Saru Jayaraman

Saru Jayaraman is Co-founder and President of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley. After “9/11,” in collaboration with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded ROC, which now has more than 30,000 worker members, 500 employer partners and 23,000 consumer members in a dozen states nationwide.

Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She was listed among CNN’s Top 10 Visionary Women, and she has been recognized as a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2014. She further was a recipient of the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015. In January 2018, she attended the Golden Globe Awards as the guest of actress Amy Poehler, and used that platform to bring widespread attention to the issue of sexual harassment in the restaurant industry. Saru was one of eight women activists who attended representing the #TimesUp initiative.

Saru is the author of Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), a national bestseller, and Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has appeared as an interview guest on CNN with Soledad O’Brien, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Melissa Harris Perry, UP with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the Today show, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.