Nobody plays a funnier April Fools’ joke than the restaurant industry. In fact, I’m sure Oregon minimum-wage earners are laughing their aprons off.
It must be hilarious to try to feed your kids while the Oregon Restaurant Association pushes business-friendly legislators in Salem to freeze the minimum wage for workers who earn tips.
The restaurant industry has been fighting this battle for years. Restaurateurs hate the minimum wage, they hate increases in the minimum wage and they hate not being able to factor tips into the minimum wage.
The battle has intensified since 2002, when Oregon voters approved an initiative that raised the minimum wage and tied annual increases to the Consumer Price Index. Oregon now has a $7.25 minimum wage, the second highest in the nation only to Washington.
The minimum wage fight boils down to a political boxing match. In one corner stand Republican legislators, who control the state House, with the restaurant industry playing the role of trainer. In the other corner stand Democrats, who control the Senate and governor’s office, with labor unions cheering on their pugilists.
Rep. George Gilman, R-Medford, has thrown a right hook with HB 2409, a bill that would freeze the minimum wage for workers who earn tips.
Gilman apparently thinks all those working mothers earn too much money — all those hard-working waiters and waitresses who place lemon slices in your iced tea,
fetch you an extra stack of napkins for a messy burger and offer you coffee refills.
One might jump to the conclusion that Gilman, his House allies and the Oregon Restaurant Association want to screw over the working poor in exchange for campaign contributions and higher profits.
No, ORA spokesman Bill Perry said, restaurateurs simply want to pay higher wages to their untipped employees, such as cooks. “We’re not saying that the servers don’t deserve their tip income,” Perry told The Associated Press. “The question is, how do we get a fair wage to the back-of-the-house employees?”
Of course. The Oregon Restaurant Association has been pouring campaign contributions into Republican coffers for years — to the tune of $147,680 in 2004, according to The Institute on Money in State Politics — in an altruistic campaign to raise wages for cooks.
Now that’s a good April Fools’ joke. And it’s on Oregon’s working poor.
Amusingly, if Perry were honest in the quote above, the bill would adhere rather closely to socialist philosophy. Think about it: a government plan lowering wages for one type of worker in order to give more to another type of worker, leveling wages all around. One wonders if Gilman’s constituents in the Medford area elected him to ease class divisions in the restaurant industry.
Gilman, a longtime dairy farmer, might not have read a great deal of Karl Marx, who with Friedrich Engels described the essence of the minimum wage more than 150 years ago in “The Communist Manifesto.”
“The average price of wage labor,” they wrote, “is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence … under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital,
and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.”
Gilman has done the job of a good Republican, submitting to the bidding of the latest industry to whine about the cost of doing business.
Simultaneously, he has proposed
to shift the cost of paying waitstaff from employers to consumers.
One hopes he gets a nice campaign contribution.
One also hopes that Democrats have the wisdom to block this shameless bill.

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