The ‘Alt-Labor’ Leader Fighting for Fair Pay for Restaurant Workers

After Sept. 11, the surviving employees of Windows on the World, the 107th-floor restaurant destroyed in the World Trade Center attacks, needed an advocate. Union organizers who’d represented the workers recruited Saru Jayaraman, then a 26-year-old Yale Law School graduate, to help start a group to support employees in the absence of a contract. Her organization, which she called the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), soon faced a big test: The company that had managed Windows was starting an eatery but rejecting the majority of former Windows staffers who applied for jobs.

It reminded Jayaraman of her experience as a high school student in Southern California, when a teacher suggested that the best she and her mostly low-income Latino classmates could aspire to was community college or pregnancy. Jayaraman organized a protest at the restaurant’s red-carpet opening—a move so embarrassing the manager caved and doubled the number of ex-Windows people on staff. “To say to a group of workers—mostly people of color who lost family members and livelihoods in your restaurant—that they didn’t have the experience to work in your new nightclub was just outrageous,” she says.