DC Restaurant Workers Fight for a Minimum Wage
For years the District of Columbia, like states across the U.S., allowed servers, bartenders, and other tipped employees to be paid less than minimum wage, with the logic that tips would supplement their paychecks to above minimum standards. That two-tier salary scale has existed in the U.S. since the sixties. The last time the tipped employee minimum wage was raised was in 1996, when it was set to $2.13 an hour. Proponents of the tipped minimum wage (who tend to be restaurant owners that benefit from not paying employees a full salary) claim that tipping culture allows servers to make more money than they would on a fixed salary.
The data doesn’t back that up. Tipped employees are significantly likelier than non-tipped employees to be below the poverty line. They are more likely to depend on government benefits like SNAP (food stamps). (One strike against Trump’s “no taxes on tips” proposal: one third of tipped employees are so poor they don’t even make enough money to pay income taxes.) Tipping exacerbates preexisting inequality—studies have found that Black servers receive lower tips than their white counterparts. And besides, there’s no rule that says you can’t give someone money to thank them for their work unless they make less than $3 an hour.
In DC, tipped employees and voters won an equal minimum wage in 2023 with the passage of Initiative 82. Voters in DC decided by a 50-point margin to require restaurants to pay tipped employees hourly rates equal to non-tipped employees. But last week, the DC Council undermined voters’ will by watering down I-82. Restaurants will now only have to pay workers up to 75 percent of the minimum wage, in a process where the tipped minimum wage will gradually rise until 2034.
In the short run, this means workers will simply make less money. But unions and other activist organizations are already successfully fighting back. We wrote in a June News Briefing about the organizers who successfully got dozens of prominent congressional Democrats to boycott premier DC restaurants. Their work is still ongoing, and they have more high-profile personalities on their side. The American Prospect profiled Representative Greg Casar last week while he was at a rally with DC restaurant employees protesting a union-busting owner. He said, quite presciently, “we need more congressmen and -women who feel more comfortable marching into a fancy D.C. restaurant with a union than mingling inside of one with lobbyists.”
This story was adapted from the Current Affairs News Briefing. Subscribe today!
