It’s déjà vu all over again. Less than four years after Gov. Andrew Cuomo convened a wage board to study tipped-employee pay, the Labor Department will hold a series of hearings to decide whether New York should follow seven other states and eliminate the tipping system entirely. The first hearing, on Friday at SUNY-Farmingdale, will pit service-industry staff who value their tip income against labor advocates who prefer […]

North Dakota's secretary of state recently approved for signature collection a ballot initiative that would raise the state's minimum wage to $15 by 2021. To get a sense of how radical that is, that's a 107 percent increase over the state's current minimum wage--at a phase--in that would happen even faster than scheduled increases in California or New York. Before voters rush to endorse this […]

In his inaugural address, Gov. Phil Murphy told his colleagues in the legislature, “Send me the bills … to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour,” promising a stronger, fairer economy as a result. On January 25, Senator Troy Singleton gave Murphy what he wanted in S1142, the first step to reaching a $15 minimum wage. Unfortunately, raising New Jersey’s minimum wage will likely […]

Does the option to leave a gratuity for a waiter or waitress encourage customers to sexually harass these employees? That's the message currently being promoted by the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), and echoed in dozens of recent news articles. It's a popular talking point. But it's not worth the paper it's written on. ROC is a controversial labor advocacy organization with its own history of alleged bad behavior; it was […]

Should Florida’s cities join the Fight for $15? Florida’s legal statutes--not to mention its courts—prohibit localities from setting a wage floor above the state requirement of $8.25 per hour. But the labor groups behind the Fight for $15 are nothing if not determined, and this month renewed their argument for local wage ordinances in Florida with an unusual poll asking voters for their legal interpretation of this issue. Setting aside the […]

A proposal from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to eliminate New York’s tip credit has worried restaurateurs, who are already reeling from recent wage hikes. Cuomo counsel Alphonso David recently dismissed these concerns by pointing west. “California, as an example, does not have a tipped wage, and the sky didn’t fall,” he said at a Crain’s forum. David might want to take a closer look at the data. For many […]