CHECK YOUR BILL

The industry lobby supporting No Tax on Tips wants server wages kept low.

- EYAL PRESS

Progressives often call the National Restaurant Association "the other N.R.A."

Hearings before the Commerce Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives normally draw a modest crowd of lobbyists in suits. On March 19, 2024, a throng of people in more casual attire appeared. They wore matching green T-shirts adorned with the message “Save Our Tips.” The slogan caught the eye of Analise Ortiz, a Democrat on the committee. She assumed that the visitors were bartenders and waitstaff who had come to voice opposition to a bill that could lower their salaries.

The bill was called the Tipped Workers Protection Act, a name that disguised its true purpose. The legislation, if approved, would place an initiative on that November's ballot to amend the Arizona constitution so that employers could pay tipped workers twenty-five per cent less than the state minimum wage, then $14.35 an hour. In Arizona, the minimum wage for such workers was already $11.35 an hour. The formula being proposed would allow employers to pay tipped workers just $10.76 an hour—a pay cut that would reduce a full-time server's annual salary by twelve hundred dollars.

Ortiz, who had worked at a restaurant to help pay for college, knew from experience that servers were vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment. She'd noticed that the chief supporter of the Tipped Workers Protection Act was the Arizona Restaurant Association, an industry lobby that represents the interests of owners. It had persuaded Republicans to introduce the measure as a way of blocking another ballot initiative, the One Fair Wage Act, which called for raising Arizona's minimum wage to eighteen dollars an hour and insuring that by 2028 tipped workers would be paid that amount (without relinquishing their gratuities).