The budget Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law last month will raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour by 2016 — an increase that especially benefits women, who represent nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners in New York. But for hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers, higher pay is not yet assured. Tipped restaurant and hotel workers are still waiting to hear whether they will get a raise through the "wage board" process established by the budget.
Women are nearly two-thirds of New York's restaurant servers, the state's largest group of tipped workers. Many struggle to feed their own families on $5 per hour, the minimum cash wage for tipped food service workers. That's just $10,000 a year for full-time work, providing little guaranteed income when fluctuating tips make it difficult to cover expenses like rent and child care. It hardly comes as a surprise that restaurant servers in New York live in poverty at more than twice the rate of the state workforce as a whole.
State Labor Commissioner Peter Rivera should immediately convene a wage board to ensure that tipped hospitality workers are not left behind when the minimum wage begins to rise at the end of the year. This board should set the tipped minimum wage at 100 percent of the state minimum wage, as a number of states already do.
Cuomo has publicly promoted a "women's equality agenda" that rightly prioritizes measures to advance pay equity. Securing a $9 minimum wage for all New York workers, both tipped and non-tipped, could help close the gender wage gap.
Sara Niccoli is the director of the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State. Julie Vogtman is an attorney at the National Women's Law Center.