Women's History is Every Month: National Women’s History Month lessons and resources; Rachel Carson’s Brave and Prescient 195
philip panaritis
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Oriflamme Jessie Redmon Fauset, 1882 - 1961
"I think the big thing people should know is that it is the second-largest and fastest-growing sector of our economy, but pays the absolute lowest wages in the country. And that is due to the money, power and influence of a trade lobby called the National Restaurant Association, which leads the Fortune 500 restaurant chains in our country, and whose power dates back over 100 years to the emancipation of the slaves, when they essentially first fought for the right to not pay workers anything—especially former slaves, who were the first tipped workers in our country—not pay them anything and let them live on customer tips.
And there’s just such a great deal of misinformation about who those workers are today, even. There’s such a misperception, that the Restaurant Association likes to promote, that these are very well-paid tipped workers, white guys working in fancy fine-dining restaurants, when in fact the vast majority of tipped workers in America, 70 percent in fact, are women who work at IHOP and Applebee’s and Olive Garden, and earn a median wage of $9 an hour including tips, and suffer from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the US workforce, and the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry in the United States, because they are forced to live in large part on tips rather than receiving a wage from their employer."
