Trade Center Restaurant's Workers Back in Business -- This Time as Owners

The center grew into the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, which they called ROC-NY, becoming an advocacy group for restaurant workers with Jayaraman as executive director. ROC-NY has protested outside of some of New York's ritziest restaurants to force them to pay back wages to kitchen workers.

ROC's one-room office is adorned with posters of Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara, and it once listed a $25 bullhorn as its sole taxable asset. But ROC members also had a dream of their own: They wanted to open a high-end, worker-owned restaurant.

"We know from the beginning it's not going to be easy," said Fekkak, a Moroccan immigrant well versed in the Darwinian nature of the restaurant business. "We're a group of immigrants that have no money, no power."

The workers applied in 2004 for help from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, the powerful city-state organization that oversees the rebuilding of downtown. The corporation has given $40 million to persuade the Bank of New York to remain downtown and $3 million to underwrite actor Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival. But corporation officials only last year set aside money for community groups such as ROC-NY, and to date those funds have not been awarded.

Without funding, the workers abandoned leases for two desirable sites near Ground Zero. "When we talk about September 11th, we talk about us," said Siby, who later became a paid organizer with ROC-NY. "We wanted to . . . get back jobs in the same community."

It took the help of a foreign company to kick-start their project. Good Italian Foods, a Bologna, Italy-based workers cooperative, agreed to invest $500,000 in Colors. The Nonprofit Finance Fund helped find $1.2 million in loans, and ROC kicked in the rest with grants that it had secured from foundations.

Jayaraman and a majority of workers voted to require that every member of their collective "buy" their share of the restaurant by investing 100 hours of sweat equity, to be earned by volunteering with a catering service or attending labor protests.

"It's not really a tough thing to do. You're not going to be carrying bricks on your back," said Magdi Labib, 51, a former Windows on the World captain who says he took a cut in pay from another restaurant where he worked as a waiter to join the fledgling Colors. "Everybody is doing whatever it takes."

But those demands, and the collective's insistence on deferring profits to create future restaurants, rankled other members who joined a growing dissident group. Nearly half of the approximately 30-member group walked away saying they could not afford to keep waiting for a dream.

The split also exposed class and language fissures. The core of ROC's remaining members were U.S. citizens or green-card holders who spoke English and were well educated. Most of the dissidents spoke little English, lacked legal immigration documents and labored in the lower rungs of the restaurant business.

Sparking Protests

Last year, Jayaraman warned that Spanish-language translation of ROC meetings would come to an end. Everyone needed to learn to speak English. Some members argued that that contradicted the group's egalitarian spirit and left in protest.

Next came the board's decision that every worker-owner needed a green card.