Thread by @maustermuhle

A quick 🧵 on what happened yesterday in the D.C. Council with Initiative 82: As you may have heard, the council rejected what would essentially have been a repeal of the initiative, which was approved by voters in 2022 and slowly phases out the tipped wage.

The proposal the council voted on would have dropped the base wage paid by employers to $8 (from $10 now), but set a "super minimum wage" of $20. (So if a worker getting the $8 base wage can't get to $20 with tips, the employer makes up the difference.)

It also would have set a 10% cap on service fees.

All of this was presented as a "compromise," since in theory employers would get a break on labor costs (with a lower base wage) but workers would be guaranteed a $20 min. wage, higher than the regular min. wage of $17.95.

The "compromise" was unveiled Sunday by @ChmnMendelson as part of his proposed changes to the 2026 budget, which got its first vote yesterday. He said he had heard a majority of councilmembers supported it, but it failed on a 7-5 vote. What happened?

The political reality is this: There's probably a majority of councilmembers who want to do something about Initiative 82 and what they worry are negative impacts on the city's restaurant industry. If that involves changing or repealing the initiative, so be it.

But the packaging and process matter, and this is where things fell short this week. @MayorBowser had proposed a straight repeal, which would drop the base wage down to $5.95 from $10 today. On paper that's a pretty big cut, so that wasn't going to happen.

That's why the "compromise" the council debated (which was partly negotiated by @CMBrookePinto) dropped the base rate only to $8, and then added in that "super minimum wage" and cap in service fees. Something for everyone, right? Well, no.

Once the proposal was made public, there were lots of questions about what this "super minimum wage" is. And opponents argued it wasn't much of a compromise, since employers would get a lower base wage and still get to charge service fees.

On top of that, Mendelson, who doesn't like I-82 and wants to repeal it, basically washed his hands of pushing councilmembers to vote for the compromise. Though he didn't it, he included it in his budget changes, so in a sense he owns it. But he didn't fight for it.

Finally, there was a view that what was essentially a repeal of a voter-supported initiative was being dropped into the budget the day before the vote. Critics of I-82 say it didn't get a full debate ahead of adoption, yet here the council was going to repeal with no debate.

All that combined led to councilmembers who otherwise may want to see changes made to help restaurants flee the apparent compromise option presented to them.

The point is that process and politics collided to sink what just a day prior had been presented as a "compromise" that a majority of the council would support.

What's next? Well, they might try again ahead of the final budget vote July 28. Failing that, this could get punted to the fall. But I'd bet most councilmembers don't want to keep kicking this can down the road. The tipped wage debate has been around since 2018, after all.

On top of all this, last month the council paused a planned increase in the base wage restaurants have to pay, freezing it at $10. But that expires in the fall. Needless to say, all of this uncertainty can't make businesses feel good.

Anyhow, politics is messy. If this was left to a secret vote, I'd bet Initiative 82 would have been repealed easily. But democracy isn't run behind closer doors, so how things look and how they are packaged matters a lot.

Last point: While it's easy to trash the council for going back and forth on this, the tipped wage is a very complex issue. The restaurant industry is very diverse, so you have employers and employees on both sides of this. "Listen to the workers!" Umm, which ones?

Yesterday, for example, Busboys and Poets owner Andy Shallal was lobbying councilmembers to reject any repeal of Initiative 82. And a local union had tipped workers speaking to reporters. But I've also been at the council when the anti-82 employers and employees show up.

And finally (I promise), what's additionally hard here is that it's *impossible* to look at where D.C. restaurants are today and say it's just because of I-82. There was a global pandemic, for one. And inflation. And so on. So many factors are driving things here.