Heather Curtis
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON (WMAL) – D.C. restaurant workers may not be getting the standard minimum wage by 2026, even though voters in June passed a ballot initiative hiking their minimum wage to $15 an hour by that year.

Mayor Muriel Bowser and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson met Friday with tipped restaurant workers for a roundtable discussion on repealing Initiative 77. It comes ahead of a council meeting Tuesday where repeal bills will be taken up.

The idea behind the one fair wage initiative – supported by the D.C. office of the New York-based Restaurant Opportunities Center United – was to increase pay for tipped restaurant workers by raising their hourly minimum wage from $3.89 to $15, but many restaurant workers argue they already make more than minimum wage. Before the June vote, Kathy Hollinger, president of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, told WMAL some tipped workers make anywhere from $20 to more than $45 an hour. Opponents of Initiative 77 fear if customers know restaurant workers are earning the same minimum wage as workers in other industries, then they will stop tipping, and those workers will earn less.

“This initiative is bad for me, my coworkers, my back of house staff and my fellow restaurants that make D.C. the great place that it is,” said Alex Blanton – a server at Duke’s Grocery on 17th Street NW – at a press conference after the roundtable.

ROC has taken to social media to urge people to contact council members and tell them they are going against the will of the people by overturning the initiative.

“What this says to D.C. is, it’s nice that you have an opinion, but you don’t count,” said a participant at a Protect 77 pray-in Thursday at Mendelson’s office. ROC posted videos of the pray-in on Twitter.

Mendelson said he and other council members aren’t “gleeful” about repealing the initiative, but they have a responsibility to ensure that the city’s laws are just and fair.

“Sometimes the council gets it wrong, and sometimes the voters get it wrong, and, in both cases, the council has the obligation to fix it,” Bowser said.

Council member Jack Evans said they have overturned “bad laws” in the past.

Mendelson contends he is not ignoring the people’s vote.

“They voted for me, and I was against the initiative,” he said.

Tuesday the council is expected to vote on Mendelson’s emergency repeal legislation, which would temporarily stop the initiative from going into effect on Oct. 9 as scheduled. The council is also scheduled to take one of two votes on a permanent repeal bill.

Copyright 2018 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Mayor Muriel Bowser @MayorBowser via Twitter)