Syracuse - Gubernatorial Candidate Howie Hawkins: Tip Workers Need a Pay Raise from NY

Op-Ed

By Howie Hawkins

Tuesday is garbage pickup day on the South Side. Early in the evening, I often see a young woman pulling two shopping carts, with a toddler in each seat and redeemable bottles and cans in the baskets. Around 4 a.m. when I return from my job unloading trucks, I often see a senior citizen pushing a cart, scavenging for bottles and cans.

People are willing to work. But there are not enough jobs, and many jobs don't pay enough to make ends meet.

Mothers and seniors need jobs that pay them enough to live without sorting through garbage.

On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo's long-delayed Wage Board begins its work with a hearing in Syracuse to see if food tip workers deserve a pay raise.

Two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women. Many are single moms raising their kids in poverty. Half of children in Syracuse live in poverty.

The current deal by Cuomo and state lawmakers, raising the minimum wage to $9 over three years, maintains the pay at a sub-poverty wage. Most New Yorkers support a higher minimum wage. At every step of the struggle to raise the minimum wage, Cuomo delayed and weakened the proposals made by anti-poverty advocates, labor unions and other lawmakers.

Excluded from the deal were food tip workers -- waiters and waitresses, food delivery people, backroom workers at restaurants. More than 20 percent of tipped restaurant workers live in poverty, three times the rate of the rest of the work force.

Mothers and seniors need jobs that pay them enough to live without sorting through garbage.

The median age of tip workers is 31, a third are parents and nearly half are single mothers.

State law gives the labor commissioner -- effectively, the governor -- the power to raise the minimum wage without legislative approval if he feels the wage is too low to adequately support workers.

As governor, I would use the Wage Board to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The 1963 March on Washington demanded a $2 minimum wage. Today that would be $15.55 when adjusted for inflation.

I agree with groups like the National Organization for Women and the Food Chain Workers Alliance that want to eliminate the tip deduction that allows employers to pay tipped workers less than the minimum wage. Seven states have already ended this sub-minimum wage. The poverty rate among tipped workers is one-third lower in these states than in those that didn't make the change. Among workers of color, it is one-half lower.

Both restaurant sales and employment increase when the tipped minimum wage increases because workers stay at their jobs longer, their productivity increases, customer service improves and these workers can now afford to buy more meals out themselves. One of the reasons President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the minimum wage was that unemployment was so high he needed to put more money into the hands of working people, raising demand and thus increasing hiring by businesses to meet that demand.

A related problem is that many minimum-wage workers get money stolen out of every paycheck. The amount stolen annually in New York exceeds a billion dollars. The backlog of wage theft complaints with the state Department of Labor is more than 15,000. Workers can wait years for action. In the few cases where they are awarded back pay, they are often unable to collect.

The labor law states that the Wage Board can take action to safeguard minimum wages. As governor, I would use this power to strengthen enforcement against wage theft.

The Wage Board is one of the governor's strongest tools to lift workers up. We need a governor who will use that power to help New York's lowest waged workers.

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