Tipped workers and their advocates fought long and hard to get Initiative 77 onto the Washington, D.C. primary ballot in June. The proposition, which won with double-digit margins, demands establishments pay their tipped workers the full minimum wage, as opposed to the paltry $3.89 base pay for tipped workers.
But if the D.C. government gets its way, the victory will be short-lived. Seven city council members introduced a bill last week to overturn the proposition, thanks to a well-funded campaign from the restaurant industry that continues on despite defeat at the ballot.
The move has outraged voters. After all, the initiative won with a healthy margin. Only Ward 3 — the whitest ward in the district, and the one with the highest median income — voted against the measure. Compare that to the predominantly Black Wards 7 and 8, where the initiative won with its highest levels of support.
But despite its popularity, the council members of five of the city’s eight wards — all of which voted in favor of Initiative 77 — joined DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson and Councilmember-At-Large Anita Bonds to introduce a bill to suppress the voice of voters and maintain the subminimum tipped wage.
D.C. residents already know something about having their will ignored. District license plates read “Taxation Without Representation” — a reference to the lack of a D.C. vote in Congress. The district’s laws and spending are already subject to congressional authority, which means the city’s governance often turns into a bargaining chip during national debates.
City council members have decried the ability of Congress to interfere in how the city is run. Mendelson even called it “antithetical to democratic principles.” So why don’t they see their actions as belonging to that same anti-democratic tradition?
A coalition of worker and voting rights advocates gathered outside the city council offices on Friday to demand the local government respect the voices of the people they claim to represent. Restaurant worker Trupti Patel was appalled by the move of the D.C. council to block the will of the voters. “We did everything by the book,” Patel said. “This is outrageous.”
She was joined by Rev. Graylan Hagler, who asked why the same city officials pushing for D.C. statehood — an effort to give the district’s people fair representation in their own government — would repeal a voter-backed effort to raise wages.
“Calling for statehood is more than a speech,” Hagler said. “You cannot bellyache about the lack of statehood and then turn around penalize people because they didn’t vote the way your economic benefactors wanted them to.”
Diana Ramirez, who works for the D.C. chapter of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, pointed out that the Democratic city council members are now aligned with an unlikely ally in their fight to overturn the initiative: the same Congressional Republicans they condemn for interfering in the district’s local governance. Rep. Mark Meadows, who heads up the far-right Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Gary Palmer introduced a rider to the 2019 D.C. appropriations bill that would block the city government from carrying out Initiative 77.
“We get upset when Congressional Republicans are trying to meddle with our laws,” Ramirez said. “Well guess what. They did. They’re doing it again. And the D.C. council is aligned with them.”
But while D.C. voters are particularly vulnerable to having their vote suppressed, the anti-democratic trend of attacking ballot initiatives is national, warned Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. “In 2017 and 2018, BISC saw more than 100 pieces of legislation in 24 states that attempt to undermine the ballot measure process,” Fields Figueredo told the crowd.
“In many cities across the country, in many states across the country — and we know that here in D.C. — elected officials are more beholden to big business, special interests, and trade organizations like the National Restaurant Association than the actual people who voted them in office.” Fields Figueredo said. “And that’s not right. These attacks are lawlessness.”
Negin Owliaei is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits Inequality.org.
The Wind Cries Freedom, the new book from Z co-founder Michael Albert, is a sweeping oral history of a future American revolution.
Through thirty interconnected chapters, it draws out the strategies, failures, turning points, and hard-won wisdom of a movement that called itself the Revolutionary Participatory Society. These are not the polished memoirs of politicians: they are the unfiltered accounts of people who organized in neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, stadiums, courthouses, and places of worship, and kept a shared vision alive through cynicism and exhaustion.
The result is speculative political fiction that reads like history: messy, human, and quietly hopeful in the way that only real experience and long thought can produce.
Get your copy and peruse more features on the book’s website below.
“Read it, argue with it, but don’t look away. The future it recalls is one we must still fight to deserve.”
Yanis Varoufakis
“The most unusual and intriguing combination of prophecy, manifesto, and movement building manual that I have ever encountered.”
Bill Fletcher Junior
“This work fills a huge gap in our social movement literature.”
Cynthia Peters
Subscribe
All the latest from Z, directly to your inbox.
This is your article this month.
We’re glad you keep coming back. If Z’s work has informed, challenged, or inspired you, that’s no accident: there are no paywalls, no ads, and no billionaire owners here, and there never will be. Independent media survives because readers choose to support it.
Billionaires fund their own media. We fund ours. Help us reach 1,000 sustaining donors:
Your reading count is stored only in your browser and is never sent to us.
Sound is muted by default. Tap 🔊 for the full experience
CRITICAL ACTION
Critical Action is a longtime friend of Z and a music and storytelling project grounded in liberation, solidarity, and resistance to authoritarian power. Through music, narrative, and multimedia, the project engages the same political realities and movement traditions that guide and motivate Z’s work.
If this project resonates with you, you can learn more about it and find ways to support the work using the link below.
Independent media is not disappearing because the ideas are weak.
It is disappearing because platforms reward speed, outrage, and algorithmic visibility over thoughtful analysis.
More than 100,000 people read Z every month, free of paywalls, ads, and billionaire owners. It takes fewer than 1 in 100 of them to fund all of it: 1,000 donors who keep Z independent, for everyone, and build what comes next.
