Your Legislator Needs to Hear from
​you on theMinimum Wage and Tip Wage

​Activists are circumventing the legislative process and using the ballot to advance their own union driven agenda. Raise up Massachusetts, which is funded mostly by out-of-state labor PACs, has collected signatures to move to the next stage of the 2018 ballot process.
The proposed ballot question would increase minimum wage by 36% and an even more costly 140% increase for tipped employees in only 4 years! 

Ballot Proposal:

Wage laws should be determined by the legislature and not at the whims of the voting public who may spend a minute reading the title of a ballot question and certainly not by the big unions who spend unlimited money to get what they want.

​Impact of Minimum Wage

• Massachusetts has the highest state minimum wage or starting wage in the country. To raise that number 36% in only 4 years is way too high and far too fast. A multi-year, multi-dollar increase is unsustainable and borderline reckless.  
• While the vast majority of starting wage workers are just beginning in the work force, the real impact is wage compression.  Those jobs that paid $11 only two years ago are now at $14 and $15 per hour, those jobs who were at $15 per hour only, again are now at $18-$20 per hour. That is a significant increase for any employer, but especially one that is as labor intensive as the restaurant industry.
• On the West Coast, where cities have the ability to set higher minimum wages. Small business are closing every day. They cannot keep up with the increase in labor cost.
• In order for business to adjust and absorb an increase, any increase in the starting wage needs to be gradual and spread out over many years.  

Impact of Altering the Tip Credit

• The Tip Wage allows the highest percentage of employees in a restaurant to earn the highest average wage, with many tipped servers earning in excess of $25 or $30 per hour.
• Employers can only pay the tip wage if the employee is claiming at least the difference between the cash wage and the minimum wage in tips and must pay all of the contributory taxes, FICA, FUTA, and SUTA on both the tipped wage paid and the tips received from patrons.
• Tipped employees benefit from a natural increase in wages through menu inflation. Menu inflation averages about 3.5% each year, as food and operator costs increase, the menu cost increases and as a result the amount the customer leaves as a tip increases as well.
• Massachusetts tipped employee wages have increased 84% in the last 15 years.
• Massachusetts has among the highest tipped wage earners in the country (hourly tip wage + declared tips), topping even California which has no tip wage.
• Servers are not the ones asking for the increase, the change is driven by activists not in the restaurant industry, yet they will be the workers most negatively impacted with a reduction in pay and loss of hours.

To contact your legislator, click here.