Saru Jayaraman

Saru Jayaraman is co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded ROC in New York, which has organized restaurant workers to win workplace justice campaigns, conduct research and policy work, partner with responsible restaurants, and launch cooperatively owned restaurants. ROC now has 10,000 members in 32 cities nationwide. The story of Jayaraman and her co-founder’s work starting ROC was chronicled in the book The Accidental American. Jayaraman is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was profiledin the New York Times “Public Lives” section in 2005, and was named one of Crain’s New York Business “40 Under 40” in 2008 and one of New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City. She authored Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), a national bestseller that blends personal narrative and investigative journalism to reveal the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out.