#ResturantsCould…

Take Leadership on Gender Equality and Sexual Violence

Guidelines for Individual Restaurants:

• Start from the top: Owners make clear, proactive statements on restaurant’s policies and protocols on sexual harassment and gender equity – not just once, but regularly.
• Conduct regular pre-shift messaging/training on these issues; reinforce when topics are in the news; bring in organizations that do bystander training for all employees; prominently post the Cherry Bombe sexual harassment poster.
• Don’t take a “cover your ass” approach. If a restaurant has an HR director, they should have a company mandate to support ​workers first​, or if no HR director, employees should be provided info on a neutral third-party they know to call on these issues. Never use nondisclosure agreements, mandatory arbitration agreements or retaliation to keep harassment claims secret.
• Lift up workers who speak out on harassment experiences – don’t participate in blacklisting.
• Engage men as part of the solution; recommend “That’s What She Said” book about being a workplace ally; discuss power dynamics and what constitutes abuse of power; have clear policies on sexual and social relationships between supervisors and subordinates.
• Have a clear policy for how to handle sexually harassing customers that supports workers.
• Take leadership in articulating connections between “bro culture,” gender equity and LGBTQ issues.
• Analyze staffing to understand if you have less than 50% non-cis men in various positions and actively work to fix that. Pursue hires and move women/queer people into leadership/management positions.
• Welcome trans and nonbinary people, ensure dress codes don’t assign specific genders, ensure all single-person bathrooms are all-gender usage. Learn about NY’s Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), and make sure your restaurant follows the law.
• Give employees the opportunity to register what pronouns they prefer to use when they start employment, and positively acknowledge later requests to change pronoun preferences.
• Make employee benefits fully cover sexual and reproductive healthcare, provide maternity leave; but don’t make assumptions about any employee’s desire to have children or interest in taking on additional responsibilities based on parenthood status.
• Audit payroll by gender and other demographic categories to make sure people doing the same basic job are being paid comparably, and if they are not, that there is a rational business reason that can be attributed to the disparity. Audit should examine shift assignments for tipped workers to ensure the best shifts aren’t going disproportionately to privileged demographic groups.

Guidelines for the Hospitality Industry:

• Contribute to policy organizations conducting research on pay differences by gender.
• Invest in women, trans and nonbinary owned businesses.
• Support organizations that do bystander training, like OutSmartNYC

#ResturantsCould…

Take Leadership on Racial Equity and Immigrant Fairness

Guidelines for Individual Restaurants:

• Seek out implicit bias training for all workers. Owners, managers and other leaders especially should actively seek out bias training and encourage all to engage.
• Take time to learn about race and immigration issues, help create an atmosphere of dialogue where addressing race head-on is an opportunity for introspection rather than a threat of being branded racist.
• Actively recruit for all positions in places where immigrants and people of color are, don’t guide anyone toward stereotypical jobs.
• Authorize managers to pause the hiring process until there is a diverse pool of candidates; develop a standardized interviewing Q&A scoring system specifically researched and developed to reduce bias; apply similar principles to all advancement evaluations.
• Have policies on how to address usage of racist language or experiences of micro-aggressions, seek out racial equity/implicit bias training for all levels of workers.
• Do not cooperate with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; never threaten or joke about calling ICE on an employee.
• Do not discriminate against people with an accent, or steer them from jobs interacting with the public.
• Be understanding of commuting issues for people who are literally pushed to the margins.
• Don’t exploit the undocumented, don’t pay people under the table.
• Identify immigrants and people of color doing good work and nurture them to more advanced jobs.
• Reconsider criminal background checks, or ask about the context of past interactions with the justice system before rejecting a candidate.
• Think about how welcoming your restaurant is to guests of color, because that will set the tone for how welcoming it is to workers from those communities.
• Collect data on racial/ethnic/immigration status and audit your restaurant’s pay equity performance.
• When considering customer complaints about employee performance, management should factor into their assessments the implicit biases held by customers.
• Have employee resource recommendations on local training to improve reading and writing in English.

Guidelines for the Hospitality Industry:

• Support industry-wide efforts to produce training materials for all jobs in non-English versions.
• Think more deeply about the organizations you support with charitable time and dollars, do those nonprofits apply a racial equity lens?
• Support organizations that provide direct help to immigrant workers in the food system, like Brandworkers and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.