How to Confront the Affordability Crisis: Use the Ballot to Raise Wages

The US restaurant industry is on the cusp of historic change. After years of organizing and building power to raise wages and end subminimum tip-based wages, restaurant and service workers and “high road” restaurant owners in many states still work in an industry that offers a minimum wage of $2.13 an hour—a direct legacy of slavery. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, over one million workers have left the industry, resulting in thousands of restaurants raising wages to recruit staff.

Restaurant workers’ demand for higher wages reflects a broader economy-wide affordability crisis. Recent election polls of youth, Black voters, and Latinx voters all show that “the rising cost of living” and “jobs with living wages” are top priorities.

Service workers in many states still work in an industry that offers a minimum wage of $2.13 an hour—a direct legacy of slavery.

To meet the historic moment, service workers are leading legislative and ballot measures in 12 states in 2024, including three states—Arizona, Massachusetts, and Ohio—where these wage increases will be directly on the ballot. Researchers at One Fair Wage, which I direct, have calculated that in five states alone (Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Ohio), 3.2 million workers would see their wages rise.¹ The campaigns will also mobilize hundreds of thousands of new workers to turn out to “vote themselves a raise.”

A Movement Emerges

With nearly 14 million workers, the restaurant industry has been one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the US economy—and one of the largest employers of youth, women, people of color, immigrants, and formerly incarcerated individuals, among other groups, for decades. Forty percent of these 14 million workers are under the age of 25.

Unfortunately, the restaurant industry has also been one of the lowest-paying sectors of the US economy for generations. The subminimum wage mentioned above is one cause of this. Data show that tipped restaurant workers of color earn an estimated $4.79 an hour less than their White counterparts due to segregation into lower-tipping establishments and implicit bias in tipping from customers.

Of course, a full minimum wage with tips on top would reduce workers’ dependence on tips and, therefore, reduce these racial inequities. The federal minimum wage level is absurdly inadequate, but a silver lining is that cities and states can set higher wages than the floor established by federal law.

For example, seven states—Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—have long banned paying restaurant workers less than the overall minimum wage. But since 1988, when voters in the state of Washington agreed to raise the minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers to the same rate as other state workers, no state has acted to bring the minimum wage level for them in line with the general minimum wage.

There remain 43 states where subminimum wages for restaurant workers persist.

Ballot initiatives can be a valuable tool—not just to raise wages for millions of workers, but also to mobilize voters.

The good news is that the post-pandemic worker exodus and consequent moment of worker power resulted in policies that raised wages for hundreds of thousands of workers. For instance, in 2022, residents of Washington, DC, passed a ballot initiative that ends the national capital’s subminimum wage and brings up the restaurant workers’ minimum wage to the city’s overall level of $16.10 an hour by 2027. The City of Chicago passed a similar measure in 2023 that will bring restaurant worker wages up to the city’s overall minimum wage of $15.80 by 2028.

At the state level, as mentioned above, there are wage increase policies pending in 12 states, including Illinois (following the local victory in Chicago) and Michigan.

Michigan’s story has been particularly complicated. In 2018, an initiative qualified for the ballot to raise the statewide minimum wage to $12 an hour and end subminimum wages for tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and youth. To keep the measure off the ballot, the then-Republican Legislature moved to pass the measure, then gutted it after the election. This move to “adopt and amend” is currently being challenged in the state supreme court. If the workers’ challenge prevails, nearly 900,000 workers will receive a raise. Michigan would become the first state in decades to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers, requiring these workers to be paid a full minimum wage with tips on top—and could pave the way for several other states to follow.

Raising Wages and Mobilizing Unlikely Voters

In many states, ballot initiatives can be a valuable tool—not just to raise wages for millions of workers but also to mobilize voters. In Ohio and Arizona, two critical swing states, restaurant workers, community partners, and election lawyers have teamed up to implement peer-to-peer voter programs that use raising the minimum wage as a motivating issue to engage in elections—with hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers telling each other to “vote ourselves a raise.” Simply put, turnout rises when people’s wages are on the ballot.

In Ohio, advocates have filed a petition to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour and end subminimum wages for tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and youth. Tipped workers in Ohio currently earn $5.05. Nearly a million Ohio workers would receive a raise through this ballot measure.

The partners include a range of organizations, including SEIU District 1199, the Ohio Education Association, Ohio Organizing Collaborative, Red Wine and Blue, Ohio Voice, Policy Matters Ohio, and Ohio Working Families Party, as well as One Fair Wage.

The voter registration program is particularly effective because it uses minimum wage as the issue that stops people on the street and inspires new voters to register on the spot so they can sign the petition to raise the wage.This approach is known as “issue-based voter engagement.” Voter engagement is generally most effective when tied to the issues that working people—particularly youth and people of color—have named as most important to them.

In Arizona, groups have come together to file a petition for a ballot measure that would raise the state minimum wage to approximately $18 an hour—and end the subminimum wage for tipped workers, who currently earn three dollars less than the state minimum wage. Nearly 600,000 Arizona workers would receive a raise through this ballot measure. Latinx advocacy organization UnidosUS and their state affiliates are acting as core partners to co-lead this effort with One Fair Wage.

In both states, this effort has involved hiring hundreds of low-wage workers, particularly restaurant workers, and training them to collect signatures from their fellow workers and conduct voter registration throughout the process. They, along with a cadre of high-road restaurant owners, are also sharing their stories and serving as spokespeople for the campaign; this summer and fall, these worker-organizers will be helping lead peer-to-peer voter engagement programs.

Voter engagement is generally most effective when tied to the issues that working people…have named as most important to them.

Beyond Ohio and Arizona, a measure to require tipped workers to be paid the full minimum wage with tips on top is also likely to be on the ballot this year in Massachusetts, and legislation is advancing this year in Illinois and many other states as well as Puerto Rico.

In California, a coalition of labor and criminal justice groups has emerged to raise the overall state minimum wage closer to the living wage and to end the last subminimum wage in the state—for incarcerated workers. An initial study bill has passed the Assembly and the Senate Labor Committee—and will lay the groundwork for later legislation on the issue.

Through these efforts, worker and employer leaders are developing permanent bases of power in each of these states to organize around a slew of progressive issues.

Building Democracy by Addressing Affordability

Wages have long been a major concern for restaurant industry workers. The rising cost of living after the pandemic has given this concern new urgency—not just for restaurant workers but for all working people—and is an indicator both of how they will likely vote in November and of the health of US democratic institutions. Indeed, a recent political science study shows that when the minimum wage is higher, voter participation increases—and not just when the minimum wage is on the ballot, but also in subsequent years.

Although workers, of course, care deeply about a wide range of issues, millions of working people will be limited in their capacity to engage politically as long as they must work multiple jobs to survive. In this way, supporting this current historic fight for living wages is not only good for workers, but vital to strengthening our democratic institutions.

Author update: Since this article was written in June, ballot petitions were submitted to place minimum wage increases that included tipped workers on the 2024 ballot in both Arizona and Massachusetts. In Ohio, however, ballot petitions are being submitted in September 2024 to appear on the statewide ballot in 2025, not 2024.

Notes:

1. The number of workers affected, 3.2 million total in five states (MI, OH, AZ, IL, MA), has been calculated by One Fair Wage staff based on IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) data, which break down US Department of Labor wage and employment data to the census tract level.