Cutting your Three Dollar per Hour Wages

Workers are getting $3/hour. Usually, we tip well beyond 20% of the bill. Maybe it is just because we struggled at times.

Some of AZ’s legislators should be working for $3/hour and getting tips if they do a good job in the legislature. It does not appear they are representing people. The last go around I sat through was a House Committee meeting on HOAs which in Arizona are big business. One Rep did not like it when I said during the meeting his comment was not true.

Here, the HOA’s represent the builder’s interests and there is little the people can do to oppose them. The declarants, builders, and HOA walk away from the issues.

Arizona Restaurants Want to Cut Their Servers’ Wages, David Dayen on Tap

I will be voting against Proposition 138 on the Arizona ballot this fall will change the state constitution to allow business owners to cut the pay of workers who earn tips to 25 percent below the state minimum wage. Currently, those businesses can pay workers up to $3 an hour less. This amounts to a 5 percent wage cut in the immediate term, and more over time.

There were going to be competing ballot measures on this, one that would eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers in Arizona and one that would cut that subminimum wage. But under pressure from a lawsuit by the Arizona Restaurant Association, the Raise the Wage campaign withdrew their signatures last week. Voters will only get to weigh in on whether the tipped minimum wage should be lower.

Republican lawmakers put this proposal on the ballot, with backing from … those same folks at the Arizona Restaurant Association. The National Restaurant Association and national Republicans all endorsed Trump’s “no taxes on tips” idea. This Arizona measure reveals the true aims of the Trump concept: talk up a populist-sounding idea while letting businesses cut wages further in the background.

This explains my hesitancy with Harris co-opting the Trump plan, when a policy that would actually help tipped workers who need it is out there. Harris could begin to clean this up by opposing Prop 138 in Arizona, and running on increasing the subminimum wage.