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By Adrian D. Garcia
Denverite, December 22, 2016

Minimum-wage workers in Colorado will get a voter-approved raise in January, but where their additional cents will come from still remains to be seen.

Some companies have said they’ll eat the expense of paying for more waiters, maids and other entry-level earners. Others have said they’ll pass the new costs on to customers or in some cases eliminate positions to save money. ...

“Business associations, like the Colorado Restaurant Association, always, always say the sky is going to fall whenever there is anything that passes that helps workers and working families. And the sky never falls,” Debra Brown said.

Brown is the business manager of Colorado Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a group that helped get Amendment 70 passed in November. The amendment adds 99 cents to the minimum wage of hourly workers in 2017 and brings their pay up to $9.30 per hour. The new law also gives a 99-cent hourly raise to waiters and other employees. The increase brings the tipped employee minimum wage to $6.28. Amendment 70 calls for the hourly minimum wage to increase gradually to $12 per hour — $8.98 per hour for tipped employees — by 2020. The law is expected to increase pay for more than 400,000 workers in Colorado.

Last year, Edwin Zoe was able to start paying his employees at the Denver location of his fast-casual Chinese restaurant Zoe Ma Ma at least $10 an hour by replacing tips with a standard fee on every ticket.

“Tipping benefits the few,” Zoe said. “Based on the study that was conducted by Cornell (University), there are gender and ethnic biases that are inherent in the tipping system. And also there is an inequity in terms of pay for the front of the house versus the back of the house.”

Removing tipped workers can also add some stability to a restaurant’s budget. Workers who don’t earn tipped wages make the same amount hourly whether nobody comes in a restaurant during a week or a million people do. But with tipped workers, unexpected slow weeks might mean employees don’t earn enough through their wages and tips to meet state’s hourly minimum wage requirements. That leaves employers holding the tab to make up the difference.

Zoe plans to expand the no tipping policy at his Boulder store in January. ...

The co-founder and president of Boulder-based manufacturer Product Architects Inc., Judy Amabile, was pleasantly surprised by what she saw after boosting the company’s starting hourly pay to $12 an hour in 2011.

“We almost completely eliminated turnover, and we had better employees who were more enthusiastic about their job,” Amabile said.

She originally thought a dip in profits would be worth making sure the company’s roughly 45 workers could better be able to afford to live in the area. Instead, workers started making more Polar Bottle water bottles and the cost of replacing and retraining workers went down. It actually generated money for the company. ...

Given that Amendment 70 passed and the cost of living continues to go up, Product Architects will likely boost its starting pay to $13 an hour in 2017. ... “When you occupy 40 hours or more of someone’s week, I think you should help provide them with a decent life.”

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