Minimum wage push for tipped restaurant employees
State lawmakers, including Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal (above) served restaurant workers at a Jan. 23 event in Albany to highlight the need for One Fair Wage, legislation that would require restaurants to pay tipped workers the state’s full minimum wage. COURTESY OF ASSEMBLY MEMBER LINDA ROSENTHAL
Lawmakers reintroduce 'One Fair Wage' legislation
Jennyfer Almanzar, a 26-year-old bartender, makes about $45 a shift tending bar part-time in Harlem. Like most food and drink service workers, she relies on tips to make ends meet. Tips, though, have gone down since the pandemic, she said.
“It’s terrible. I’ve come out of a shift with $20 in tips,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Several state lawmakers want to put an end to subminimum wages for tipped restaurant employees. In New York City, Westchester and Long Island, where the minimum wage is $15 an hour, restaurants are allowed to pay their employees $10 an hour, with tips accounting for the rest of the workers’ wages. And in the rest of the state, food establishments must pay at least $9.45 an hour.
Last week, Assembly Members Jessica González-Rojas and Linda Rosenthal, State Senator Robert Jackson and other elected officials served food to restaurant workers in Albany to call attention to legislation that would require tipped service workers to be paid the full minimum wage.
“If we want to make New York more affordable for all we cannot leave any worker behind and that includes our restaurant workers. It’s time that we end the sub-minimum wage and lift our black, brown, immigrant, and women of color workers in this sector out of the poverty they’ve endured for years,” said González-Rojas, who sponsored the One Fair Wage legislation. The bill, first introduced two years ago, was reintroduced Jan. 23.
The proposed legislation would phase out the subminimum wages for restaurant workers over five years. It would also allow tips to be shared between employees in the front and the back of the house, which is currently illegal in New York. It also would provide forgivable loans to restaurants that immediately implement the higher wages.
The restaurant industry has been the sector hardest hit by Covid-related job losses. A report released earlier this month by the Center for New York City Affairs found that the city has recovered just 82 percent of the food service and hotel jobs on the books before the pandemic, a net loss of about 49,000 fewer jobs.
"New York has lost workers in the restaurant industry at twice the national average during the pandemic — and that is largely because tipped wages are no longer a sufficient incentive for working in this often grueling industry,” State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal said in a statement.
One Fair Wage, an advocacy group pushing for service workers to be paid full wages that hosted the Albany event, found that half of New York restaurant workers who were surveyed were considering leaving the industry, with 90 percent of them citing low wages as the primary reason.
Almanzar, who also works as a full-time organizer at One Fair Wage, said that turnover has been a problem at the bar where she has been working since July 2021.
“I’m one of two people who has been there for more than a year,” she said. “I think One Fair Wage is key to saving the restaurant industry after the pandemic. Workers need to know they’ll have guaranteed basic wages before they return to the industry.”
Ending subminimum wages would help address inequities faced by a workforce that is predominantly female, in which women of color in particular face growing wage gaps, according to One Fair Wage. In 2021, black female restaurant employees working at the front of the house earned $6.19 an hour less than white men in the industry, or $12,875 annually.
Bear brunt of harassment
Since tipped workers must depend on their customers for tips, they face the highest rate of harassment in any industry, One Fair Wage found.
“When we had to wear masks, I’ve had people tell me to take [the mask] down so they could see my face,” Almanzar said.
Assembly Member Anna Kelles, another proponent of the legislation, said the bill was personal to her because she worked in the restaurant industry for two years.
“I walked on the first day and I was wearing black pants and a white shirt, and literally within the first five minutes, walked up to get a cocktail at the bar and the bartender looked at me and he said ‘Oh honey, you’re not going to get any tips wearing pants.’ And I looked around and every single woman had a short, tight skirt that was halfway down to their thighs,” she said at the Albany event.
The bill would also help end wage theft: although restaurants are supposed to make up the difference if a tipped worker doesn’t reach $15 an hour after tips, some don’t, the advocates said. Almanzar noted that was the case at the bar where she worked, but she was afraid to bring up the issue because she feared getting fired.
“They’re getting away with a lot,” she said.
González-Rojas is hopeful lawmakers will take up the legislation this year, citing Governor Kathy Hochul’s announcement during her State of the State address earlier this month that she wants to tie the minimum wage to the rate of inflation.
“This is the year we need to get it done,” González-Rojas said after serving tables. “You do this work that is backbreaking and difficult; you deserve all the opportunities that our state and our country affords.”