Behind the Kitchen Door: Inequality & Opportunity in Metro Detroit’s Growing Restaurant Industry
RESEARCH IN ACTION
The Detroit-based chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Center United wasted no time after its founding to get its story out. It issued the most comprehensive report on labor practices in Michigan’s restaurant industry.
The bottom line: The industry has too many bad jobs and is not on its best behavior when it comes to respecting worker rights under the law.
Restaurants behaving badly
When the Restaurant Opportunity Center came to Detroit to organize workers, it hit the streets, not with picket signs but with surveys, cell phones and gigabytes local economic data.
ROC- Michigan provides workforce training and development to help restaurant workers advance in the industry to higher-paying jobs.
The restaurant industry data collected by Restaurant Opportunities Center-Michigan mirrored research on the industry in New York, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago and Portland, Maine. Each Behind the Kitchen Door report reveals a pattern of bad wages, widespread legal violations, a large wage divide by race, no insurance, lack of sick days and unsafe working conditions.
Too many low wage jobs
The Detroit study found a surprisingly resilient and growing industry generating $12 billion of the state’s revenue and employing more than 134,000 workers – 7.8 percent of the region’s total jobs.
Most of the jobs in the region pay low wages with limited benefits or opportunities for mobility. Half of restaurant workers in Detroit earn less than the U.S. median wage of $8.32 for restaurant workers.
To make matters worse, workers of color are overrepresented in lower-paying positions and in lower-paying segments of the industry. Forty percent of workers report experiencing verbal abuse in which race was a factor.
The researchers also got an earful about wage, safety and health violations that the state does not effectively address.
“I just hope that when you are sitting in a fine dining restaurant and eating the food served to you, that you take time to think about who cooked it and how they feel. Is that person being treated well? Are they being paid well? Does this fine dining establishment look as fine on the inside as it does on outside?” – Christi, 10 years in the industry, Cook.
What the industry could look like
Not all news from Detroit is bad. The ROC-Michigan report found that 13 percent of workers reported getting good wages, benefits and working conditions. This important finding suggests that the industry can create good jobs.
ROC’s strategy for transforming the restaurant industry has been to shine the light on the good restaurant owners who pay fair wages and benefits, treat their employees well and follow the laws of the land.
ROC calls these industry leaders “high road” employers. They run good businesses, make a healthy profit and set an industry standard.
The recommendations emerging from the research include: enforcing employment laws in the restaurant industry, encouraging high road practices such as living wages, benefits and opportunities for advancement with incentives, providing paid sick days and increasing the tipped minimum wage, penalizing racial, ethnic and gender discrimination and promoting opportunity.
Behind the Kitchen Door: Inequality & Opportunity in Metro Detroit’s Growing Restaurant Industry
Author: The Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and the Southeast Michigan Restaurant Industry Coalition
Contact: Saru Jarayaman, Restaurant Opportunities – saru@rounited.org
Date: February 2010
Featuring Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan, a grantee of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation.
