One Fair Wage and NCL are Making Headlines!

With the much-appreciated support of the National Consumers League, One Fair Wage is on the precipice of historic change. After years of organizing and building power with hundreds of thousands of restaurant and service workers, and ‘high road’ restaurant owners, to raise wages and end the subminimum wage for tipped workers (which is still $2.13 an hour), One Fair Wage has documented a massive upheaval in the restaurant industry that is driving change. More than 1 million workers have left the industry, and thousands of restaurants are raising wages to recruit staff.

To take advantage of this historic moment, One Fair Wage has launched the 25 by 250 campaign, which calls for raising wages and ending subminimum wages in 25 states by the United States’ 250th Anniversary in 2026. With recent victories in Washington, DC; Chicago; and Michigan, our campaign and ballot initiatives have become even more critical given recent polling showing that the top issue for young people, people of color, and other unlikely voters in 2024 is “the rising cost of living” and “jobs with living wages.”

With nearly 14 million workers, the restaurant industry has been one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy, but it has also been one of the lowest-paying for generations. A legacy of slavery, the subminimum wage for tipped workers, was always a source of poverty, racial inequity, and sexual harassment for millions of service workers nationwide as well as a source of liability for restaurant owners. Data showed that tipped restaurant workers of color earned at least $5 an hour less than their white counterparts due to segregation into lower- tipping establishments and implicit bias in tipping from customers.

Meanwhile, seven states have always required a full minimum wage with tips on top—AK, CA, MN, MT, NV, OR, and WA. These states have the same or higher restaurant sales, small business growth rates, menu prices, overall industry job growth rates, and tipping averages as the states with a subminimum wage for tipped workers. Workers in these seven states report that providing them with a full minimum wage and reducing their complete dependence on tips also reduces sexual harassment and racial inequities as a result, as dependence on tips makes workers vulnerable to harassment and bias from customers.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this crisis. We uplifted the voices and data from thousands of service workers who reported reduced tips and increased customer hostility and harassment and then left the industry in a mass exodus. To date, we have documented that 1.2 million workers have left the restaurant industry. With support from the Gates Foundation, we documented the huge industry shift following that exodus, in which thousands of restaurants voluntarily transitioned to paying a full minimum wage for tipped workers during the pandemic in order to recruit staff.

This upheaval has led us to the precipice of policy change, in which there is great momentum for One Fair Wage in multiple states. With the support of the NCL, we won One Fair Wage and a 300% wage increase for service workers on the ballot with a 75% margin in Washington, DC, on November 8, 2022. We also won a 50% wage increase for 100,000 service workers in the city of Chicago with a 36 to 10 vote. In July 2024, Michigan became the first state in 40 years and the first state east of the Mississippi to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers. This historic move is a result of the momentum gained following the pandemic when the racial inequities of the subminimum wage were exposed and exacerbated.

We expect many more states to follow, and have already completed signature collection to put One Fair Wage on the ballot in Massachusetts, and are moving One Fair Wage as policy in Baltimore, MD. We are also advancing bills and ballot measures in CO, NJ, NY, and OH and many more states in 2025 and 2026.

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Saru Jayaraman is President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.