The tipped wage is good for waitstaff

Gov. Cuomo recently proposed eliminating New York’s separate minimum wage for restaurant workers who receive tips, calling it “a question of basic fairness.”

It’s a topic I’m more familiar with than most. Last year, I helped lead the opposition from thousands of restaurant servers to a similar proposal in Maine. We successfully convinced Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature that this foolish idea would put our tip income and our jobs at risk.

Now, servers in New York who want to preserve their livelihoods need to make their voices heard.

New York and most other states permit employers to pay a lower base wage to servers and bartenders who receive substantial tip income from customers.

In New York City, the minimum is $8.65 for tipped restaurant workers at businesses with 11 or more employees; the full minimum in New York City, for nontipped wages, is either $12 or $13 an hour.

If the full minimum wage is not met when tip income is included, the employer is legally required to make up the difference.

With the current model, many servers make an excellent living. Data from the New York City Hospitality Alliance show that servers in the five boroughs average $25 an hour with tips. These kinds of tip numbers aren’t limited to major cities; in Portland, Maine, I average $28 an hour with tips.

Why would anyone be opposed to this arrangement? As I learned last year, there are a handful of national labor organizations — chief among them a group called the Restaurant Opportunities Center — that harbor an ideological opposition to tipping. Center founder Saru Jayaraman has been vocal on her goals: To eliminate America’s “system of tipping,” and to organize the nonunion restaurant workforce.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Jayaraman came to Augusta, Maine, last year to speak at what became the longest legislative hearing in state history. She made outrageous and unsupported statements to the legislators that tipping was racist and sexist.

Meanwhile, hundreds of servers submitted testimony — representing thousands of servers in the state who organized under our banner “Restaurant Workers of Maine” — to say that eliminating the tipped wage would harm them, their employers and their families.

This is personal, because serving isn’t a side gig for me; it’s my profession. My husband and I live in Portland, and the tip income I earn in the restaurant industry helps provide a middle-class lifestyle for us.

The job also provides flexibility that’s unusual in the working world. For instance, when my grandmother was battling cancer in the winter of 2014, I was able to take her to radiation treatments without losing shifts at work.

In the few states that have destroyed the traditional tipping system, many servers are worse off. In an industry where profit margins are razor thin, changes in tipping laws have often resulted in employees earning less money and in restaurants shutting down. (If you have any doubt, Google “Bay Area restaurant closures” and read about what happens when the traditional tipping system is destroyed.)

Some employers have adapted to laws requiring higher hourly pay for servers by embracing a “no tipping” service model. That has proved to be wildly unpopular with servers. New York restaurateur Danny Meyer experimented with the idea and is learning this lesson the hard way. A report last year in New York magazine found “people have left the company in droves, staff morale has dropped considerably, and the company has been forced to slow down its rollout plan to deal with the fallout.”

If servers in New York want to save their jobs and tip income, there must be a strong grass-roots movement from the bottom up. After our victory in Maine, I joined with servers from around the country who want to save tip culture in their own locales.

We formed an organization called Restaurant Workers of America. I would strongly urge any servers or bartenders who want to save their jobs to join us.

Servers are the underdog in this fight in New York. Powerful political and union interests are aligned against you — just as they were aligned against us in Maine. The only way to get your message out is to organize, and do it soon.

Chaisson has worked in the restaurant industry for 17 years.