Women’s rights advocates say getting rid of tipping could help end rampant sexual harassment in the restaurant industry.

According to a survey carried out by Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United last year, four in five women working in the US food service industry report having been sexually harassed by customers. About 74% of women in the restaurant industry reported sexual harassment from co-workers or superiors.

Women who work in restaurants and bars should not have to tolerate lewd behavior and sexual harassment from customers in order to supplement their wage and make ends meet, said ROC co-founder and co-director Saru Jayaraman this week.

“When you live off the tips,” she said, “you have to tolerate whatever the customer might do to you, however they might touch you or treat you or talk to you, because the customer is always right. The customer pays your bills, not your employer.”



In a Thursday session in New York that kicked off a two-day discussion of ways in which employers and politicians could help reduce violence against women, Jayaraman laid out a case for how better wages could help reduce sexual harassment and assaults against women working some of the lowest-paid jobs in the country.

Since 1996, the federal minimum wage for jobs where tips are received has been $2.13. Since Congress has shown little interest in reforming the tipped minimum wage, state and local governments have taken the matter into their own hands. About half of the 50 states have passed laws to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers. Seven have moved to eliminate it completely.

The main opponent of raising or eliminating the tipped minimum wage is the National Restaurant Association, which Jayaraman and other advocates often call, in a pointed reference to the powerful gun rights lobby, “the other NRA”.

The NRA claims that most tipped workers are “wealthy, white, steakhouse servers who make a ton of money in tips”, said Jayaraman. In fact, she said, most tipped workers are women.

“They are women who work at iHop and Applebee’s and Olive Garden and suffer three times the poverty rates of the rest of the US workforce.”

Tipped employees’ low wages and sexual harassment in the hospitality industry are intertwined issues, said Jayaraman.



In states where tipped minimum wage remains below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and is anywhere from $2 to $5, women interviewed by ROC United were twice as likely to say they had been sexual harassed at work as women in states such as California, where the tipped minimum wage has been eliminated.

Eliminating the tipped minimum wage and increasing the federal minimum wage could help reduce sexual harassment in certain industries, Jayaraman said. However, she added, the rise of “breastaurants” like Tilted Kilt and Twin Peaks, in addition to the long-established Hooters chain, had reinforced the idea that women’s bodies are on sale as much as the food.

Workers are not categorizing sexual violence and wage issues. It’s just one continuum of work and exhaustion Daffodil Altan

The NRA has dismissed ROC United’s findings, saying they are part of recycled attacks funded by labor unions and their allies. Labor and women’s rights advocates counter that low wages and sexual harassment are not separate issues for workers and thus should not be so for policymakers.

“It is one spectrum,” said Daffodil Altan, an investigative reporter and video producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting who attended the New York meeting. “Workers are not categorizing sexual violence over here and wage issues over here. It’s just one continuum of work and exhaustion.”

Janitors are also at risk for sexual harassment and assault, the advocates said. Paid minimum wage and usually working the night shift, they are what Altan describes as invisible workers. In June, PBS aired a Frontline segment produced by Altan and titled Rape on the Night Shift, in which she interviewed women who worked as janitors and were allegedly raped by supervisors.

“They show up and they inhabit all these buildings,” Altan said. “They inhabit department stores, the Targets, the Walmarts. They are cleaning. And you can go to your office the next day and not know that a sexually violent crime has occurred there the night before.”

When Altan was a teenager, she said, her mom was a janitor who was harassed but not assaulted.

Jayaraman said accepting such a culture in the hospitality industry could lead to women tolerating such behavior in other fields. She asked those attending to raise their hands if they had worked in the restaurant industry.

“Look around. It’s everybody,” she said. “The restaurant association estimates one in two have worked in the industry.”

To many women in these industries, sexual harassment and assaults have become part of the territory. When speaking recently at a university, Jayaraman said, she took a question from a female student who worked in restaurant.



“A young student raised her hand and said: ‘I don’t understand why you are talking about these things as if they are so outrageous. This is our industry.’ And I said: ‘It’s outrageous that you don’t think it’s outrageous. It’s outrageous that it’s so normalized for you as it is in our industry.’

“It’s such a fine line between pleasing the customer, hospitality, the ‘customer is always right’, and doing things that feel totally uncomfortable.”