A month was all it took for Seattle’s city council to repeal a head tax the council passed in May. Over on the East Coast, D.C. City Council members moved on Tuesday to repeal a ballot measure voters approved in June, raising the $3.89 hourly minimum wage for tipped workers to $15. Despite being hubs of progressivism, both cities were amusingly quick to walk back the bad policies.
Seattle’s initiative would have taxed companies, whose yearly revenues exceed $20 million, at $275 per employee. As USA Today reported, “Pushback from Amazon, Starbucks and other large firms resulted in a surprise swerve by the council on [June 12.]” The 7-2 vote came after the council passed the measure unanimously on May 14.
One week later, on June 19, voters in D.C. approved the tipped-minimum-wage spike, threatening the city’s thriving restaurant scene with increased costs and rankling business owners. But after less than a month, seven of the city council’s 13 members, all Democrats, introduced a bill to repeal it on Monday. Like Seattle, the turnaround in Washington happened in less than a month (though the bill won’t be considered until the fall, after summer recess). Even the editorial board of the Washington Post argued it was not “the right move for servers or diners,” noting, “No one can say for sure how restaurants will offset a roughly fourfold increase in labor costs, but there are only so many ways to do it: reducing hours, reducing jobs, cutting portions, substituting cheaper ingredients and, almost certainly, raising menu prices.”
D.C., by the way, already requires businesses to make up the difference between tipped workers’ earnings if they don’t meet the city’s $13.25 minimum wage.
In June, restaurant owner Jeff Black told the Washington Post the measure was “singularly the dumbest, most ill-thought-out concept that has ever happened to the hospitality industry. Period. End of discussion.”
“You can’t afford to give somebody a 500 percent pay raise and not have it come from somewhere,” he correctly explained. “All my best servers will leave this city. They will move out and … take jobs in Maryland and Virginia.”
In both cases, confrontation with the real-world impacts of pie-in-the-sky progressive proposals was enough to motivate quick walk-backs, even in two of the country’s most liberal cities.
