Here's an uncomfortable truth that supports the thriving food industry in major cities like New York: the people sending out the food at restaurants often could not afford to sit down to a meal at the same tables they serve.

That's why, yesterday, Governor Cuomo announced the formation of a Wage Board "to review and recommend any changes to the relevant regulations for food service workers and service employees in New York State".

In fact, many restaurant workers can't afford much food at all. They're not starving, but they're living a situation known as food insecurity.



A small group of 30 restaurant owners, restaurant workers and their advocates gathered this week in the kitchen of Crema, a restaurant in New York, to talk about solutions to the problem of food insecurity among New York City restaurant workers.



The key finding was the scale of the problem. What few patrons know – or ignore – is that the people who prepare our food very often struggle to feed themselves.



About 32% of restaurant workers would be considered "food insecure" by the US Department of Agriculture's definition, as a newly released report found. Food security means availability of nutritional, safe food, as well as the ability to buy that food. Unfortunately, many restaurant workers cannot afford food that would meet this definition.

Restaurant workers often eat at work, but they are usually only allowed to eat what's called a family meal, which is often prepared by the restaurant for its staff. Almost half of New York restaurant workers, at 49%, did not consider the family meal provided by their restaurant to be nutritious.

"The food is not good. It's gross," says Carolina Portillo, a 35-year-old New Yorker who works in the restaurant industry. Not only is the food lacking in nutrition, but restaurants often do not make enough to feed everybody. Trying to cut costs, restaurants often serve family meals made of leftovers and food about to expire.

Tipping as an economic force

Tips – or the lack of them – make a difference.

"What we hear from our members all the time is that living on tips is hard. It's a constant struggle," says Rahul Saksena, the policy director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, ROC-NY.

In New York, tipped workers earn $5 an hour and while minimum wage in New York is going to go up to $9 by 2016 because of a deal cut and agreed to by Governor Andrew Cuomo last year, tipped workers are being left out of that raise and will continue to earn $5 an hour.

"We found, in New York city, tipped workers were 30% were more likely than non-tipped workers to be food insecure," he said. In partnership with ROC-The Bay, the organization surveyed 286 food workers in New York and San Francisco.

Martin Sanchez, an eight-year veteran of New York's restaurant industry, says his unstable wages make it hard for his family to budget and afford food.

"Working for tips is not easy, because my wages are usually very unstable. It depends on the hours you get and the customers that come into the restaurant," says Sanchez, a father of five children who currently works as a busboy earning $80 a day.



After working at one restaurant for six years, Sanchez was let go. At his current job, he is the new guy – which means he gets fewer hours, about 35 or less a week, and worse shifts than the senior staff. He earns a tipped minimum wage of $5, plus a fraction of tips that a server would. There is no overtime or extra hours.

"The salary I earn doesn't help me support my family, my five daughters," he says. Currently, his wife does not work and the poverty level for a family of seven is $36,020 a year, twice as much as his annual income. "It's always difficult for me to eat for myself, and to make sure that my family eats well."

Food prepared at restaurants is often not the same as what those restaurants make available for their own employees. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

"You have to be really organized to make sure that have enough money to buy food," says Portillo. "I work three jobs."

After having her hours cut at her full-time job, Portillo was forced to find another job to make ends meet. Currently, she works at two restaurants. At one restaurant, she is a server. At another, she is a prep-cook. On her only day off, she works at the culinary school, where she gets paid and her works also counts as school credit towards one of their programs.

While she has only herself to feed, she too struggles to make enough to maintain a health and balanced diet. According to her, about half of her coworkers are married with kids.

"A lot of the times, they are not able to feed their families at home, because they earn so little," says Diana Robinson, education coordinator of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. About 20% of restaurant workers rely on food stamps, also known as Snap, according to the ROC-NY and ROC-The Bay survey.



There is nothing special about Portillo's situation. Currently, about seven million Americans – usually those holding low-wage jobs – hold two in order to make ends meet. More than three-and-a-half million people have one full-time and one part-time job, while almost two million people have two part-time jobs; another million have two jobs of which at least one's hours vary.

The harsh realities of food and drink industry

The hospitality industry grows consistently but is often based on a harsh economic model: what fuels restaurants are low-wage jobs, with a limited number of hours and unpredictable schedules.

About 10.6 million Americans were employed in the food and drink industry in June, according to the Department of Labor. Usually, only about a million of these jobs are supervisory positions held by restaurant managers and owners. The other nine-and-a-half million are waiters, food runners, busboys, cooks, dishwashers and porters.

In April, on average, a typical employee in the industry made $11.05 an hour and worked under 25 hours a week. Last year, cooks earned on average $11.07 an hour and waiters earned $9.90 – including tips.

These wages are higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and the tipped minimum wage of $2.13, but are not enough to actually make a living.

The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13, remaining unchanged since 1996. Only seven states have eliminated this sub-wage so far. A few others, like New York, have increased their hourly tipped minimum wage.

"We work nine, 10-hour long shifts and we get maybe 10 minutes to eat. It's not a real break," says Portillo.



The vast majority of the 10.6 million Americans in the food industry work as waiters, runners, busboys, cooks, dishwashers and porters. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

"When [workers] do eat at their restaurants, often times the food they are given is not the food that we as customers demand when we go to restaurants. It's not the healthy stuff, it's not the organic stuff, it's not the local stuff. Often it's old and expired," explains Saksena.

"It's sad that we, the restaurant food workers that cook and serve the food, that we are not able to eat well for ourselves," says Sanchez.

For many workers, however, staff meal is their only option. According to the ROC-NY and ROC- The Bay survey, 28% relied on the staff meal because they couldn't afford to buy enough food. Another 22% relied on it because they didn't have time to cook.

In order to improve food-security among restaurant workers, Saksena recommends increasing wages, providing staff with stable full-time positions and paid sick-days.

Unions, wage theft and undocumented workers

In addition to increasing the tipped minimum wage, there are other ways to ensure that workers are able to afford food. One of them is making sure that more restaurant workers are represented by unions.

In 2013, only 1.8% of food and drink industry workers were represented by the union. Such representation can lead to about $100 more in earning each week. Those represented by unions earned on average $535 a week, while non-union workers earned $430 a week.

A green card and/or social security number can make quite a difference as well, found ROC-NY.



Undocumented workers, vulnerable, are often more susceptible to wage theft from employers, something that should not happen to anyone, according to Sonia Lin, a general counsel at the New York City mayor's office of Immigration affairs.

"Minimum wage laws which protect against wage theft, against deprivation of overtime or tip stealing, they apply to everybody, regardless of your immigration status, regardless of whether you are here with documentation or without documentation," she said. "It's basic standards. That's the floor that all employers need to meet."

Yet, due to wage theft and being pay practices, undocumented immigration restaurant workers were 25% more likely to experience food insecurity than documented workers and US citizens, said Saksena.

"It's not a secret that this is an industry that's built on the back of immigrant workers, especially here in New York," he added.