Last Wednesday, the Chicago City Council voted 30–18 to freeze the city’s scheduled phaseout of the tipped subminimum wage — a measure that restaurant workers and their allies spent years fighting to win, and that the council itself passed by a 36–10 margin less than three years ago. The ordinance, introduced by Ald. Samantha Nugent, through a parliamentary maneuver and backed by the Illinois Restaurant Association, locks in the tipped wage floor at 24 percent of Chicago’s $16.60 minimum hourly wage indefinitely, stripping workers of raises they had already been promised.

Mayor Brandon Johnson has pledged to veto it, in just the third use of veto power by a Chicago mayor since 2006. “If I’ve got to veto something to make sure that black and brown women are protected, then veto it is,” he said after the vote, referring to the workers most affected by the subminimum wage. Because the freeze passed four votes short of the supermajority needed to override a mayoral veto, the veto will hold — for now. The workers of this city are counting on it.

I say “for now,” because the past week has underlined that no labor gain at city hall is ever fully secure. Political power that is not continuously organized can be dismantled by a well-funded lobbying blitz in a matter of days. That is exactly what happened here. And with the anti-worker Illinois Restaurant Association emboldened by its ability to compel a majority of Chicago City Council members to do its bidding, there is no doubt they will soon try it again — just as the National Restaurant Association has all over the country, most recently in Washington, DC.

How Corporate Lobbyists Rewrote the Narrative

Chicago’s 2023 One Fair Wage ordinance was the product of hard negotiation among workers, advocates, restaurant owners, and city leaders. It set a five-year path toward gradually eliminating the tipped subminimum wage by 2028. The subminimum wage system has roots in the post–Civil War era, when an emerging hospitality industry successfully excluded tipped workers — primarily black workers freed from slavery — from standard wage protections. This established a two-tier labor system that has been justified since by the claim that hospitality workers should not be guaranteed fair wages because restaurants’ patrons can be relied upon, simply out of generosity, to supplement the wages of the poor people serving them.

In Chicago, where approximately 70 percent of restaurant workers are non-white, the current tipped wage stands at $12.62 an hour, roughly 76 percent of the city’s full minimum wage. The move did not emerge from any genuine crisis. It was jump-started barely a week prior to the city council vote, when a group of city council members — many of whom voted for the original ordinance they’re now seeking to undo — used a parliamentary maneuver to force a floor vote, bypassing the committee process that had previously allowed a similar proposal to stall. The Illinois Restaurant Association and the National Restaurant Association were driving the effort. These are not small-business advocates. They are among the most well-resourced lobbying operations in the country, with decades of experience defeating minimum wage legislation at every level of government and consistently fighting for the narrow interests of owners at the expense of workers.

Put aside the ethical bankruptcy of their position: the economic case they are making does not hold up. Their central claim, that eliminating the subminimum wage is destroying Chicago’s restaurant industry, is contradicted by the city’s own licensing data. Since the One Fair Wage ordinance went into effect, nearly 1,600 new retail food establishments have been licensed in Chicago, including more than a thousand last year alone, and restaurant license renewal rates rose in 2025. The industry’s catastrophe narrative is fiction.

The restaurant closures cited in this debate stem from causes that the Illinois Restaurant Association prefers to ignore: Trump’s tariffs driving up the cost of imported ingredients and equipment; immigration enforcement raids that have terrorized the immigrant workers who form the backbone of Chicago’s hospitality workforce and frightened customers away from immigrant-owned establishments; pandemic-era debt that has never fully cleared, changing downtown foot traffic as remote work reshapes the city; and the ordinary high turnover rate of an industry in which new establishments have always opened and closed every year regardless of wage policy.

Another key part of the National Restaurant Association lobbyists’ claims, repeated both in Illinois and across the country in its campaigns against workers’ rights, is that increasing the minimum wage for workers would undercut their tips and result in workers ultimately earning less while paying more in taxes (as the first $25,000 in tips is now temporarily tax deductible due to legislation passed last year, although this deduction expires at the end of 2028).

But seven states, including California, Washington, and Minnesota, already require employers to pay tipped workers the full minimum wage. Not only do restaurants miraculously continue to operate and thrive in all of them, but tipping culture has not changed. Workers continue to make tips as before, only now on top of higher guaranteed wages. The biggest thing that has changed is that workers in those states are now less vulnerable to abuse — from wage theft to rampant sexual, physical, and verbal abuse in the industry — by customers upon whom they are forced to rely for tips, as well as by owners, chefs, and management who often steal those tips.

The Reality Workers Are Forced to Endure

Although the Illinois Restaurant Association states that they do not back “bad actors” in the industry, it has no programs to protect workers from widespread wage theft. Nor has it ever had campaigns meant to stop physical and verbal abuse of workers, nor to protect them from sexual harassment at their workplaces. In fact, it has no initiatives aimed at helping workers at all, because it has no interest in acknowledging abusive industry realities nor in identifying the owners and chefs responsible for them. Even its own president, Sam Toia, is implicated in the very conditions the association refuses to confront; his family business settled a 2015 lawsuit alleging nearly two decades of wage theft.

