Saru Jayaraman led a protest march outside the Cite Restaurant in midtown Manhattan in Fall 2003 over unpaid wages and discrimination. (Photo: Courtesy, ROC-NY)

Saru Jayaraman, 29, attorney and the executive director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY), along with the Morocco-born waiter-founder, Mamdouh Fekkah, has turned the non-profit into a platform for seeking improved conditions for restaurant workers in New York City.

Their efforts have made two Manhattan restaurants, Cité and the Park Avenue Cafe –– owned by the Smith & Wolensky Restaurant Group –– pay $164,000 to 23 workers to settle lawsuits for alleged discrimination and failure to pay for overtime.

ROC-NY was formed in April 2002. Jayaraman got a call from Fekkah, who worked at Windows on the World –– a restaurant which was located in the World Trade Center. He and other workers who lost their jobs asked her if she would start an organization to promote their cause.

“Initially I was hesitant. When I met the workers I was enamored and I wanted to work for them,” told Jayaraman to News India-Times. These immigrants hailed from about 30 countries, including India and Bangladesh. “People were very distraught as they had not only lost their loved ones and their jobs, but also they were discriminated against,” said Jayaraman.

ROC-NY today has become a known advocacy group for restaurant workers in the city. Jayaraman claims that the organization has won six lawsuits, amounting to $300,000. For her, the first victory felt great. “Windows owner tried toanother restaurant… he didn’t want to hire former employees because he thought they would form a union. We protested and to avoid bad publicity he took them in,” she said.

Jayaraman said that research has shown that workers were often subjected to derogatory remarks. “In the case of Muslims, they were told to ‘go back to Iraq.’ Some of them were told that you are too fat… or you are too dark to be a waiter.” She herself often leads the protest march. Her stint as a singer with the gospel choir at Harvard University has worked well for her.

ROC-NY’s efforts have led workers to start a restaurant that will be owned and managed by them. Called Colors, the restaurant willthis fall on Lafayette Street near Astor Place.

Jayaraman, who lives in Brooklyn, works 70-80 hours a week. “I am single, I have so much time on my hands,” jokes Jayaraman. She didn’t acquire a passion for the cause overnight. “I lived in an immigrant community where a lot of people never amounted to anything, that kind of drove me to organize immigrants so that they were valued for their contribution to the U.S. economy.”

Jayaraman grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles. Her parents, software consultant father and a school teacher mother, immigrated from south India in 1974. The school she went to had students whose parents were janitors, domestic workers, etc. “I am glad my parents put me in that school. I was exposed to a lot and made me what I am today.”

Jayaraman, who claims her Spanish is better than her Tamil, did a dual degree graduate program from the Yale Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She said she wasn’t interested in being a corporate lawyer and make money. “I wanted to fight for social justice… I was too angry about not doing anything.” She was exposed from a young age to abusive working conditions the families of the immigrants she got to know had to deal with.

At 17, as an undergrad at UCLA, Jayaraman formed a group called the Women and Youth Supporting Each Other. The aim was to teach women leadership skills and reduce high pregnancy rates. This organization today has 12 chapters in six states. Immediately after her grad school, Jayaraman joined a non-profit organization, Workplace Project, set up in Long Island by her Yale professor. There she trained Latino workers to advocate for themselves at restaurants, factories, etc.

Her desire to work in a multi-racial and multi-ethnic city made her leave the organization after two years in mid-2001. Thereafter she taught full-time for six months at Brooklyn College and worked on her book, ‘The New Urban Immigrant Workforce,’ which will be released in June this year. After joining ROC-NY full-time, she still teaches political science at Brooklyn and Queens Colleges and immigrant rights at New York University.