D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says a controversial law regarding restaurant wages for tipped workers needs to be repealed.
The effort to repeal what was known as 2022’s Initiative 82 was unveiled Monday as part of her plan to transform the city’s federally dependent economy.
In the fall of 2022, voters approved the measure to end the tipped minimum wage and create one wage scale for workers regardless of their industry. The referendum passed by a 3-1 margin, though efforts to pass a similar measure in other neighboring jurisdictions haven’t been so successful.
Appearing at a venue on H Street Northeast, Bowser said it’s clearly hurting the city’s restaurants disproportionately.
“The economy that we’re dealing with right now and the environment for restaurants is vastly different than the economy and the environment that restaurants were operating in when this ballot measure was advanced,” Bowser said. “It would be negligent of us to act like we’re in the same place we were three years ago.”
‘We have to save this industry,’ Bowser says
Any changes to the law would require approval from the D.C. Council, which overturned the measure once before, in 2018. She thinks there’s a strong case for the council to do it again.
“They know the importance of restaurants to our economy and local hiring and keeping D.C. residents employed, they can see that we are out of line with the rest of the region, and we are losing investment of new restaurants, growing restaurants and employees to other parts of the region,” Bowser said.
She wouldn’t speculate whether voters would look at the referendum differently from 2022, but said city residents are supportive of policies that make sense.
“We have to save this industry, and there are things that are going to be out of our control with other increasing costs, but this one is in our control,” she said. “This is a local policy, and we have to make the strong case.”
Joining Bowser on stage at the Atlas Theater was Rock Harper, a chef who owns two restaurants on the H Street Northeast corridor.
“That means that we have a way to get to profitability,” he said, in regards to the proposal. “If you have a fast casual restaurant or a fine dining restaurant, you all have to operate the same way, and that just doesn’t work. We have the data, and we see that just doesn’t work.
“Raising the minimum wage for everybody really shrunk the scope of getting to profitability,” he said afterward.
In an emailed statement, the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington thanked Bowser for her support and said repealing the legislation is about “saving jobs, saving restaurants, and stabilizing a vital sector of the District’s economy.”
The group called on the D.C. Council to repeal the initiative, echoing its sentiments shared with District lawmakers from last month.
A leading advocate for repealing the measure, the Arlington-based Employment Policies Institute, hailed the move, saying it has “wreaked havoc” on the industry.
“Advocates promised the law would bring higher wages with no impact on tips,” Rebekah Paxton, a research director with the think tank, said in a statement. “But all D.C. tipped workers actually got were fewer tips, lost jobs, and closed restaurants.”
‘Stunning betrayal’
The group One Fair Wage, which pushed the referendum that overwhelmingly passed in 2022, also put out a blistering statement on the measure.
“This is a stunning betrayal of D.C. workers and democracy,” Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage, said in a statement. “Mayor Bowser is siding with industry lobbyists who have fought fair wages for decades, rather than respecting the twice-expressed will of voters who chose dignity, fairness, and economic justice.”
The group argues that tipping of workers remains strong, and that restaurant employment continues to increase.
“The data shows growth, not collapse,” she added. “Voters in the District voted in favor of One Fair Wage twice — we will thus be fighting for their votes to matter.”
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