Saru Jayaraman is a nationally recognized advocate for immigrant workers, who is regularly featured in The New York Times, on television and the radio. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. With restaurant workers from the World Trade Center's Windows on the World, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY)-- a workers' center focused on organizing immigrant restaurant workers in New York City. Along with many of the displaced World Trade Center workers and families of restaurant worker victims of 9/11, she launched a cooperatively-owned restaurant. ROC-NY is expanding to a national organization, based in major metropolitan areas. Jayaraman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Labor Law at Brooklyn College, and she lectures widely. She recently co-edited The New Urban Immigrant Workforce, (ME Sharpe, 2005). Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, a little nonprofit that just pulled off a David-versus-Goliath feat. The center extracted $164,000 from two fashionable Manhattan restaurants - Cite and the Park Avenue Cafe - to sett>She is the executive dile lawsuits that involved charges of discrimination and failure to pay overtime to 23 restaurant employees, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico and Bangladesh. Jayaraman has an interesting background: The daughter of immigrants from southern India, a graduate of Yale Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she was singled out and honored as one of America’s finest young people in 1995 by President Bill Clinton… Ms. Jayaraman, whose father is an unemployed software developer and whose mother is a school aide, grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles… She teaches… immigrant rights at New York University… She is a soprano who used to sing with a gospel choir at Harvard. |
 |
Getting down to business: Expanding Dine College’s role in Navajo economic development (Project report series / Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development)  |