KPFA presents The 18th Annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, featuring Labor Activist and UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center Director Saru Jayaraman, in a talk entitled “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Streets? Restaurant workers and the movement for economic justice.” This event was recorded Thursday, Oct. 2nd, in Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, California.

The speaker is: Saru Jayaraman is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United). After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded ROC which has organized over 13,000 restaurant workers to win workplace justice campaigns, conduct research and policy work, partner with responsible restaurants, and launch cooperatively-owned restaurants. A graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Saru has been profiled in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and was just named a 2014 “Progressive Champion” by the Campaign for America’s Future (along with Bill deBlasio and Lee Saunders, President of AFSCME.) She has been one of “40 Under 40” (Crain’s) a “Newsmaker of the Year (1010 WINS), and an “Influential.” ( New York Magazine) She co-edited *”The New Urban Immigrant Workforce”, (ME Sharpe, 2005) and authored “Behind the Kitchen Door” (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Video Production by Ed Ellsworth, Enlightened Films
(Apologies for audio quality, there was fan noise, and some tripod and mic noise from adjustments in this two-camera DSLR recording.)