By Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | AZMirror
Arizona restaurants are hoping voters will change the state’s constitution to let them pay servers and bartenders 25% less than the minimum wage, allowing them to pad their profit margins, critics say.
Originally designed to counter a ballot initiative that would have sharply increased the minimum wage and scrapped existing laws allowing restaurants and bars to pay most tipped workers less than the minimum wage, Proposition 138 is the only worker pay measure that voters will consider this year. The proposal to increase the minimum wage was barred from the ballot after the restaurant industry successfully challenged the signatures its backers filed to qualify for the November election.
Under current Arizona law, businesses can pay tipped workers $3 less than minimum wage, which currently stands at $14.35. If Prop. 138 were on the books today, restaurants, bars and other businesses could pay their tipped workers $3.59 less than the minimum wage.
“This is transparently bad. The math here just does not check out at all,” Jeanne Woodbury, a lobbyist for Creosote Partners who has decided to run a no on 138 campaign by herself, told the Arizona Mirror. “I do think people, when they spend any amount of time looking into Prop. 138, they are able to do the math.”
