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PROPOSED RESOLUTION
RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF ONE FAIR WAGE FOR WORKERS IN COOK COUNTY AND ACROSS ILLINOIS
WHEREAS, the subminimum wage impacts a Cook County workforce of almost 78,000 tipped workers, 60 percent of whom are women and 46 percent are people of color; and
WHEREAS, under the Cook County Minimum Wage Ordinance, the minimum hourly wage for adults over the age of 18 was raised to $14 for non-tipped workers per hour and $8.40 for tipped workers per hour on the 1st of January 2024; and
WHEREAS, the "two-tiered" subminimum wage system exposes tipped workers to disproportional levels of poverty, financial uncertainty, exploitation of workers under the age of 18, sexual harassment; and
WHEREAS, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an estimated 2 million people are working as restaurant servers in the United States, and roughly 70 percent of them are women; and
WHEREAS, almost 13 percent of tipped workers are in poverty, compared with approximately 6 percent of non-tipped employees, according to a 2014 joint report by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley; and
WHEREAS, income inequality due to tipped wages disproportionately impacts sole providers and their households, whom are often Black, brown, Indigenous, and women of color and single mothers; and
WHEREAS, in a study conducted by Michael Paarlberg and Teofilo Reyes, between the New York and Pennsylvania workforces along the state's border found that on aggregate, in the year following the tipped-minimum hike, those New York border counties saw workers take-home pay go up an average of 7.4 percent and employment go up 1.3 percent, compared with Pennsylvania border counties, which saw a pay increase of 2.2 percent and a decline in employment of 0.2 percent; and
WHEREAS, restaurant sales in states that have implemented One Fair Wage grew by 17 percent, according to 2017-2018 restaurant trade lobby estimates,...
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