By Robb Mandelbaum
Forbes, Oct 28, 2016
For ten years, Jeff Rogoff and Jenni Hayes have carefully tended to their small salads-and-pizza restaurant, Sazza, in the south Denver suburbs. Almost immediately, they faced the recession, but managed to stay in business serving local and sustainable ingredients — eventually they opened a small urban farm near the restaurant. Since 2011, Sazza has prospered, enough so that next spring Rogoff and Hayes plan to open a second restaurant on the north side of Denver, in a redeveloped airplane hangar at the edge of the city’s former Stapleton Airport.
There is one recent complication that might give a restaurateur pause before opening a new establishment: on Election Day, Coloradoans will vote on Amendment 70, which would amend the state’s constitution to raise the current minimum wage from $8.31 to $9.30 at the beginning of 2017, and to $12 by 2020. Colorado is one of four states voting on ballot measures to raise the minimum wage, along with Arizona, Maine, and Washington State. A fifth ballot proposal, in Washington, D.C., was averted after city leaders enacted a $15-an-hour wage increase on their own.
But Rogoff and his wife were not put off by the proposal; in fact, they’ve embraced it. Rogoff already pays the dozen or so people who work in his kitchen above minimum wage. “We start our kitchen staff at $10,” he told me, “but if it looks like a good fit for both of us, after the first month we bump them up to $10.50 an hour.” (He pays his servers the state’s minimum wage for tipped employees, $5.29 an hour, but says they average $11 an hour in tips serving lunch and $20 an hour during dinner.) Rogoff has come to believe that a higher minimum wage is “a good idea for all businesses and for the state of Colorado.”
... Rogoff is one of over 250 Colorado small business owners — the number continues to grow — who have signed a statement supporting Amendment 70. “People think of organic as pesticide- and herbicide-free fruits and vegetables, and hormone- and antibiotic-free meat and poultry,” he explained. But “in the beginning, organic also meant a fair wage, from the start all the way through the line, from the food pickers to distributors, to our staff.” ...
Several recent surveys of business owners have shown broad support for a higher minimum wage, including a private survey conducted for state chambers of commerce, which found that 80 percent of their own members back an increase. And in most of the states seeing a ballot contest — all but Colorado — the business groups that have traditionally spent small fortunes to beat back minimum wage increases have all but abandoned the fight.
Holly Sklar, founder of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, which organized the Colorado statement, is happy to take some of the credit for this turnabout. More than a decade ago, Sklar was advising a minimum-wage campaign organized by church and community groups. Around the country, she met business owners and even business groups supporting the cause, but they were isolated, and swimming against the current of popular preconceptions. “It was always presented as polarized,” Sklar recalled. “We knew that there was good business support for minimum wage, but it hadn’t been put together nationally in a large-scale way that was expressing business support with a business case.”
Sklar created Business for a Fair Minimum Wage in 2006, as six states — including Arizona and Colorado — held votes to raise the minimum wage. In 2007, Congress increased the federal minimum wage, “after the longest period in history without a raise,” said Sklar. “It was a three-step process to raise the wage to $7.25 by 2009, and even by then it had lost ground.”
Sklar says that not only has her organization amplified the voices of business owners who back a higher wage, it has helped bring other entrepreneurs around. “Business support for raising the minimum wage has grown, because more business people have heard a business case for raising the minimum wage, and more business people are comfortable expressing their support for the minimum wage as they don’t feel so isolated for doing it.” ...
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