Ed Sealover
Denver Business Journal, Sept 14, 2016
For Colorado restaurant leaders, who are the primary funders of the campaign to defeat the minimum-wage hike on November’s ballot, a major sticking point in the proposed constitutional amendment is its provision raising the credit for tipped workers at the same monetary levels as it raises the ground-floor wage for statewide workers.
Though Colorado’s minimum wage is now $8.31 an hour, employees who receive tips as part of their jobs can get a lower base salary of $5.29 per hour with the expectation that the gratuities they get will put them over that $8.31 mark. Under Amendment 70, which ups the minimum wage 44 percent to $12 an hour by 2020, those tipped workers would get the same $3.69 hourly boost during that time ...
On Wednesday, officials on opposing sides of the proposal discussed this and other issues that weigh heavily on eatery owners at a debate hosted by EatDenver. ...
Pete Turner, founder and president of the Illegal Pete’s chain who is in favor of the ballot initiative, told the crowd of how he decided to boost the floor wages at his restaurants last year from $9 an hour to $10.50 an hour and to ensure that workers already above that pay level received at least a $3,000 annual boost.
It cost his company about $650,000, as it did not raise prices to offset the increased expenditures. But it also cut hourly employee turnover down to 29 percent and manager turnover down to 10 percent — numbers that are less than one-quarter of the industry average and that helped him make half of those costs back in reduced training, he said. ...
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