At typical political fundraising dinners, enormous sums of money are funneled toward a candidate or cause, and not, perhaps, to the waitstaff bustling around with trays of food and drinks. Looking to make those typically underpaid workers the star of an event, One Fair Wage — an advocacy group representing hundreds of thousands of servers and about a thousand restaurant owners demanding living wages for all — recruited celebrities to do their job for an hour.
On Thursday evening at Ladyhawk, a plush Mediterranean restaurant adjoining a boutique hotel in West Hollywood, attendees settled in for a meal of seared halloumi and steak shawarma that would be overseen by some familiar faces. Among them were Keegan-Michael Key, June Diane Raphael, Matt Bomer, Nischelle Turner, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ike Barinholtz, Bozoma Saint John, and the event chair, Chrissy Teigen. They all had something in common: experience waiting tables as young unknowns. Teigen, for example, once worked at Hooters, never knowing if the tips she made would be enough to get her through the next month. Saint John, an entrepreneur and executive who has joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, tells Rolling Stone that her first job was as a hostess at Denny’s — working the graveyard shift.
“There have been many, many jobs I’ve had since, many of them very powerful ones, but the fight to get equality and pay has never changed,” says Saint John. She doesn’t think either party is talking enough about the importance of raising the minimum wage, but adds, “I don’t know that I’ve ever been a fan of just leaving it up to the politicians to do everything. It’s up to us as citizens and working people who are interacting with other working people to stick up for each other.”
Raphael recalls meeting Saru Jayaraman, restaurant activist and president of One Fair Wage (as well as one of the hosts for the evening) around when the #MeToo movement was taking off. She heard her speak about the likelihood of a young woman new to employment being sexually harassed in a food service job and thought back to her time dishing out meat skewers at a Brazilian steakhouse. “One night, this gentleman was trying to get my attention — I had walked past him,” Raphael says. “And he took a fork, and he poked my ass with the fork. I truly didn’t know what to say, so I just said, ‘That’s inappropriate.’ That’s the best I could come up with.”
Raphael jokes that she’s not sure exactly what her tableside manner will be tonight, because in the steakhouse days, “I did not give service with a smile, I was not friendly, I was not engaging. And so I’m trying to figure out, do I take on the server personality that I always maintained, which was an absolute bitch, because I hated doing it so much? I hated having to work for tips and being reliant on such a volatile industry.”
The mix of light-hearted humor and sincere indignation about what’s called the “subminimum wage” for tipped workers — some making as little as $2.13 an hour in base pay, the federal minimum — endures as the meal gets started. California’s current minimum wage is $16, and the state has eliminated the subminimum wage for tipped workers. But $2.13 is still the floor for restaurant workers in 18 states.
In her introduction, host Meena Harris, CEO of Phenomenal Media and the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris, speaks about ensuring everyone’s “ability to feed their families and to pay their bills.” Introducing the celebrity servers, she says, “Do not go easy on them, people,” explaining that they should experience “all the challenges and joys” of the work.
Carrying a martini made by Barinholtz, who is installed behind the bar and really putting some muscle into his cocktail-shaker moves, I’m pointed to a table where other guests include a political strategist, organizers from a nonprofit that offers support to people getting out of jail, and, to my surprise, a professional psychic. (She mentions at one point that business is slower in summer, but her clients start to call again when the holidays roll around.) Teigen stops by to say hi but asks us not to order anything from her, describing her waitressing as “terrible.”
Eventually, Turner visits to take more drink orders, and has a very natural rapport with the table. The food, as it transpires, is actually a fixed menu of shareable items — which is just as well, since most of the stars are a little out of practice and seem to have their hands full without trying to remember which entree goes where. And, naturally, it’s Ladyhawk’s usual waitstaff that brings out the platters. Ferguson is gently jeered when he arrives at the restaurant half an hour late for his shift.
In between tending to the customers, the celebs make remarks to the room. (One notable speaker, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, is not compelled to don an apron and make the rounds.) Key, always a high-energy performer, is particularly impassioned at the podium. “Who here remembers their very first job, and how much they made at that job?” he asks. “I bet there’s a decent chance you were paid more than $2.13 an hour, which is more than millions and millions of Americans can say today. I read a statistic today that really shocked me: People who work in the service industry are twice as likely to be food stamps as the entire rest of the U.S. workforce.” After a few more grim statistics, Key adds, “I wish I was joking.”
Even if some of the logistics of having actors and comedians wait tables in a busy, crowded restaurant are a little fudged for the purposes of the stunt, it’s clear that Key and others have done the reading on their cause. Copies of Jayaraman’s book, One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America, are handed out to attendees. It describes how the very notion of workers living on tips emerged from the post-slavery era, when employers refused to pay newly freed Black people a salary, and has remained a discriminatory practice affecting people of color, immigrants, and women, as well as disabled, incarcerated and young workers.
The money raised by the event will go towards One Fair Wage’s efforts to energize and empower those very workers in the ongoing fight for living wages; the organization wants those making too little money to be directly involved in securing a better economic future for themselves. That message is a compelling one, though at times it was hard to reconcile working-class struggle with a swank dining room and gourmet cuisine here in a wealthy L.A. enclave. On the other hand, who am I to nitpick? I wasn’t paying anything, which I certainly didn’t mind. But I did feel somewhat awkward about not leaving a tip.
