John Guggenmos, the owner of gay bars Trade and Number Nine, declines to speak about ending the tipped minimum wage in absolutes. He doesn’t support Initiative 82, the upcoming ballot measure that would do that, but he believes it will likely prevail. Rather than fight it, he’s thinking about how he’ll pivot when he can no longer rely on patrons’ tips to top off his workers’ wages.
D.C. voters will weigh in on the controversial initiative in November which, if passed, will phase out the tipped wage system. Currently, employers can pay specific workers, such as servers and bartenders, just $5.35 an hour with the expectation that their tips will bring their total earnings up to the District’s minimum wage of $16.10 an hour. If they don’t, by law employers have to make up the difference. If Initiative 82 passes, employers would have to front the full minimum wage by 2027.
The owners of bars and restaurants, and the people working for them who account for the overwhelming majority of the city’s tipped workers, have spent recent months grappling with how the elimination of the tipped wage system will affect them and their work. There is substantial disagreement within the industry, which employs tens of thousands of people, about how disruptive the change will be — or whether the industry should undergo this change at all.
Guggenmos favors the current system to the proposed alternative. He says the tipped minimum wage allows him to keep labor costs low because the gratuity his...
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