Saru Jayaraman is the president of One Fair Wage 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 the Restaurant Opportunities Center, which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers, and consumers. She then launched One Fair Wage as a national campaign to end all subminimum wages in the United States.
Jayaraman was listed among CNN’s top 10 visionary women and recognized as a champion of change by the White House in 2014, won a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015, and was named visionary of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2019. She is the author of the forthcoming One Fair Wage: Ending All Subminimum Pay in America as well as Behind the Kitchen Door, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, and Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning. She has appeared on MSNBC, HBO, PBS, CBS, and CNN, and she attended the Golden Globes in January 2018 with Amy Poehler as part of the Time’s Up action to address sexual harassment. Jayaraman is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.