Blog Posts

Point of sale platform Square releases new data quarterly on earnings and tips for workers across the country – and the latest results show restaurant workers are earning substantial tips and well above minimum wages across the country. Square finds that the median restaurant employee is earning a $14.20…

After weeks of vote counting across the Golden State, the Associated Press finally called the race for Proposition 32 – which would raise the state’s minimum wage from $16 to $18 an hour. The measure was rejected by a 50.8% to 49.2% vote as of November 22. This is…

After the city council passed an ordinance to eliminate Chicago’s tip credit last year, the city experienced a one-two punch of wage hikes this summer. As a result, the number of jobs in the Chicago area’s leisure and hospitality sector plummeted – slashing 6,000 jobs as of September 2024.

One surprising takeaway from this election is California’s statewide $18 minimum wage ballot measure currently trailing by roughly 4 percentage points. While the measure qualified for the ballot several years ago after it failed to certify for the 2022 midterms, California’s recent experiments with unprecedented minimum wage hikes —…

One Fair Wage set out across the country this year to try to eliminate state and local tip credits in Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island. The group’s only measure to survive the legislative and ballot initiative process was Question 5 in Massachusetts, which aims…

In February, U.S. House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer opened an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s enforcement (or lack thereof) of non-profit tax laws against progressive activist groups, including anti-tip credit group One Fair Wage (OFW). Once the investigation went public, National Review reports One…

A report recently released by researchers at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), a union-funded project housed at the University of California-Berkeley, echoes Governor Gavin Newsom’s media campaign that the recent $20 fast food minimum wage has not been a disaster. Yet Californians for months leading up…

This week, advocates for Governor Gavin Newsom’s $20 fast food minimum wage are coming out in droves – clawing at alternative data sources to prove Newsom is right and restaurant operators are wrong about the impacts of the wage law. The two studies that surfaced over the last two weeks,…

This week, the California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) released its second ad in USA Today calling out Governor Newsom for his revisionist history on the success of California’s $20 fast food minimum wage hike. The Governor continues to cherry pick data, using whatever is politically advantageous to his…

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s spin room has been awfully quiet since new state jobs data dropped over the weekend. Last week, the governor published an op-ed claiming California’s fast food industry was in fact thriving – expressing no concerns about restaurant closures, layoffs, or price hikes following the April…