Intersectionality and the Fight for a Fair Wage in Food Service

1.81% of workers covered by union contract
$16.24 median hourly wage (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics 2023)
The food service industry has the largest proportion of workers in the food system and is an incredibly diverse sector—in terms of both the kinds of work being done and who is doing it. While restaurants and other food service outlets are often sites of joy, celebration, and social connection, they are also simultaneously sites of worker dissatisfaction at best and worker abuse at worst. Having gained traction since the turn of the century, labor activists are challenging the poverty-level wages that are endemic to food service and have highlighted serious and persistent problems of discrimination and harassment in the industry. Various groups, including the Fight for $15 among fast-food employees, are working tirelessly to bring powerful abusers to justice and mobilize campaigns to eliminate the tipped wage. In this chapter, we take inspiration from these efforts and engage an intersectional approach to argue that inequalities related to race, class, gender, and other markers of difference and identity are deployed as mechanisms of capitalist growth and profiteering within food service.
