Listen to Mark Bittman – Sustainable Food Requires Sustainable Jobs!

It’s not often that I come to work and find I can credit the same person with the inspiration for both yesterday’s dinner and today’s blog post – but today I’d like to thank Mark Bittman for his delicious tomato panzanella recipe as well as his brilliant NY Times Opinionator post on the substandard wages and working conditions faced by many food industry workers. 

Bittman’s blog post may not be as fun to read as some of his other writing, but it sheds light on a serious issue that is too often overlooked, even by foodies who go to great lengths to assure that farmers and animals are treated with respect. As Bittman observes, “If you care about sustainability — the capacity to endure — it’s time to expand our definition to include workers. You can’t call food sustainable when it’s produced by people whose capacity to endure is challenged by poverty-level wages.”

Poverty-level wages, indeed: for many workers in the restaurant industry who receive tips, the minimum cash wage is just $2.13 an hour, as it has been since 1991. Though employers are required to make up the difference between the tipped minimum wage and the regular minimum wage (still only $7.25/hour at the federal level), many do not. Given that even full-time work at the full federal minimum wage rate leaves a family of three thousands of dollars below the poverty line, it should come as no surprise that restaurant servers, the largest group of tipped employees, experience poverty at nearly three times the rate of the workforce as a whole. And as Bittman points out, about 70 percent of servers are women.

Low wages are hardly the only challenge confronting women in the food industry, many of whom also face erratic hours, workplace discrimination, and little in the way of benefits like health insurance or paid sick leave. (For more on all of these issues, take a look at the excellent reports from Food Chain Workers Alliance and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.) But increasing the federal minimum wage, and finally bringing the tipped minimum wage up along with it, is an essential step toward creating sustainable jobs for the women and men who produce and serve our food.

Several bills that would raise the minimum wage have already been introduced. Now it’s time for Congress to act.