While lobbying groups like the Illinois Restaurant Association fight to freeze wages, worker abuse continues to plague Chicago’s restaurants, as illustrated by recent media coverage of repeated violence and intimidation by a chef-owner at the critically acclaimed Avondale restaurant Warlord. Former head chef and owner, Trevor Fleming, was accused of sharing sexual images of a woman without her consent and berating staff for years. This man’s behavior was tolerated and was an open secret in the industry until the accumulated weight of multiple criminal charges, along with victims who refused to stay silent and instead fought to see a serial abuser held to account, finally forced it into the open.

As someone who has worked in Chicago’s restaurants and bars for more than fifteen years, and as the executive director of the Chicago Hospitality Accountability & Advocacy Database (CHAAD) Project, which organizes restaurant and bar workers across the city, I can tell you that such abuses are far from exceptional. They simply rarely generate media traction. I can also tell you, from both my experiences as a worker and those of the workers who come to us every day at CHAAD to report workplace abuses, what the subminimum wage actually feels like from the inside, and how it functions to silence victims and enable abuse.

When most of your income depends on customer generosity, every interaction with a customer carries a financial threat.

You do not challenge the man making a racist comment or sexually harassing you, because you cannot afford to lose the tip. You do not tell the manager about the harassment because managers control your sections and your shifts, and a bad shift is a bad week, which often means that you — living paycheck to paycheck — now can’t make rent. Studies have consistently documented higher rates of sexual harassment in workplaces where tipped income constitutes a large share of total pay. That is not a coincidence; it’s the result of a system in which workers’ economic survival is, by design, tied to staying quiet, regardless of the mistreatment to which we are subjected.

This two-tiered labor system intensifies the vulnerability of the most precarious workers and continues to actively reproduce racial inequalities in both power and income. Despite making up the overwhelming majority of restaurant workers in cities like Chicago, workers of color are systematically passed over for the highest-paying front-of-house positions, occupying only about 22 percent of such roles.

And even when they do manage to get into these jobs, researchers have repeatedly found that non-white servers receive lower tips than equally skilled white servers, a gap that widens rather than narrows after controlling for service quality. (A survey-based study of hypothetical tipping argued that no such racial discrimination exists, while studies of actual tipping practices clearly show it does.) The subminimum wage transforms those biases into wages, making consumer prejudice the direct determinant of what service workers take home.

When the Illinois Restaurant Association repeatedly told reporters last week that the average server in Illinois earns nearly $29 an hour, they deliberately sought to obscure these inequalities that permeate the industry. Their cited dollar number is a statistical artifact, reflecting a small number of high-earning servers at upscale establishments, and is meant to deflect attention away from the actual experiences of the vast majority of restaurant workers. It says nothing about the hourly earnings of the busser, food runner, or café worker — and nothing about the undocumented workers now being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who are routinely excluded from tip pools and have no meaningful recourse against wage theft.

The Fight Didn’t End on Wednesday

Restaurant workers are among the most difficult to organize in any industry, as workplaces are small, owner relationships are intimate and often coercive, and turnover is high. While the Illinois Restaurant Association and allied real estate and landlord interests have PACs, lobbyists, and years of quid-pro-quo relationships with alderpersons, hospitality workers have only one another and the elected representatives who are supposed to protect them.

On Wednesday, thirty alderpersons chose the lobby over the workers. They claim that they did so in the name of the small business owner, a figure deployed in Chicago politics much as the small business owner is deployed everywhere: to humanize the interests of a class, in this case, of corporate restaurant groups, multimillion dollar operators, and the investment layer behind them, entities with significant capital, political access, and the power to shape policy in their favor.

Mayor Johnson bluntly named what happened: it was “shameful,” and the alders who voted for the freeze were throwing their backing behind a system that ensures service workers are paid less than a living wage. He is right. And his veto is a responsible use of executive power to check a council majority that has been captured by lobbying money and threats.

But a veto is not a movement. The workers who won One Fair Wage in 2023 won it through sustained organizing pressure, and what this week demonstrated is that the far-better-funded anti-worker side never stopped their plans to upend this change. The speed with which they got from parliamentary maneuver to council floor vote in under a week shows what organized money can do, and how important it is that workers — and the elected people who are supposed to represent us — stay ready to counter such efforts.

Chicago’s more than one hundred fifty thousand hospitality workers who cook meals, wash dishes, mix drinks, and serve customers in this city every single day are facing the same rising rents, grocery bills, and economic fear as everyone else in Chicago. They do not need to be told, yet again, to absorb someone else’s problems. They need the raises they were promised.