Restaurant Opportunities Center of The Bay

Founded initially after September 11th, 2001, the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) has grown into a national organization with more than 30,000 low-wage restaurant worker members in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Chicago, Michigan, New Orleans, Pennsylvania, Seattle, and Washington, DC. In California, we are organizing restaurant workers, employers, and consumers to win ‘One Fair Wage’ (OFW) legislation that will protect workers’ gratuities, increase equity, and ultimately increase worker power and voice in the workplace and statewide. We are also opening COLORS Oakland, a restaurant that will serve as a home base for our workforce-development training, re-entry programs, and organizing campaigns.

ABOUT ROC THE BAY

The Restaurant Opportunities Center of the Bay Area (ROC-The Bay) is an affiliate worker center of ROC-United that was founded in 2013 in Oakland, California. We have over 300 worker members and dozens of restaurant employers throughout the Bay Area. We operate a hospitality job training program with an advanced curriculum that trains over 100 workers annually. Our mission is to promote and ensure a just and dignified workplace in restaurants throughout the Bay Area and to build a strong and unified community of restaurant workers.

ROC-The Bay is currently: (1) organizing low-wage restaurant workers, including immigrants and workers of color, and restaurant owners in policy campaigns; (2) operating an advanced and community based hospitality job training program. We are also piloting a racial equity project that seeks to desegregate the local restaurant industry by providing worker and management training, employer and consumer de-biasing strategies. In addition, we are opening COLORS Oakland in 2020, a regional training center anchored in a fine dining restaurant that will train hundreds of Bay Area residents and will place them in higher paying jobs in the industry.