City Accidentally Gives Tipped Workers a Raise, Immediately Regrets It
In DepthRecently, Portland, Maine* decided they wanted to get in on some of that sweet, sweet minimum wage raising action everyone has been in on lately. When they found out they had unintentionally raised wages for tipped workers as part of the process, though, they were immediately aghast, because fuck tipped workers, they’re not people, I guess.
Via Josh Eidelson at Bloomberg, the Portland city council voted earlier this month to raise the minimum wage by $2.60, to $10.10. Sounds good, right? I mean, not good enough relative to other countries which treat low-wage earners like human beings with a right to live with dignity, but still, it’s something. A day after they passed the ordinance, though, they realize they done made an oopsie by raising tipped workers’ hourly wages from $3.75 to $6.35.
The sad thing is that with a base rate of $3.75/hour, Maine was already on the more progressive side of the tipped wage scale, which can go as low as $2.13/hour because the National Restaurant Association’s lobbyists made damn sure it was never tied to inflation. Technically, restaurants are supposed to make up the difference between the minimum wage and the actual earned wage if servers wind up making less than the minimum in tips. Thanks to non-existent oversight or regulation of industry practices, restaurants all too frequently avoid actually fulfilling this obligation—and even when they do, the vast majority find ways to exploit it in order to wrench more or less free labor out of their employees.