Activists speaking for about 34,000 waiters, waitresses and bartenders in Connecticut say it's time to stop having a two-tiered minimum wage, for tipped workers and for everyone else."The women who put food on your tables can't afford to put food on their own tables!" thundered Saru Jayaraman, a New York-based activist speaking at a Thursday press conference called by activists. Jayaraman founded Restaurant Opportunities Centers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and ROC United now has chapters around the country. She said some people think waiters and waitresses make good money, but that's because they're thinking about pricey white-tablecloth restaurants.According to a book put together by the activists' coalition, tipped workers are twice as likely to rely on food stamps as the rest of the work force. The Everybody Benefits Coalition, a constellation of liberal groups and unions that united to get paid sick leave in Connecticut has a new agenda they're calling the Women's Economic Agenda, and eliminating the lower minimum wage for tipped workers is first on the list.

The Connecticut Restaurant Association, a lobbying organization that represents more than 600 restaurants, opposes the bill. Nicole Griffin testified before the legislature's Labor Committee Thursday evening that no waiter or bartender makes less than the minimum wage, because if the tips don't add up to the minimum wage when added to the $5.78 base pay, the employer makes up the difference.According to a think tank that opposes increases to the minimum wage, the average pay for Connecticut servers, including tips, is $14.04 an hour. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics, the median wage, including tips, for servers in the state was $9.16 an hour in 2013. At the time, the standard minimum wage was $8.25.That wage was even lower than fast-food workers, whose mid-point in pay was $9.36 that year.New York just raised its tipped workers' minimum wage from $5 to $7.50 an hour, and Nevada, Wisconsin, Montana and all three West Coast states pay the same minimum wage for all workers.

Griffin said a $3.82 raise for tipped workers would cost restaurants almost $5 when Social Security taxes, unemployment insurance are factored in."That's a big cost," she said.A Deloitte study of table-service restaurants found profit margins tend to be between 2 and 3 percent.buy sushi costumeGriffin, who said she expects the bill to pass the committee, but did not predict its chances in the wider legislature, said she expects restaurants to either raise their prices or add a service charge, and take some of that money to pay the higher wages.play sushi go round gameTaki Tanaka, general manager of West Hartford's Umi Sushi and Tapas, supports the bill, as his restaurant already pays all workers the minimum wage and then pools tips.free online game sushi go round

Tanaka said the great gap between line cooks' pay – typically $60 or $72 a shift before the new system – and the servers caused resentment in the restaurant. The servers often earned $150 on weeknights and $250 on weekends, he said.When he first made the change, all but one of the dozen servers quit. where to buy sushi gummy candyBut now, everyone works as a team, with servers retaining enough tips to make $20 an hour, and with kitchen staff getting enough tips to earn $15 an hour.sushi miami beach flPeter Tercyak, co-chairman of the Labor Committee, attended the activists' press conference before presiding over the public hearing. how much sushi does one cup of rice make"This has been very informative as well as very moving," he said. sushi master online game

"This is an important fight."The committee took up many bills in the Women's Economic Agenda, and one that's also popular among restaurant and retail workers is the Fair Schedules Act. San Francisco is the first place to pass an ordinance requiring employers to plan schedules in advance, and to make partial payments to workers who are sent home early because business is slow.The restaurant lobby also opposes the Connecticut bill, which has none of the exceptions that the San Francisco law contained for bad weather, employee-initiated shift changes or a last-minute need to fill in for a sick worker.Griffin said her trade group would oppose the bill even if it had exemptions. She said if it passes, restaurants will be less likely to open or expand here. The number of restaurant and hotel jobs added in Connecticut in 2014 – more than 6,000 – was by far the fastest growth rate of any sector.Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Is It Okay for Restaurants to Racially Profile Their Employees?” 

