Prop 138 to decide pay for tipped workers

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — When you head out for a nice dinner, how nice it is may depend on the person who serves you. How to decide their pay, is up for a vote on this year’s ballot.

The November ballot contains more than just candidates to choose from. Arizona’s ballot has a long list of ballot propositions where voters have to decide some fairly complex legal issues and one of them has to do with how workers who make tips should be paid.

Right now Arizona law says when workers make tips, employers can pay three dollars less than minimum wage. So instead of $14.35 an hour they get $11.35. Tips are supposed to bring the worker above minimum wage or the boss makes up the difference.

Prop 138 asks voters to re-write the math and lock it into the State Constitution where it would take a new public vote to change it.

Instead of three dollars below the minimum wage, a “Yes” vote on Prop 138 would allow employers to pay 25 percent below the minimum. That would be $10.77. The assumption is tips would bring the worker to minimum wage and they’d get two dollars per hour on top of all that.

The Arizona Restaurant Association convinced state lawmakers to put Prop 138 on the ballot.

Grant Krueger runs three restaurants through his Union Hospitality Group. He says his servers do so well on tips a lot of them clear $41 dollars an hour. But he says if restaurants can’t hold down costs customers will pay a different price.

“We're going to see a continued decrease in full service restaurants, you're going to see more and more tablet based ordering and QR code based ordering, as opposed to the full service hospitality experience that our customers have known to love and to appreciate.”

But Jim Barton of One Fair Wage Arizona sees Prop 138 as nothing more than an effort to lock a pay cut into the Constitution.

“The day this passes, that server who was making $41 an hour will now make $40.40 an hour, it will immediately cut his pay by 60 cents an hour. Now I don't know that anyone can say with a straight face that 60 cents an hour, one way or another, is either going to shut down the restaurant industry or mean they're going to have to start using QR codes. They're already doing that.”

Prop language can be confusing. A "Yes" vote will pass Prop 138, and a "No" vote will leave things as they are now.