The Hands that Feed Us: Giving Thanks to Our Food Workers

While food­ies debate the mer­its of buy­ing her­itage turkeys ver­sus going meat­less for Thanksgiving, mil­lions of food work­ers are strug­gling to eat at all. The word ironic doesn’t even begin to describe the injus­tice. A shame­ful 40 per­cent (8 mil­lion) of all food work­ers cur­rently earn the min­i­mum wage. And partly because that wage is set so low, an incred­i­ble 10 mil­lion food work­ers (half of the total 20 mil­lion) earn below the poverty line for a fam­ily of three. Adding to the irony? The feds are pick­ing up the slack with food assis­tance pro­grams. Food work­ers par­tic­i­pate in food stamps at 1.5 times the rate of other work­ers and expe­ri­ence food inse­cu­rity at 1.2 times the rate of oth­ers. Also, food work­ers are more likely receive Medicaid and those lack­ing health ben­e­fits often use emer­gency rooms for pri­mary care.

So groups are orga­niz­ing to sup­port the fed­eral Fair Minimum Wage Act, recently intro­duced by Representative George Miller of California in the House, and by Senator Tom Harkin in the Senate.) The bill would raise the fed­eral min­i­mum wage from $7.25 to $9.80 per hour over the next three years, and the tipped min­i­mum wage from the cur­rent $2.13 to 70 per­cent of the reg­u­lar min­i­mum wage.

Yes, you read that right. As low as the reg­u­lar min­i­mum wage is, I was shocked to learn about the tipped min­i­mum wage. Obviously, the restau­rant indus­try has extremely pow­er­ful lob­by­ists. In the past, tipped wages were indexed to 60 per­cent of the reg­u­lar min­i­mum wage so that when one rose, the other would too. Congress unlinked tipped wages from non-tipped wages in 1996, due to lob­by­ing efforts of the National Restaurant Association. As a result, the fed­eral tipped wage has stayed at $2.13 for the last 21 years. That’s worth repeat­ing. The min­i­mum wage for tipped work­ers has stag­nated at just over two bucks for more than two decades, even while the reg­u­lar min­i­mum has gone up. (Some states have higher tipped min­i­mum wages and oth­ers don’t dis­tin­guish between the two.) This affects a lot of work­ers, most of them women, which means fam­i­lies. Of the 10 mil­lion work­ers in the restau­rant indus­try, 872,500 are tipped work­ers and 75 per­cent of those are women, accord­ing to researchers.

One of industry’s favorite talk­ing points against rais­ing the min­i­mum wage is that food prices would nec­es­sary go up. (Such scare tac­tics are quite effec­tive.) Instead of rely­ing on self-serving and unsub­stan­ti­ated claims, two labor experts at the University of California (Berkeley and Davis) decided to take a sci­en­tific approach. Their report, called A Dime a Day and released last month by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, came to an impor­tant if not sur­pris­ing con­clu­sion: indus­try is exaggerating.

The study esti­mated the impact the Miller-Harkin pro­posed min­i­mum wage increase would have on food prices. Researchers found prices would increase by less than one per­cent cumu­la­tively over three years at food retail out­lets, and 2.25 per­cent cumu­la­tively over three years at restau­rants. (The study assumes employ­ers would pass 100 per­cent of the wage increase onto con­sumers, a con­ser­v­a­tive approach.)

This trans­lates to an aver­age house­hold pay­ing less than 10 cents a day as a result of the min­i­mum wage increase. Why so low? One rea­son is that only one per­cent of restau­rant pay­rolls go to min­i­mum wage work­ers. Also, food prices are kept arti­fi­cially low due to gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies of com­mod­ity crops.

Despite the small impact on con­sumers, the pos­i­tive effects on work­ers would be huge. Wages for non-tipped work­ers would increase by a third and for tipped work­ers by more than dou­ble. This wage increase would directly ben­e­fit 19.5 mil­lion min­i­mum wage work­ers and directly and indi­rectly ben­e­fit more than 28 mil­lion work­ers.

However, farm labor is exempt from min­i­mum wage require­ments (thanks to more pow­er­ful lob­by­ing) so this bill won’t help most farm work­ers. (The report pre­dicts that some “crop pro­duc­tion” work­ers will ben­e­fit both directly and indi­rectly.) Still, if the bill passes, it would mean an impor­tant step towards sig­nif­i­cant food sys­tem change for many work­ers. The min­i­mum wage increase is one of eight pol­icy ini­tia­tives rec­om­mended in the Food Chain Workers Alliance “The Hands That Feed Us” report.

If the food move­ment and pub­lic health advo­cates are seri­ous about improv­ing food qual­ity, they have to stop leav­ing 20 mil­lion work­ers out of the pic­ture. It’s time to broaden the agenda to include those on the front lines of the bro­ken food sys­tem. This hol­i­day sea­son, please sup­port the Food Chain Workers Alliance and other related groups, such as ROC-United, which focuses on restau­rant work­ers. And next time you eat out, help counter the power of the National Restaurant Association by leav­ing a big­ger tip.

Michele Simon

Michele is a pub­lic health lawyer who has been research­ing and writ­ing about the food indus­try and food pol­i­tics since 1996. Visit her site at www.EatDrinkPolitics.com/