Like a diner who sends back a bad meal, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s City Council floor leader on Friday turned up his nose at the Illinois Restaurant Association’s latest attempt to stop the elimination of the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) said the restaurant industry’s latest proposal to raise the minimum wage for tipped workers to $20.54 an hour at Chicago restaurants with more than $3 million in annual revenues is “dead on arrival.”
“It’s super complicated. Hawaii implemented something similar within the past year, and it has been such a disaster for both restaurants and workers that the [Johnson] administration is not interested in touching this with a 10-foot pole,” Ramirez-Rosa said. “It’s just not a viable alternative.
“It just caused confusion for both restaurant workers and operators. It’s led to so many complaints of wage theft where people are saying, ‘I should be making this amount,’ and the restaurant says, ‘No. You made this amount in tips.’
“It’s been such a nightmare, particularly around enforcement, that a Republican has now introduced ‘One Fair Wage’ in Hawaii because they said, ‘To hell with all this. We just need one fair wage.’”
Illinois Restaurant Association President Sam Toia acknowledged the 11th-hour proposal introduced on the industry’s behalf by Ald. Bennett Lawson (44th) was the legislative version of a Hail Mary pass. In fact, it was referred to the City Council’s Rules Committee, the traditional burial ground for legislation opposed by the mayor.
But Toia said he’s simply trying to “save jobs” that would almost certainly be eliminated at restaurants — particularly the family-owned establishments that are the heart and soul of Chicago neighborhoods — because they are given just two years to choke down a 66% increase in labor costs.
“There’s only two things you can do in the restaurant industry. You control labor costs. You control product costs. Over the last two years, product costs have gone up double digits because of inflation. So, if you have five wait people, you’re gonna go to maybe four wait people. If you have two busboys, you’re gonna go to one busboy. Some people will go to automation, where people will order off their iPhones or iPads and have food runners,” Toia said.
“I’m just trying to save jobs. I’m trying to put something on the table because I’d rather be at the table than on the menu. … You keep the tipped credit in place,” he said. “But you guarantee 130% of the minimum wage, and you triple the fines against bad actors.”
That’s a reference to restaurants that thumb their noses at the mandate to make up the difference whenever tipped workers, now paid $9.48 an hour, don’t make enough in tips to reach the $15.80-an-hour mandatory minimum wage that applies to all other Chicago workers.
Toia acknowledged he’s trying desperately to stop a legislative train that’s about to leave the station.
At Thursday’s City Council meeting, the ordinance that gives Chicago restaurants two years to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers was referred again to the Committee on Workforce Development.
“We have the votes to pass the ordinance as is. If changes are gonna be made, they need to happen soon, because the committee meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, and aldermanic briefings are scheduled for Tuesday,” Ramirez-Rosa said.
“It’s one thing to introduce an ordinance that’s a completely different structure to provide restaurant workers with higher wages. It’s another thing to say, ‘We want more years.’ If anyone is interested in five years, that’s the ask they should be making at this moment — not pushing this ordinance that is not gonna get anywhere,” he said.
Told that time was running out, Toia sent a text message that read, “I will definitely be communicating with folks over the next 24 hours! ... We definitely need a five-year phase-in.”
Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th) is negotiating with the restaurant industry on behalf of Johnson, who campaigned on a promise to eliminate the tipped wage, which has disproportionately affected African Americans in general and black women in particular.
Fuentes has said three years was as long a runway as she was willing to give.
“Speaking to electeds in other cities and restaurants who have been able scale up to the minimum wage in cities in which the gap was much larger allows us to believe that we can do this scale-up in two [years]. Negotiating toward three would be us meeting in the middle,” Fuentes has said.
