Saru Jayaraman is the co-founder and President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. After 9/11, together with displaced World Trade Center workers, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), which grew into a national movement of restaurant workers, employers and consumers. She then launched One Fair Wage as a national campaign to end all subminimum wages in the United States. The story of Saru and her co-founder’s work founding ROC has been chronicled in the book The Accidental American, and the story of the One Fair Wage campaign has been profiled in the award winning documentary, Waging Change. Saru is a graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

She was profiled in The New York Times “Public Lives” section in 2005, named one of Crain’s “40 Under 40” in 2008, was 1010 Wins’ “Newsmaker of the Year” and New York Magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City. Saru was listed in CNN’s “Top10 Visionary Women” and recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House in 2014, a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2015, and the SF Chronicle ‘Visionary of the Year’ in 2019. She has appeared on CNN with Soledad O’Brien, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Melissa Harris Perry and UP with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the Today Show, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Saru is also the author of four books including her latest, One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America (The New Press, November 2021). Additional publications include Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press, 2013), Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning, (UC Press, 2020). She attended the Golden Globes in January 2018 with Amy Poehler as part of the Times Up action to address sexual harassment.

Mónica Ramírez is a long-time advocate, organizer, and attorney fighting to eliminate gender-based violence and secure gender equity. For over two decades, she has fought for the civil and human rights of women, children, and immigrants. In 2003, Mónica created the first legal project in the United States dedicated to addressing gender discrimination against farmworker women, which she later expanded to create Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2014, Mónica founded Justice for Migrant Women to provide technical assistance to lawyers, advocates, political leaders and law enforcement on addressing workplace sexual violence, as well as other issues confronting migrant women. She is also a co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas (The National Farmworker Women’s Alliance), which is the first national farmworker women’s organization in the US.

In November 2017, Mónica wrote a letter to women in the entertainment industry on behalf of Alianza that was published in TIME magazine and has been credited with helping to spark the TIME’S UP movement. In 2018, she attended the Golden Globes with Laura Dern as a part of the TIME’S UP action. Mónica is a leader in efforts to build a cross sector movement to end workplace sexual violence. She has also been recognized as a prominent voice in advancing the rights of low-paid workers, immigrants and women in the United States.

Mónica has received numerous awards and recognitions for her work, including Harvard Kennedy School’s inaugural Gender Equity Changemaker Award, the Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award, and Forbes Mexico included her on its 2018 list of 100 Powerful Women, among other recognitions. In November 2018, she was awarded the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for Social Progress on behalf of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas for the “Dear Sisters” letter and their role in the TIME’S UP movement.