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There’s little question that the vast majority of restaurant workers in the United States could use a union. On the whole, their jobs offer low pay and few benefits and employees have little job security. Yet they are also a very difficult group to organize: turnover in the industry is high, the workforce is largely an immigrant one, and employers effectively use threats of deportation and other retaliation against those who speak up.

Over the past decade, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers, now a national organization known as ROC-United, has taken on these challenges. While not a union, ROC-United has brought together 10,000 restaurant workers into an advocacy organization devoted to improving wages and working conditions. In recent years, ROC has expanded beyond New York City and launched affiliates in New Orleans, Miami, Michigan, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington DC. The organization has deployed a diverse arsenal of tactics – community and workplace mobilization, lawsuits against discrimination and wage theft, high-profile research and reports on the industry, and partnerships with “high road” restaurant owners – to advance the interests of low-wage workers who have been largely beyond the reach of the traditional labor movement.

Recently, I spoke with ROC-United’s co-founder and co-director, Saru Jayaraman, about how it has been able to use its status as an advocacy organization to develop fresh approaches to defending workers’ rights and building alliances in the community. Next month will see the release of Jayaraman’s first book,  Behind the Kitchen Door, which challenges foodies who demand organic, fair-trade and free-range ingredients in their food to pay just as much attention to the people who do the majority of the work in the restaurants we patronize.

I started by asking Jayaraman about her background and about how ROC got started.

“My background is that I am a child of immigrants from India,” she said. “I grew up in California, then ended up going back East for law school and graduate school, and I got more and more engaged in immigrant worker issues. Ultimately, after 9/11, I received a phone call from the union that was in Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. They asked if I would start an organization that would initially support the workers who had lost their jobs and the families of the victims.”