A slew of left-wing organizations, from think tanks to community groups to non-profits, have recently taken up the idea of a hike in the minimum wage. One group that has been particularly vocal — the Restaurant Opportunities Center — recently registered to lobby for the Fair Minimum Wage Act and has been hosting rallies in major cities to drum up support for a wage hike. It even attended a White House minimum wage strategy session in May.
ROC presents itself as an independent non-profit committed to producing unbiased wage and benefit studies and providing worker trainings. It’s a clever charade: ROC is actually a labor union front group founded by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union to “organize the 99 percent of the [restaurant] industry that doesn’t have a union.” ROC’s long history of misrepresenting itself is particularly robust on the minimum wage issue.
Several years after its founding in 2002, ROC opened up its own restaurant in New York City. The restaurant was supposed to demonstrate that when it comes to pay practices, restaurants are more than able to take “the high road.”
The dream died fast. Within a year of its opening, the eatery was already $1 million in debt — even though many of its employees were required to work for free. Many workers, unable to make ends meet while ROC touted its “high road” but took the “low road,” quickly left, claiming, as the Washington Post put it, “they could not afford to keep waiting for a dream.”
One of the restaurant’s board members recognized this glaring hypocrisy and sued ROC for its wage-related injustices.
While ROC was being sued by its own employees, the front group was accusing other restaurants of not paying their staff a fair wage. It hasn’t devoted a commensurate amount of money to compiling reports of those alleged abuses, however; to gather the data published in ROC’s annual “Diners’ Guide,” which ranks restaurants based on employment standards rather than food quality, ROC employed unpaid interns. These interns researched unfair pay practices while the ROC refused to pay them a single cent.
When good, old-fashioned hypocrisy doesn’t work, ROC instead tries its hand at manipulating data. Its reports and surveys on restaurant employment abuse — the ones that the unpaid interns put together — demonstrate a profound aversion to exhaustive research and accuracy. Reading the fine print of ROC’s reports is important: In small methodology notes buried in the endnotes, ROC acknowledges that its surveys are based on “convenience” interviews rather than random surveys. Furthermore, the interviewers are prepped to “know the agenda/purpose of these interviews” and be prepared to “prompt people in order to get these quotes.”
Sometimes misleading and manipulated reports aren’t enough, either. That’s when ROC resorts to outright lies.
For example, the ROC claims that tipped workers only make $2.13 an hour. This misleading statistic may work when it comes to drumming up support for wage hikes, but it’s also plainly false. Federal law requires that all tipped workers make at least the federal minimum wage; Census Bureau data also shows that these employees actually make an average of $13 an hour — and top earners pull down $25 or more. Nowhere in the country does a single tipped employee make $2.13 an hour.
Clearly, ROC is not fit to lecture the public on the importance of a minimum wage hike. Given ROC’s long-standing connection to unions like HERE, which often tie collective bargaining agreements to the minimum wage, it’s unlikely that they’ll stop their double-speak any time soon. But that doesn’t mean that the media and the general public have to listen.
Mike Paranzino is communications director for ROC Exposed, which is supported by a coalition of restaurant workers, employers and citizens concerned about ROC’s campaigns against America’s restaurants.