One Fair Wage by Saru Jayaraman, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

A powerful exposé of how the tipping system and the subminimum wage has been used to exploit society's most vulnerable, from the nationally renowned activist and author of Behind the Kitchen DoorYear by year, more people are working for a subminimum wage. The vast majority, more than 6 million people, are tipped workers in the service industry. They serve us in cafes and restaurants, they deliver food to our homes, they drive us wherever we want to go, and they work in nail and hair salons for wages as abysmally low as $2.13 an hour-the federal tipped minimum wage since 1991-leaving them with next to nothing to get by. The numbers are sure to only increase. As the service industry digitizes, tech companies, such as Uber, Lyft, and Doordash, are capitalizing on this loophole to avoiding having to pay workers a minimum wage. In Waging Change, acclaimed restaurant activist and author of Behind the Kitchen Door Saru Jayaraman shows the American economy at its most exploitative. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, she illustrates how the people left out of the fight for the minimum wage are society's most vulnerable and most marginalized: people of color, many of them immigrants; women, who form the majority of tipped workers; disabled workers; incarcerated workers; and youth workers. They epitomize the direction of our whole economy, reflecting the precariousness and instability that is increasingly the lot of all workers in America. Calling for every worker in America to receive a full, fair minimum wage, Waging Change points to a new future where the service industry can prosper with, not off of, its workforce. | One Fair Wage by Saru Jayaraman, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters