LAS VEGAS—Donald Trump’s promise during last year’s campaign to not tax tipped wages if he won the White House produced a notable shift to his column among workers who depend on tips—if they voted at all—says Saru Jayaraman, leader of the One Fair Wage Campaign and founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center,
And given there are 14 million restaurant workers alone, the vast majority of whom depend on tips for their income, many more of those workers—the lowest-paid of all worker groups—defected to Trump, she said.
“They either didn’t vote or they voted for Donald Trump.”
And a campaign to further raise the tipped wage, to a living wage, would produce a swing back to progressives, and a swing back to democracy, Jayaraman declared. Because right now, she said, those workers question what democracy does for them.
Jayaraman’s statement added yet another reason why Trump gained notably among workers of color during last year’s campaign against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. He blared his support for no taxes on tips in a campaign visit to Las Vegas, in swing state Nevada, and before an audience of tipped-wage workers, most of them workers of color.
Many of them were members of 60,000-person Unite HERE Local 226, the largest local in Nevada, and a political powerhouse there, with influence elsewhere too, given its mobilization to other swing states, notably Arizona.
Jayaraman did not estimate how many of the lowest-wage tipped workers shifted to Trump and how many stayed home during her hour-long discussion and Q&A on August 3 with members of the Progressive Democrats of America.
Looking for change agent
But she said “restaurant workers were looking for a change agent” in last year’s election, and when Trump came out first with his no-taxes-on-tips promise, they embraced it. Days later, Harris followed.
Jayaraman traced the history of tipping, which began in Europe, but was adopted in the U.S. as a relic of slavery, to allow the white ruling class to avoid paying workers of color decent living wages. Tipping—and a lower “tipped minimum wage”—was embedded in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, the law that mandated a minimum wage and overtime pay.
Then, Jayaraman noted, the federal tipped minimum wage was zero. Now it’s $2.13 an hour, a figure that hasn’t increased in at least 30 years. In the law, as amended, bosses are supposed to make up the difference between the tipped minimum and the federal minimum of $7.25.
In practice, many greedy bosses let the workers pocket the tips and don’t fill the gap, a form of wage theft that costs millions of workers billions of dollars in illegally lost wages every year.
“Forty-three states follow this legacy of slavery,” Jayaraman said. “They have tipped minimum wages of $6 an hour or less.”
While seven states and D.C. raised their own tipped minimums to $15 or more, fierce lobbying for decades by the National Restaurant Association, which Jayaraman and her campaign call “the other NRA,” has prevented an overall hike in the minimum wage, tipped or regular.
The regular federal minimum wage hasn’t risen since 2009. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., tried to raise the regular minimum wage in 2021 during debate on a “reconciliation” bill at a time when Democrats controlled the Senate and the House. Eight Democratic senators defected, and his amendment, for $15 an hour, lost. Jayaraman cited that without naming Sanders or the defectors.
And while voters in eight states and D.C. have raised their own tipped minimums far higher than the federal minimum wage, some lawmakers—of both parties—kowtow to the restaurant lobby and revoke the results.
The latest revocation, she noted, came in D.C., where pro-corporate Mayor Muriel Bowser convinced the City Council, by majority vote, to overturn a referendum result making the capital’s tipped minimum equal to D.C.’s overall minimum of $17.95/hour. The council rolled it back by 25%, Jayaraman said.
Other rollbacks, with Democratic acquiescence, occurred in Colorado, Washington state, and Michigan, she said. On party-line votes, Missouri’s right-wing Republican majority enacted a rollback.
As a result of the combination of low tipped wages, high sexual harassment on the job—which also goes unpunished—and exclusion groups of workers of color from the 1938 law, the tipped minimum wage workers are legitimately asking why they should vote, Jayaraman noted.
So when canvassers came around talking to them in the last campaign about both the economy and Donald Trump’s threat to democracy, “Their response is ‘What has democracy done for me?’”
Has to work three jobs
They told her, “It’s given me a $2 wage and I have to work three jobs to feed my kids.”
Even worse, she added, nobody lifted a finger when two-thirds of the restaurant workers who depend on tipped wages lost their jobs in the mass eatery and bar closures forced by the coronavirus pandemic. “And their wages were too low to get unemployment benefits” until the Democratic-run Congress stepped in with supplemental jobless checks. Trump reluctantly signed that law.
Some “1.2 million walked off the job and said ‘We’re done with this industry.’” But others were forced to return to work, often without adequate personal protective equipment in the close surroundings of a restaurant kitchen. The virus spread “because they couldn’t stay home.
“Twelve thousand died.”
Some restaurants realized they had to raise the pay of their lowest-paid workers, and did so, usually with temporary bonuses for varying lengths of time during the pandemic emergency.
The restaurant lobby claims raising the minimum wage for tipped workers would put thousands of eateries out of business because they can’t afford to pay their workers more than the difference between the $2.13 tipped minimum and the local minimum wage.
“But the CFO (chief financial officer) of Denny’s was caught red-handed on a stakeholder call” on that claim, Jayaraman explained. He was asked the difference between restaurants other states and those in California. It then had a $16 minimum wage, and it’s one of the states where “tipped” workers must be paid the regular minimum.
His reply was the restaurants in California “outperform the rest of the system. Why? Because the workers can bring their families in to eat, too.”
“For all my railing and ranting,” Jayaraman urged the Progressive Democrats—and everyone else—to get behind a massive campaign to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $25 an hour. She noted that wherever a minimum wage hike was put on the ballot, in red states, blue states, purple states and blue cities in red states, it passed overwhelmingly.
“Our fight is to end all subminimum wages in the U.S.,” Jayaraman declared, seeking the progressives’ help in their campaign. “There’s one minimum wage for the disabled. There’s a youth subminimum wage. There’s the tipped subminimum. “And even jailed workers who get pennies on the dollar,” when they’re sent out from prison to work.
That’s thanks to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, Jayaraman admitted. It bans slavery everywhere in the U.S. “except as a punishment for crime…where the offender shall have been duly convicted.”
“We will have the power” to overcome resistance, if there is any, from Trump’s MAGA legions, Jayaraman said. “The Fight for 15 has inspired people across the political spectrum. We can show them that democracy can deliver for them.”
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