The servers at your favorite Chicago restaurants are bringing home a little more bacon because of a change in the city's minimum wage law, but some restaurant owners want aldermen to stop that change from taking full effect.
Right now, the minimum wage for wait staff is $12.62 an hour. For everyone else, it's $16.20, and that difference is called a "tip credit" ... because, according to the thinking behind the original law, restaurant servers usually get tips that bring up their wages.
But by 2028, servers will get the same minimum wage that everyone else gets, because the city's phasing out that "tip credit," which is often referred to as a "sub-minimum wage."
And Sam Toia from the Illinois Restaurant Association says his members can't afford it: "They're gonna have to go back to the drawing board and increase prices again."
He claims 84% of restaurant owners in a new survey increased their menu prices after the city started phasing out the "tip credit," and 69% reduced staff hours.
"People in Chicago, they want to see affordability," said Toia, who's calling on Chicago aldermen to pause the phase-out of the "tip credit," citing that and other increased cost pressures.
But Richard Rodriguez from the One Fair Wage Coalition says the raise for service workers is boosting other businesses in the city - mostly in the neighborhoods where waiters live and work: "Those new wages that they're getting, they're circulating them back into the economy."
And despite what the restaurant trade group calls a crisis in the industry, Rodriguez says the number of new and renewed licenses in the city is close to past years.
Ultimately he calls the "tip credit" a relic of past laws that disproportionately affect women and people of color. "Consumers shouldn't be subsidizing wages for workers," he said.