Business Ethics Week 2024 - Who Can Afford to Live Here Anymore? The Fight for a Livable Wage in California and the U.S.

Saru Jayaraman is the President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. She then launched One Fair Wage as a national campaign to end all subminimum wages in the United States.

Saru was listed in CNN’s “Top10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award recipient in 2015, and the SF Chronicle “Visionary of the Year” in 2019. Saru is also the author of four books, including One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America (The New Press, November 2021). Additional publications include Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning, (UC Press, 2020). She is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.