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- If you’re among the majority of Americans who eat out once a week or more, and you’re wondering how to find restaurants whose working conditions you can stomach, check out these apps.
- If you’re among the majority of Americans who eat out once a week or more, and you’re wondering how to find restaurants whose working conditions you can stomach, check out these apps.
You’re out. You’re hungry. You’re unfamiliar with the neighborhood. You reach for your phone.
You’re craving, specifically, an Italian place with mid-priced entrees that offers its workers paid sick leave and a living wage.
Recently intensifying strikes among restaurant workers are drawing attention to the low wages, limited benefits, and scant promotion opportunities within many segments of the dining industry. If you’re among the majority of Americans who eat out once a week or more, and you’re wondering how to find restaurants whose working conditions you can stomach, check out these apps.
1. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United National Diners’ Guide App
ROC’s app lets you pull up wage, benefit, and promotion-practice information for the U.S.’s 150 most popular restaurants, along with a list of establishments whose worker conditions are solid enough to earn ROC's distinction of “high-road restaurants.”
An upcoming version of the app, set to launch later this year, will ask users to go a step further: they’ll be able to use the app to report on signs of occupational racial segregation. ROC’s intention is to crowdsource worker-race information and feed it back into the app as red flags, applied when certain restaurants are shown to consistently place white workers in higher-paying front-of-the-house jobs, and people of color for lower-paying positions like dishwashing and bussing.
“It’s going to be both educating consumers and engaging them in documenting what they’re seeing,” says Ariel Jacobson, ROC’s development and communications director.
2. SWICH
SWICH scores restaurants on a set of standards that includes workers’ conditions, but also factors in the healthfulness of menu items, local-food focus, environmental soundness, and its general humanity within the community (Is the establishment involved in charitable or social missions? Has it been connected to inhumane animal treatment?). So far, SWICH’s data is limited to New York, but it has plans to expand. ROC will be collaborating with the app by supplying data for the workers’ rights category.
This app from the U.S. Department of Labor lets you go right to the source when searching for labor violations at the restaurants, shops, and hotels where you’re considering spending your money.
