Employment discrimination in upscale restaurants: Evidence from matched pair testing

Abstract

White and racial minorities with equal qualifications applied simultaneously for 43 waiter/waitress jobs in New York City fine dining restaurants. Applicants of all demographic backgrounds were treated with equal courtesy, but minorities were only 54% as likely as whites to receive a job offer. This discrimination, either conscious or unconscious, was documented in 31% of restaurants tested. Post-hiring differences appear even more widespread, with front of the house minority restaurant servers averaging 12% lower earnings than their equally qualified white peers. Ensuring equal treatment in hiring would expand minority access to good jobs in Manhattan fine dining by 3500 positions but not make it universal.

Keywords:

• Employment
• Discrimination
• Race
• Immigrants
• Testing
• Restaurant industry

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Ford Foundation and insightful comments by an anonymous Social Science Journal referee.

Notes

1 Tel.: [phone]; fax: [phone].

2 Tel.: [phone]x1754/212 243 6900; fax: [phone] 243 6800.

3 Throughout this paper, “white” is shorthand for the 2000 Census category of white non-Hispanics, and “persons of color” refer to the Census categories of African Americans/Blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, Asians, American Indians, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and mixed races.

4 A restaurant's “front of the house” is the dining area, where waiters/waitresses, host/hostesses, bartenders, cocktail servers, table bussers, food runners, and their supervisors work. “Back of the house” (kitchen) employment is not examined in this study, but it is in ROC-NY (2005).

5 Our sampling frame consisted of establishments in any of 25 well-known “mini-empires” of high-reputation restaurants; in Restaurants and Institutions’ top 100 restaurants by sales or 75 top multi-concept operators; in Zagat (2006)’s “Most Popular” or “Top 50” for service, décor, or food; in Zagat (2006) and participating in New York Restaurant Week 2006; or in Platt (2005) or Platt (2006).

6 In auditing the earnings of restaurant employees, the Internal Revenue Service assumes that tips total 8% of restaurant revenues (IRS, 1990). Thus, if restaurants employ similar numbers of employees per customer, higher-priced meals translate directly into greater tip income for servers.

7 In 2000 Census data, among persons of color employed as waitstaff in Manhattan restaurants, 5.4% earned at least $40,000, while among their white peers, the corresponding proportion was 7.7%. Dividing 5.4 × 7.7 yields a rate of achieving this favorable employment outcome 70.0% as high for persons of color as for whites. By being roughly consistent with 54.5%, 70.0% confirms the reasonableness of the testing-based estimate. The difference between 70.0% and 54.5% suggests lower turnover among workers of color who succeed on obtaining such well-paid positions than among their white co-workers.

8 Bendick and Nunes (in press) describes matched pair testing studies designed to tests these alternative hypotheses.

9 However, non-testing evidence reminds us that blatant racism still occurs in some restaurants; see, for example, Adamson (2000), Feagin and Sykes (1994), and Watkins (1997).

10 Because our study never paired male and female testers, it does not directly address gender discrimination. However, the Census data in Section 3, as well as other studies cited throughout this paper, suggest that this form of discrimination is also prevalent in upscale restaurants.