This November, Vote NO on Question 5 to Support Servers and Bartenders
Patrons, friends and neighbors: This November, it's crucial to make your voice heard on Question 5.
If Question 5 passes, it could have serious negative consequences for the restaurant industry as we know it in Massachusetts. Our team is choosing to vote NO on Question 5 to support servers and bartenders who wish to maintain the current system and protect tips.
Read on to learn more.
90% of tipped employees believe if tipped wages are eliminated, employees will earn less. This is actually true, despite what the opposition communicates. Servers is Massachusetts often earn above minimum wage. 85% of tipped workers in Massachusetts indicated in a recent survey they earn more than $20 per hour on average. More than half of tipped workers polled actualy earn more than $30 per hour on average. With the implementation of tip pooling, restaurant workers and bartenders could see their hourly earnings decrease. Every worker in Massachusetts (including tipped employees) is already guaranteed to earn at least the current minimum wage of $15 under the current laws. This protects servers from seasonal slowness. If, after wages and tips, an employee does not earn $15 per hour, the employer must pay the difference.
Section 6 of the ballot question explicitly states that “the employer may require that wait staff employees, service employees or service bartenders participate in a tip pool through which such employee remits any wage, tip or service charge, or any portion thereof, for distribution to employees that are not wait staff employees, service employees or service bartenders”.
It’s unfair for a service worker’s tips to be pooled and shared with other service workers who may not work as hard or be as good at their job. Tips are to reward great service, and this initiative will take away that incentive.
Where measures like what is describes in Question 5 have been put in place, restaurants and the hospitality industry in those areas have suffered heartbreaking losses.
According to an industry analysis performed by Toast, California consistently has the lowest tip average among all 50 states. Additionally, economists from Harvard Business School and Mathematica Policy Research, using data from Yelp, identified a 14 percent increase in Bay Area restaurant closures associated with each one dollar increase in the base wage for tipped employees.
In Washington D.C., 2900 jobs were lost within the first 9 months of the new initiative bing implemented. Washington D.C. lost 9.5% of their fullservice staff.
Small, family-owned restaurants that are the heart and soul of our communities will struggle to bear the higher costs of increased expenses, leading to the heartbreaking possibility of having to lay off beloved staff members or even shut their doors.
Where restaurants have attempted to add service fees onto bills or increase the prices of dishes, patrons fail to recognize the tradeoff between paying a service fee and tipping, rather they perceive increased costs.
As more and more people working within the industry and those who frequent restaurants are educated on the issues at hand, the facts bring to light what negative impacts these new propositions could have on the Massachusetts restaurant industry.
Learn more at protecttips.org