NPR & WBUR, Here & Now, May 4, 2016
Last year, Seattle began phasing in a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Businesses with more than 500 employees will pay that wage by 2018. Smaller companies have until 2021 to comply, but some entrepreneurs are embracing the call for a higher minimum wage ahead of schedule. One of them is Renee Erickson, a Seattle chef, who this week won the 2016 James Beard Award as the best chef in the Northwest. She employs 100 people at her restaurant group. Erickson speaks with Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson as the show’s minimum wage series continues.
Interview Highlights: Renee Erickson
Why did you decide to raise your pay right away?
“Well, most of our employees already made $15 an hour or more and with a number of factors kind of leading into it, around tipping and the legality of sharing tips with the back of the house and other factors for our company, we decided to switch right away and kind of implement a service charge for our tipping and try to organize our payment in a different way so that we were legally doing the tip sharing and also we just didn’t really feel like we needed to wait. ...
So you essentially got rid of tipping?
“Essentially yes. With the inability to tip share legally, it would have been a really huge bump for our servers and not so much for the rest of our employees, and so with legally being able to redistribute the tips, that would allow us to give raises to other people in the company as well. It would kind of even it out a little bit more.” ...
Did you ever have a minimum wage job?
“Oh yeah, I mean I’ve worked in the restaurant industry my whole life, so I started at a sub shop ...
Has that shaped your views on what you are doing now with wages in your company?
“Yeah, and the more I think about it, in my business in the restaurant industry there’s a lot of other factors about it that are bringing up issues as far as tipping and that sort of thing. I think that’s where it falls apart for me is that these are people that are working really hard and often times for big companies that, you know I think are fairly profitable, and they’re not paying their employees well and they need to work two or three jobs and you know not living the life I think they deserve. We’re a for-profit company and we all want to make money, I mean we have to to survive, but we have other concerns that, you know, are important to us as well and that is definitely our employees.”