Our Challenging Public Health series invites speakers from outside of public health to reflect on the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This conversation features Saru Jayaraman, lawyer, activist, and founder of One Fair Wage. Jayaraman has written several books exposing the challenges faced by restaurant workers, including Behind the Kitchen Door: The People Who Make and Serve Your Food and Forked: A New Standard for American Dining.
Saru Jayaraman is the President of One Fair Wage 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 the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. She then launched One Fair Wage as a national campaign to end all subminimum wages in the United States. Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was listed in CNN’s “Top10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015, and the SF Chronicle ‘Visionary of the Year’ in 2019. Saru is also the author of four books including the forthcoming, One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America (The New Press, November 2021). Additional publications include Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning, (UC Press, 2020). She has appeared on MSNBC, HBO, PBS, CBS, and CNN. She attended the Golden Globes in January 2018 with Amy Poehler as part of the Times Up action to address sexual harassment.
