NYC Restaurant Industry Hiring is Discriminatory, Study Shows

There was a big "summit" meeting this morning at Tom Colicchio's Craftsteak restaurant to discuss the release of an interesting, albeit unsurprising, study highlighting the racist hiring practices at NYC restaurants. Commissioned by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, the study enlisted 37 people to pose as white, black, Asian-American and Latino job applicants and visit restaurants looking for work. Grouped in pairs with different races (but matched for age, appearance and gender), they would arrive at restaurants within about a half hour of each other to apply for a job.

The fake job-seekers were sent to 181 NYC restaurants between January 2006 and June 2007, and the study found discrimination at play 31% of the time. White job applicants got a greater number of followup interviews, more job offers, and their work histories were less likely to be thoroughly investigated. Marc Bendick Jr., the economist who conducted the study, told reporters today, "The rate of discrimination is worse for jobs that are really worth having. You don’t get a lot of discrimination for hamburger-flipping jobs at McDonalds... These are the jobs that you can make $55,000 to $100,000 a year."

But there's even discrimination at work amongst the white applicants; the ones with mild European accents were much more likely to be hired than whites with boring domestic dialects. When will the restaurant industry stop discriminating against white Americans?! Rekha Eanni-Rodriguez, director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, tells City Room, "It’s not just a matter of a few bad apples. We do believe it’s an industry-wide trend." Her group wants legislation requiring restaurants to adhere to uniform promotion policies and make job information for highly-paid positions more publicly available.