Saru Jayaraman has good reason to be pleased. She is the executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a little nonprofit that just pulled off a David-versus-Goliath feat. The center extracted US$164,000 from two fashionable Manhattan restaurants -- Cite and the Park Avenue Cafe -- to settle lawsuits that involved charges of discrimination and failure to pay overtime to 23 restaurant employees, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico and Bangladesh.
The center was born out of the ashes of the World Trade Center to help the surviving employees of Windows on the World, and it has grown into a muscular advocacy group for restaurant workers citywide. The other afternoon, Jayaraman, who is also a lawyer and an adjunct college professor, sits underneath what she calls the victory wall in the center's cramped Tribeca office. Displayed on it are oversize checks. There is the fat one symbolizing the US$164,000 from the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, which owns Cite and the Park Avenue Cafe. There is also a US$19,500 check to settle legal charges involving the Three Guys Restaurant, a diner in Manhattan where Mexican workers said they were told they were too fat, dark and ugly to be waiters.
"In our experience and through our research," Jayaraman says, "you wouldn't believe the ads put out by restaurant employers -- `good-looking required, send photos' -- to be a waiter. Employers have told us that means they want good-looking white people in the front and hard workers in the back. Hard workers mean immigrants."
The latest settlement is one of six campaigns waged by the center since it started in April 2002, shaming restaurants through litigation and demonstrations into paying a total of more than US$300,000 in back wages and discrimination payments, in addition to improved working conditions.
Jayaraman often leads the protests outside the restaurants. She is a soprano who used to sing with a gospel choir at Harvard. "It comes in very handy," she says.
The restaurant workers came up with a Christmas-carol protest outside Cite in Midtown. "You better pay up, I'm telling you why, ROC New York is coming to town," she chimes in singsong. One would think Jayaraman would be eager to talk. The center is on a roll. This fall, it plans to open a restaurant, Colors, on Lafayette Street near Astor Place, to be owned and governed by workers. On Tuesday, the center is set to release what it describes as a groundbreaking report on the state of the restaurant industry.
Yet Jayaraman is uncomfortable, squirming, about being the interview subject. She explains she is merely the group's facilitator.
"As an organizer, I don't think that this is appropriate," she says somewhat sternly. "The point is that restaurant workers lead their own struggles for justice. I'm just a spark in the fire."
She is insistent and tough. In her cluttered corner of the room, there are posters of Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi and Angela Davis. Jayaraman, who is single and works 70 to 80 hours a week, lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She will only rent there.
"I don't believe in buying property," she says. "It's not our land. It's the land of the Native Americans. Being a part of the property-owning class is the main problem to begin with."
She does not want to be in the spotlight. But her career trajectory has been rather striking. A daughter of immigrants from southern India, a graduate of Yale Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she was singled out and honored as one of America's finest young people in 1995 by President Bill Clinton.
Clinton recognized her not only as a top undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, but also because two years earlier, at 17, she founded Women and Youth Supporting Each Other in Los Angeles, where she was born. The group's goals are to teach women leadership skills and reduce high pregnancy rates. It is now a national organization with 12 chapters in six states.
She says she created the group because she was angry at the way teachers constantly told her and her classmates that they would probably get pregnant and not make it through high school. As it turned out, some classmates fulfilled that prophecy. "I wanted to find a way to provide something with more opportunity, more options and more self-esteem," she says.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy