Around New England

Same Minimum Wage for Waitresses As Everybody Else? Two Lawmakers Say It’s Only Fair, Critics Say It’s Sayonara-Waitresses

January 29, 2019

Two Massachusetts state legislators have filed a bill that would require restaurant owners to pay waiters and waitresses the same minimum wage other hourly employees in the state get.

Waiters and waitresses typically make most of their money in tips from customers, and state law acknowledges that by setting a much lower minimum wage for them — $4.35 an hour in 2019, as opposed to $12 an hour for other hourly employees.

Under the so-called Grand Bargain passed by the state Legislature and signed into law by Governor Charlie Baker in June 2018, both minimum wage levels are set to increase each year until 2023, when the tipped-workers minimum wage will be $6.75 an hour and the regular minimum wage will be $15 an hour.

But state Senator Patricia Jehlen (D-Somerville) and state Representative Tricia Farley-Bouvier (D-Pittsfield) want to eliminate the distinction.

“There isn’t any other small business that gets to pay their workers less than minimum wage,” Farley-Bouvier said, according to State House News Service. “It’s a perversion of what paying people is that we got to this point. The culture isn’t going to change by itself. It’s going to change with good policy, and this is good, solid policy.”

Critics say the result of increasing the minimum wage for tipped workers is fewer restaurants and therefore fewer jobs.

A 2014 study touted by the National Restaurant Association, a trade industry that represents restaurant owners, projected that increasing the minimum wage to $13 an hour in Chicago would cost 11,600 jobs. (That city has been increasing the minimum wage anyway; it’s current $12 an hour and slated to go to $13 an hour on July 1, 2019.)

Earlier this month the chief executive officer of the company that owns Durgin-Park at Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston cited the 2019 increase in the state’s minimum wage as one of several factors that led him to close the restaurant, which first opened in 1827.

In 2018 the tipped-workers minimum wage in Massachusetts was $3.75 an hour and the regular minimum wage was $11 an hour. The 2019 hourly increase for tipped workers (from $3.75 to $4.35) is 16 percent, while the 2019 hourly increase for regular hourly employees (from $11 to $12) is 9.1 percent.

Durgin-Park, after operating for more than 191 years, closed permanently Saturday, January 12.