Servers fight back!

Tomorrow, a delegation of servers wearing customized aprons (“Save Our Tips” is embroidered on the front, “Stop House Bill 258” is on the back) will arrive in Jefferson City to lobby members of the Missouri House of Representatives to vote no on House Bill 258, which would roll the minimum wage for tipped servers back to what it was 15 years ago. I was a waiter 15 years ago, so I can personally attest to how lousy that minimum wage was!

House Bill 258 has yet to be put on the calendar for a legislative vote, says Lara Granich, who is heading the “Save Our Tips” campaign for Missouri Jobs with Justice. “But it could be any day now.”

Granich tells me that it isn’t an enormous number of servers taking on this duty of serving up an anti-Bill 258 campaign. Between ten and twenty waiters and waitresses are scheduled to meet with legislators — they represent 53,000 servers in Missouri.

Ten or twenty? Is that enough, I wondered? “Definitely,” says Granich. “I don’t think the legislators realize how many people are watching this vote.”

Sponsored by State Representative Tim Jones of Eureka, Missouri, the bill would put employee wages back to $2.13 an hour. The Missouri Restaurant Association, unsurprisingly, is supporting the measure; in tough economic times, restaurants are looking at the bottom line.

Granich responds: “Most of the legislators we’ve spoken with see that it’s senseless to take wages out of Missouri during an economic crisis. A lot of those legislators have either been servers in the past or have sons and daughters who are waiting tables now, so they have a personal connection to the issue.”

Two local restaurant owners — who requested to remain nameless — are hoping House Bill 258 does pass: “It might keep us in business,” one of them insisted. “But I don’t want my staff to know how I feel. It’s a volatile issue.”