One Fair Wage Inc

OFW is a national coalition, campaign and organization seeking to lift millions of workers nationally out of poverty by ending all subminimum wages and increasing sustainability and workplace equity in the service sector. OFW conducts policy advocacy, voter engagement, worker and employer organizing, and culture shift activities to ultimately lift millions of primarily women and BIPOC workers out of poverty nationwide, and to engage them in the political process that governs their lives. 

COVID-19 has caused massive upheaval in the industry; with the national recognition of the greater need for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd and then the industry’s historic staffing crisis, thousands of restaurants nationwide are raising their wages voluntarily and seeking support to learn how to do so profitably, and also how to increase equity in their restaurants. Prior to the pandemic, the restaurant industry was one of the largest private sector employers and one of the largest employers of workers of color, employing nearly 14 million workers. However, it was also the lowest paying, largely due to the subminimum wage for tipped workers. At Emancipation, the restaurant industry sought to hire newly freed Black people, not pay them a wage, and have them live entirely on tips - mutating the notion of tips from being an extra or bonus on top of the wage to becoming a wage replacement. The subminimum wage became institutionalized when the Fair Labor Standards Act excluded tipped Black workers as long as tips brought them to the full minimum wage, their employers were exempt from paying them any wage. 

Today, the subminimum wage for tipped workers is still just $2.13 an hour at the federal level and below $5 an hour in 35 states. Nearly 70% of tipped workers nationwide are women, disproportionately women of color, who struggle with twice the poverty rate of other workers, use food stamps at double the rate, and experience the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry because they must tolerate inappropriate customer behavior to feed their families in tips. Black women tipped workers earn $5 an hour less than their white male counterparts for two reasons: 1) because they are segregated into lower-tipping restaurants (casual restaurants instead of fine dining) and lower-tipping positions even when they work in fine dining restaurants (bussers instead of servers and bartenders); and 2) because of customer racism in tipping.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 6 million restaurant workers lost their jobs; 60% reported that they faced severe challenges accessing unemployment insurance because they were told that their wages were too low to qualify for benefits. Millions are being asked to return to work for a subminimum wage that requires them to obtain tips from the very same customers on whom they are asked to enforce social distancing and mask rules - at a time when tips are down 50-75%, and compounding poverty for an already poverty-wage workforce. 

One Fair Wage seeks to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers and desegregate the industry, so that workers can obtain more remunerative fine dining service and management positions. We advance these twin goals through three main pillars of work: 1) policy shift - mobilizing workers and employers to call for policy to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers; 2) industry shift - training, supporting and organizing ‘high road’ employers through our national ‘high road’ employer association RAISE to raise their employees’ wages i and desegregate their restaurants racially; 3) and narrative shift activities - uplifting the stories of workers and ‘high road’ employers that elucidate how increased racial equity in the industry benefits everyone.