Send This One Back to the Kitchen: Montana Restaurant Owners Have Wage-Cut Recipe

by Mike Hall, Apr 6, 2007

They’re at it again in Montana. So what if the voters and courts slapped them down earlier.

Opponents of raising the state’s minimum wage have come up with another attack on low-wage workers, a bill that would partly repeal the state’s new minimum wage law–approved by 73 percent of the voters in November. The ballot initiative raised the state’s minimum wage to $6.15 an hour, with annual cost-of-living adjustments to keep it from falling behind the inflation rate.

Backed by the state’s restaurant industry (which was part of an anti-raise coalition that last month lost a legal battle against the new law), the legislation (H.B.492) could cut by $4 an hour the pay of about 8,600 men and women who wait tables and earn tips, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The study says that even with the new wage rate, the median wage for restaurant servers in the state is still projected to be just $7.32 an hour—after tips are included. That’s $15,226 a year for those lucky enough to work full time.

Says Paul Sonn, co-director of the center’s Economic Justice Project:

The restaurant industry’s proposal is a Trojan horse. What they’re calling a modest adjustment could actually slash pay by more than $4 an hour for 8,600 waiters and waitresses statewide and block them from getting the future minimum wage increases that the voters approved in November.

According to the Brennan Center report:

H.B. 492 would change Montana law to allow restaurant servers to be paid 100 percent in tips and receive no base cash wage whatsoever. It is true that the federal minimum wage would still require tipped restaurant servers to be paid a base cash wage of $2.13 per hour. But that is a $4.02 cut in pay from the $6.15 base cash.

…it would deny them annual cost-of-living increases aimed at ensuring that Montana’s minimum wage does not erode in value each year.

A similar attack on the wages of tipped workers failed in Missouri when public outrage forced Gov. Matt Blunt (R) to abandon the proposal. Click here to read about that battle.

For the Brennan Center’s analysis of the Montana bill, click here.

Montana was one of six states where voters approved minimum wage increases in November. Frustrated with more than a decade of Republican congressional roadblocks to raising the minimum wage in the states, activists in the AFL-CIO’s America Needs a Raise campaign and the community group ACORN have mobilized to win wage hikes via legisaltion in 16 states since 2006, including three this year. Overall, 31 states now have higher minimum wage rates than the federal level of $5.15 an hour.

Meanwhile, the minimum wage hostage crisis in the U.S. Senate hit the 86-day mark today. Senate Republicans are holding federal minimum wage legislation hostage until a multibillion-dollar ransom in the form of business tax cuts is delivered. The crisis began Jan. 10 after the U.S. House passed legislation to raise the federal wage floor to $7.25 an hour. Since then, Senate Republicans have refused to release the bill without the hefty ransom.

We will bring you new developments in the minimum wage hostage crisis as they occur. Stay tuned.

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