NewDay Speaker Saru Jayaraman, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United

Thanks to Zagat and Yelp, we know just how diners rate the cuisine, ambiance, and service at restaurants across the country. Now, with the publication of Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, we can choose restaurants based on how they treat their workers, too. Saru Jayaraman’s new book profiles fabulous restaurants taking the “high road to profitability” and provides ratings of America’s most popular eateries based on the wages, working conditions, and promotion practices they afford workers.

Saru Jayaraman is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded ROC in New York, which has organized restaurant workers to win workplace justice campaigns, conduct research and policy work, partner with responsible restaurants, and launch cooperatively-owned restaurants. ROC now has 10,000 members in 19 cities nationwide. The story of Saru and her co-founder’s work founding ROC has been chronicled in the book The Accidental American. Saru Jayaraman co-edited The New Urban Immigrant Workforce, (ME Sharpe, 2005). She is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was profiled in the New York Times “Public Lives” section in 2005, and was named one of Crain’s “40 Under 40” in 2008, 1010 Wins’ “Newsmaker of the Year,” and one of New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City. She authored Behind the Kitchen Door, a groundbreaking exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out (from Cornell University Press, 2013).