Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, to speak at URI
Attorney and activist Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, will present at the 2022 University of Rhode Island Honors Colloquium Tuesday, Oct. 25, on “Labor and the Food System.”
Jayaraman is director of the Food Labor Research
Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Following the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., Jayaraman worked with displaced
World Trade Center workers to co-found the Restaurant Opportunities Center,
which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers, and
consumers.
Jayaraman will speak at 7 p.m. at Edwards Hall on the Kingston Campus, as part of the fall Honors Colloquium, “Just Good Food,” which will be presented in person and streamed live (video links are available the day of each event at the link above). The lecture is co-sponsored by the URI John Hazen White Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service.
A graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School
of Government, Jayaraman has been profiled in a variety of publications
including The New York
Times and New York magazine
and has been a guest on multiple television shows, from CNN to PBS. Her work
after 9/11 with the Restaurant Opportunities Center led to the creation of One
Fair Wage, which works to end the practice of subminimum wages in the service
industry. The founding of these organizations has been chronicled in the
book The Accidental American and the award-winning
documentary Waging Change.
Jayaraman was recognized as a Champion of Change by the
White House in 2014 and has also received a James Beard Foundation Leadership
Award. She is the author of four books including her latest, One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America, as
well as Behind the Kitchen Door, Forked: A New Standard for American
Dining, and Bite Back: People Taking on
Corporate Food and Winning.
The URI Honors Colloquium is the University’s premier
lecture series. Hosted by the University’s Honors Program, this university-wide educational forum is free
and open to the public. This year’s lecture series is bringing several experts
to the Kingston Campus to examine local and global food systems, examining ways
to create equitable, sustainable and resilient food systems, on Tuesday
evenings through Dec. 13. Learn more about the fall colloquium.