Here’s a tip that restaurant workers don’t want. The Raise the Wage Act, which will likely return as a standalone bill before Congress, would eliminate the employer credit for tip income and raise the minimum wage for tipped workers to $15 an hour (a 600% increase). But for many restaurant servers and bartenders, this would actually mean taking a pay cut if they aren’t included in the hundreds […]

Abolishing the tipped minimum wage would wipe out the benefit of his Covid grants. Joe Biden proposes $15 billion in relief grants for America’s Covid-crushed businesses. But he also wants to mandate a new minimum wage that for many restaurants would wipe out the benefit and then some. Restaurants shed some six million jobs in the first two months of the pandemic. As a consequence of continued […]

Asked at the most recent presidential debate about the wisdom of a $15 federal minimum wage, Joe Biden dismissed potential consequences: “There’s no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business.” As the candidate might say, that’s malarkey. The minimum wage is one of the most-studied topics in economics, with reams of research papers dating back to the creation of a federal standard in […]

The coronavirus pandemic left millions jobless. Instead of getting Americans back to work, Democrats propose reviving the economy by more than doubling the minimum wage. A new analysis shows why this strategy will backfire. This unprecedented increase to the minimum wage is a key component of the Raise the Wage Act, a bill that passed in the House of Representatives just last year. The components of the legislation, which […]

His labor-policy plan could have come from Sanders or Warren. Mike Bloomberg pitches himself as a moderate, business-minded alternative to other Democrats running for president. But his plan to remake the nation’s labor laws, released earlier this month, wouldn’t be out of place in the campaign literature of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Start with Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement of a $15 minimum wage, which has already hurt the restaurant […]

Call it the restaurant opening that wasn’t. Five weeks after its Dec. 10, 2019, premiere — a reopening in the wake of a closure in 2017 — the New York City restaurant COLORS closed its doors. Management gave the head chef and restaurant employees just three days warning, and delivered the bad news via text message. Restaurant deaths are hardly unique, but COLORS’ closure is not like the others. A […]