It’s apparent now more than ever why restaurant workers are urgently organizing. While members of the Restaurant Opportunities Center  roll on with workplace justice campaigns in several cities, affiliates of the national workers center released reports this week from Chicago, New Orleans, Portland, Maine, and Detroit highlighting the low lights of one the largest and fastest-growing private sector employers in the country.
Among the findings released yesterday by ROC-Michigan: The median wage for restaurant jobs in Metro Detroit is just $8.32 an hour, less than half of the average wage for all workers in the area.
In Detroit, 200 people gathered to hear from a sampling of the city’s more responsible employers, industry experts, and its restaurant workers. The study of the city and its suburbs, where 134,000 people work in restaurants and constitute about 8 percent of the private sector workforce, gathers the stories of hundreds of workers into a not-unexpected narrative of low wages, poor working conditions, racial discrimination in hiring, and harassment on the job.
In the heartland of economic collapse, 7.6 percent of Metro Detroit jobs have been lost since July 2009, reports ROC, but restaurant jobs have grown steadily since 2000. They’ve dropped slightly in the last two years. ROC-Michigan has gone after the lowest of the “low-road” employers  at Andiamo Fine Italian Dining in Dearborn for months, filing a lawsuit over wage theft and racial and gender discrimination. (Please clink link to read the full story)