A few people have been asking me for my thoughts on Ballot Question 5, including a Globe reporter who I spoke with this week. I'll post her piece when it goes live. Here’s what this bill proposes…
(this is taken from this article on WGBH posted on August 21, 2024)
“If approved, Question 5 would increase the base pay for Massachusetts workers who receive tips. Gradual increases would be implemented over a five-year span, with the final increase on Jan. 1, 2029, bringing tipped workers’ hourly wage to equal the minimum wage for untipped workers.
The question would not eliminate tips. Customers would still be allowed to pay gratuities for service.
If Question 5 passes, it would eventually allow — but not require — employers to set up a “tip pool” that combines customers’ tips and distribute them among all workers, including those in the “back of house” who otherwise would not receive tips. This option would be available to businesses who pay their tipped workers at least the state minimum wage.”
So this Ballot Question has two points… one is an ask to raise the server minimum wage over a period of years, the other is to allow businesses to take all gratuity coming into the restaurant, put it in a pool, and then distribute it to all workers including front of house (servers, bartenders etc) and back of house (chefs, prep cooks, dishwashers). I’ll address the first point first.
The restaurant industry is already working under such slim margins. The cost of ingredients is astronomical, rent in MA (particularly in the cities) is out of control, and payroll is typically the second highest expense for restaurants after food costs. The restaurant I am currently working with has only been truly profitable once in the 8 years it’s been in business. In order for us to stay competitive in the industry job market (where we’ve already lost so many workers to other fields) we need to have high wages for our BOH team. In order to offset the cost of that increase in payroll, we needed to raise our prices for food and drink.
The proponents of this bill indicate that consumers are all for increasing food and beverage costs if the bill passes, an easy thing to say when voting, but less easy to stomach when the bill shows up after your meal. We have seen consistent reviews about our food being “very pricey” or “not cheap, but worth it on special occasions.” If this bill goes through, our prices will need to increase even more to cover server payroll. This limits our ability to stay competitive with large restaurant groups, fast casual chains, and others in our market. Some restaurants will likely be forced to either lay off half their front of house staff or close their doors due to this increase as that is how precarious the margins are in this industry.
The proponents are also indicating that tipping 20% on top of the minimum wage would still be encouraged. But when you read the comment section on some of these articles/reddit posts/etc, it is clear that most consumers will take this as their opportunity to tip less or not at all, treating tips as more of a suggestion than a necessity. This will likely help tipped workers in places like diners and dive bars who only make a few extra dollars on tips, but it will greatly reduce the income of fine dining servers and bartenders who are making an average of $35-$50 an hour during busy times. Yes, gratuity is a flawed system, and yes we do need to figure out how to compensate workers in other ways rather than relying on the inconsistency of tips, but this bill will threaten the livelihood and jobs of thousands of service workers in our state. This isn't the way to solve it.
To the second point… There is a huge disparity between front and back of house when it comes to income. It is very common for chefs and prep cooks to be working 12-16 hour days. Most of the time when you walk into a restaurant at 7pm for dinner, the chef that is cooking your meal has already been there since noon and will be there until the restaurant closes. Servers come in an hour or two before service and during a 4 hour window will sometimes make an average of double or triple the hourly rate of the chefs and cooks. This is why so many restaurants have adopted the kitchen appreciation fee. This is usually a 3-5% fee that is tacked on to your bill. The fee goes directly to the back of house team so that during the busiest hours of service, kitchen staff are making a higher hourly rate. This incentivizes the BOH team to work harder and offsets the pay disparity between front and back of house. It also, apparently, incentivizes consumers to complain endlessly about it and sometimes refuse to pay it, claiming that we should be baking it into our food and beverage prices, and we all know how consumers really feel about raising prices despite what they might say when it comes to vote.
So what this bill is proposing is that we do away with kitchen appreciation fees and create a pool of gratuity that we share between front and back of house. However, if this bill goes through it will incentivize consumers (who already don’t want to tip for service) to tip less or not at all, thus making the pool smaller to begin with, and even smaller for servers. Restaurants will have to offset that loss in order to stay competitive in the market. Fine dining will suffer the most and all your favorite restaurants serving elevated farm-to-table cuisine will close in favor of huge investment funded restaurant groups and fast casual chains and we will be living in one giant Olive Garden Tuscan Kitchen Mediocre nightmare.
So this is why I am voting NO on Question 5.
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