A newly released study of the California restaurant industry documents pervasive racial and gender segregation among restaurant employee positions, and the profound impact this has on the people who cook and serve our food. Through data analysis and interviews with both employers and industry experts, the study reveals how higher paid front-of-house positions are routinely reserved for white men, while lower paid back-of house positions tend to be filled exclusively by minorities.
The full study, "Ending Jim Crow in America’s Restaurants: Racial and Gender Occupational Segregation in the Restaurant Industry," points to a long history of enforced segregation in America's restaurants and finds that restaurant segregation exists today — right in front of our eyes.
"While Jim Crow laws regulated the enforced separation between white and African American patrons in restaurants, today restaurant workers are effectively separated by race and gender by a partition between livable-wage and poverty-wage positions," the study summary notes.
And the difference in wages is significant, as highlighted by the Chronicle, whereas a higher paid waiter can potentially earn $150k annually, "a runner — the person who brings the plate to the table and works just one step below the waiter — can make $30,000 and have little chance of advancement."
The study was conducted by a Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, an organization that bills itself as "13,000 restaurant workers, 100 high-road employers, thousands of engaged consumers united for raising restaurant industry standards."
Key study findings include:
The greatest racial and gender wage inequality is in the highest wage occupational categories—namely fine-dining server and bartender positions. The restaurants with the highest wages and greatest number of employees had the highest rates of segregation in both Front-of-the-House service positions and Back-of-the-House kitchen positions.
In California, Latinos experience the highest levels of directly observable occupational segregation, with substantial under-representation in the higher-paying server and bartender occupations, while African Americans are largely absent altogether from meaningful participation in full-service restaurant occupations and overrepresented in limited-service/fast-food occupations.
As a result of this segregation, overall after adjusting for education and language proficiency, workers of color receive 56% lower earnings when compared to equally qualified white workers. Women of color, on average, earned 71% of what white men earn, amounting to a $4-per-hour wage differential.
Through a series of employee interviews, the study finds that larger structural issues are significant factor contributing to the problem.
"Worker interviews point to real structural barriers that workers of color face in accessing livable-wage fine-dining service positions, including lack of training, social networks, transportation, childcare, interactions with the criminal justice system, and more. Those real barriers result in employers lacking pools of candidates of color for hiring into fine-dining service positions".
And while it is reassuring that California's restaurant managers are not entirely to blame, the ingrained problem doesn't sound like it's going away anytime soon.
Just a reminder: This is 2015, and Jim Crow laws went out the window 50 years ago.
