It’s an irritating and sometimes insufferable feature of many jobs in many different industries. Either before you begin, or periodically throughout your term of employment, you and your coworkers are forced to sit in a meeting room and endure a chirpy video or presentation at the behest of management. Often justified on perfectly commonsensical grounds — for safety purposes, job training, etc. — anyone who has been subjected to a mandatory workplace seminar knows that the reality can be more sinister: in practice concerned with enforcing discipline, administering company propaganda, or just plain wasting everybody’s time for no good reason. Now, imagine a version of this experience that you were not only required to attend but also to pay for, and further imagine that the tithe extracted by your boss was put to use down the chain to keep your wages low and your benefits as minimal as possible.

According to recent reporting by David Fahrenthold and Talmon Joseph Smith at the New York Times, that’s exactly the reality for millions of America’s chronically underpaid and exploited restaurant workers, even if most probably don’t realize it. That’s thanks to the innocuously named “ServSafe” program — an online class in food safety several states have made mandatory for anyone who wants to work as a cook, busser, waiter, or bartender. Offered nationwide, though most likely to be mandatory in Texas, California, Illinois, and Florida, ServSafe’s course reportedly charges workers fifteen dollars so that it can bequeath lessons like “bathe daily” and “strawberries aren’t supposed to be white and fuzzy, that’s mold.”

Since 2010, according to Fahrenthold and Smith, ServSafe has generated some $25 million in revenue. That’s significant not only because it’s a staggering sum of money, but because ServSafe is actually an arm of the National Restaurant Association (NRA): a lobbying association that has been a major player in corporate efforts to block increases in state and federal minimum wages. According to campaign finance database OpenSecrets, the NRA and its members donate copiously to both parties by way of PACs and individual contributions and spends millions on lobbying every year.