to be rewarded based on merit and punctuality.

“I should not have to show my boobies – or my booty – to you because you think it’s right for you,” Jones says of customers and employers.

Part of the problem with relying on tips for your income is that many Americans do not realize that tipped minimum wage can be so low.

“I was in for a a big shock, when they announced that my wage was going to be $2.13. I was in shock for about a month,” says Ogogor, who got her first restaurant job about two and a half years ago in Texas.



Ogogor currently works as a seasonal worker at one of New York’s High Road restaurants and is helping to re-open Colors, which is a sustainable dining – or as Ogogor described it: “ethical eating” – restaurant run by ROC-United.

“I was a waitress almost 30 years ago, for nine years,” Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, said while speaking at the “Not on the Menu” rally in New York. “And here’s a tragic story: absolutely nothing has changed. The wage hasn’t changed, the sexual harassment hasn’t changed.”

Another problem is that customers often assume that the server gets the entirety of the tip, which is not true. Servers often have to share their tips with busboys who clean their tables, runners who run the food to the tables and bartenders who make their drinks.

“We need one fair wage; $5 is not enough,” Ogogor says of the current New York tipped minimum wage.

As the west coast goes …

“California is showing the way and we have to get with the program,” said New York State assemblymember Deborah Glick on Tuesday.

The state lawmaker promised the crowd that she would devote all her energy to passing a better wage bill “so that women who work hard don’t have to put up with nonsense from drunken fools, just in order to go home with a decent tip”.

There are currently more than 40 High Road restaurants in New York City and Brooklyn that work with ROC-NYC on improving their treatment of workers and pay their employees the regular minimum wage of $7.25, instead of the $5 tipped minimum wage mandated for food workers in New York.

While some restaurants are leading the way, the National Restaurant Association, which represents nearly 500,000 restaurant businesses, maintains that ROC-United report and its rallies are just an attempt to disparage the restaurant industry.