(You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.) The gist of the episode: We seem to have decided that ethnic food tastes better when it’s served by people of that ethnicity (or at least something close). Does this make sense — and is it legal? A listener from Salt Lake City named Bailie Hicken wrote in with an observation that I’m guessing many of you have also wondered about: I was in L.A. last night at a sushi bar and I noticed [that] everyone working here is Asian. In fact everyone at every sushi restaurant I have ever been to — which is probably a lot, because I love sushi — is Asian. I mean I get it — it is part of the ambiance of eating at a Japanese restaurant. Nobody wants sushi made by a white guy; If it isn’t made by a Japanese guy with a goatee, it is a fail. So a prerequisite for being hired is that you are Asian?

So why is it okay that some restaurants can hire only Asians at a Japanese restaurant, but if someone wanted to hire all white, or “American-looking” people at, let’s say, some very Americanized restaurant, then people would be pissed? Or all black, all women, all gay, whatever really. How do the Asians get away with it? Let it be noted that my grandpa is Japanese, so I am a quarter, and I love the Asians. I just thought it was interesting, and somehow felt like I should write you an email about it so that you could possibly find some answers for me. A girl can dream right? We took Bailie’s questions to heart and set out to explore the issue of racial profiling in restaurant hiring — not just at sushi restaurants but lots of different kinds of restaurants (Chinese, Mexican, Indian, etc.) where the servers generally look like they come from the place where the food comes from (even if they don’t actually come from there!). We begin with a visit to two of my favorite neighborhood restaurants on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: Gabriela’s Restaurant and Tequila Bar and Elizabeth’s Neighborhood Table.

I talk with the proprietors, the husband-wife team of Nat and Liz O. Milner. Nat comes from a distinguished New York restaurant family and firmly believes that waitstaff ethnicity is an important part of the whole dining experience: NAT MILNER: When you walk in to Gabriela’s, you don’t want to see me. I mean, you’re looking to see Gabriela. I have red curly hair and a red beard and … I think there is something to say about that, that people want to come to a Mexican restaurant and be surrounded by Spanish-speaking people with dark hair, right? As Milner makes clear, a lot of this ethnic-specific restaurant hiring happens by self-selection — i.e., Latino employees find their way to Mexican restaurants, Asian employees find their way to Japanese restaurants, etc. — but what if such hiring is more systematic and, potentially, discriminatory? That’s the question we ask of John J. Donohue III, a Stanford Law professor (who’s also, handily for our purposes, an economist):

DUBNER: I could imagine  there would be some people out there — based on nothing more than what their face looks like — who say, you know, I would have loved to have a job waiting tables in a sushi restaurant, or a Mexican restaurant, or an Italian restaurant, but because I don’t look Asian, or I don’t look Latino, or I don’t look Italian,  those were off-limits to me. So could you imagine a time in the perhaps not-too-distant future where this kind of hiring practice is looked at as unacceptable and perhaps even illegal? DONOHUE: Certainly could happen, and … the statute is pretty clear. And if you’re taking ethnicity into account without some of these other possible defenses being present [e.g., firm size], you are technically subject to an employment discrimination lawsuit … Interestingly, we haven’t seen much in the way of litigation in these small, ethnic cuisine scenarios.” But as we learn from Justine Lisser of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there has been some such litigation:

LISSER: We sued a Houston restaurant … which was supposed to be an upscale Mexican restaurant that fired already-hired servers, one of whom was African-American, one of whom was Vietnamese, because they quote “didn’t speak Spanish” … But it had an extremely diverse group of patrons. It certainly didn’t have only a Spanish-speaking group of patrons. And the reason of not speaking Spanish was, we were alleging, was a pretext to make sure that all of their servers were Hispanic — again, to sort of fit in with the theme. And this is not legal. I mean, for any restaurant, or any employer to put in a requirement like a language requirement, it has to be — and this is the legal phrase of art, “job-related and consistent with business necessity.” And in most instances, it is not job-related and consistent with business necessity. You’ll also hear from the American-Irish comedian Des Bishop, who got a job as a greeter at a Chinese restaurant, in China, and did not like how he was greeted.