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It isn’t just fast-food empires that rely on a low-paid, disempowered, and quite-often impoverished workforce. As a stomach-turning new report (PDF viewable here) from the Economic Policy Institute shows, the entire restaurant industry hides a dirty little labor secret under the tasteful lighting of the dining room.
Here are some highlights:
• The restaurant industry is a massive and growing source of employment. It accounts for more than 9 percent of US private-sector jobs-up from a little more than 7 percent in 1990. That’s nearly a 30 percent gain.
• The industry’s wages have stagnated at an extremely low level. Restaurant workers’ median wage stands at $10 per hour, tips included-and hasn’t budged, in inflation-adjusted terms, since 2000. For non-restaurant US workers, the median hourly wage is $18. That means the median restaurant worker makes 44 percent less than other workers. Benefits are also rare-just 14.4 percent of restaurant workers have employer-sponsored health insurance and 8.4 percent have pensions, vs. 48.7 and 41.8 percent, respectively, for other workers
• Unionization rates are miniscule. Presumably, it would be more difficult to keep wages throttled at such a low level if restaurant workers could bargain collectively. But just 1.8 percent of restaurant workers belong to unions, about one seventh of the rate for non-restaurant workers. Restaurant workers who do belong to unions are much more likely to have benefits than their non-union peers.
• As a result, the people who prepare and serve you food are pretty likely to live in poverty. The overall poverty rate stands at 6.3 percent. For restaurant workers, the rate is 16.7 percent. For families, researchers often look at twice the poverty threshold as proxy for what it takes to make ends meet, EPI reports. More than 40 percent of restaurant workers live below twice the poverty line-that’s double the rate of non-restaurant workers.