Maine Employment Lawyer Blog
After Maine recently passed an increase to the minimum wage, many Maine restaurant workers who depend on tips voiced serious concerns. They believed that the increased minimum wage would actually cause them to make less money. They feared that restaurant owners would raise prices and cut workers’ shifts. Some said that customers had begun to tip less because the customers assumed that the increased minimum wage made tips less important to servers. Due to these concerns, the Maine legislature recently passed a bill that reversed the increase in minimum wage that employers must pay to tipped workers and the Governor has signed that bill.
If the minimum wage increase for tipped workers had not been reversed, employers of tipped workers would have went from paying tipped workers a minimum wage of $3.75/hour in 2016 to $12/hour by 2024. Employers of tipped workers will have to pay workers a minimum of $5/hour this year but in future years they will only have to pay them half of the minimum wage that non-tipped workers must receive. What will not change is that if tips do not result in a tipped worker making at least the same minimum wage as a non-tipped worker, the employer of the tipped worker will have to make up the difference.
One of the Maine restaurant workers who organized the movement to reverse the rise in the minimum wage for tipped workers was Jason Buckwalter. He is now saying that he wants to take this movement to other places in the country where the minimum wages of tipped workers may be raised or have already been raised. But those who advocate for a higher minimum wage for restaurant workers say that they disagree with Buckwalter and others in his camp. “We do not believe what we see in Maine is representative of the majority of workers,” said Dave Palmer, the managing director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a national group of low-wage restaurant workers.