48 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
construction and government workers; its
department that enforces wage-theft com-
plaints was formed in 2015 and has only
four employees. The chief of staff of the
Mayor’s Office of Labor, Manny Citron,
who is responsible for enforcement, says
that although he was “not a pro on what
our labor law says,” he believed that peo-
ple who didn’t earn $7.25 an hour with tips
“could just be a bad waiter,” and he falsely
asserted that state law guarantees only
$2.83 an hour. Without any documenta-
tion showing that cash tips didn’t bring
waitresses to the minimum wage, he says,
it’s hard for his office to take any action.
In July, the House passed the Raise
the Wage Act, which would phase out
the tipped minimum wage nationwide
by 2027, eventually bringing all low-wage
workers to $15 an hour. “Every member of
this institution should be fighting to put
more money in the pockets of workers in
their communities,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi
said on the House floor when the bill was
passed. In 2019 alone, at least 12 states as
politically varied as Pennsylvania, North
Carolina and Indiana introduced legisla-
tion to end the tipped minimum wage.
But the Raise the Wage Act has lit-
tle chance of advancing in the GOP-
controlled Senate. It has vocal opponents
in the NRA and the Restaurant Workers of
America (RWA), a group of servers who
want to keep tipping. “It’s a system that
works,” says Joshua Chaisson, a Maine
waiter who is a co-founder of the RWA.
Restaurant owners say they aren’t the
ones who should pay the price of Amer-
ica’s shift to a service economy. “Today,
the middle class has been gutted, but
[lawmakers] are trying to legislate entry-
level low-skilled jobs into living-wage jobs
where you can raise a family in New York,
one of the most expensive places in the
world,” says Andrew Riggie, executive di-
rector of the New York City Hospitality Al-
liance, which represents hotels and restau-
rants. “We can’t address all societal ills on
the shoulders of small- business owners.”
in the long, final days of sum-
mer, business at Broad Street Diner has
been slow. Munce tries to stay posi-
tive. The customers and staff of Broad
Street Diner are her family, more or less,
and not just because her sister, Jeanne,
is also a waitress there. Munce speaks
fondly of one of her regulars, Bill, an
elderly man who likes his toast dark as a
hockey puck. “They’ve got the best girls
in here, and I’ll tell ya, not one grouch,”
Bill says to no audience in particular one
day this summer.
For Munce, it all adds up: the freebies,
the walkouts, the cops receiving a 50% dis-
count, the mess-ups from the kitchen—
each one a knock to her take-home pay.
“I am a people person. But at the end of
the day, your compliments and smiles are
not enough,” she says during one of her
shifts, a sheen of sweat on her forehead.
She hopes she can give her daughter a
better life than she had growing up. HerEconomy
VIEWPOINT
We need bipartisanship to fix theeconomy. That seems impossible now
By Barney FrankGROWING UNEASINESS ABOUT a
possible slowdown in our economy has
raised the question of how a divided
government will respond to bad news. A
recent historical precedent offers both
encouragement and discouragement.
In 2008, constructive cooperation
between Republican President George
W. Bush and a Democratic Congress
kept a bad situation from getting much
worse. Discussions about partisanship
today call to mind the description of a
form of amnesia in which the sufferers
forget everything except their grudges.
Memories of partisan battles stay
fresh, while examples of the parties
working together are ignored.
Exhibit A is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
reputation. She was demonized
throughout the 2018 campaign as
hyper partisan, despite leading the
Democratic majority to come to the
aid of Bush in 2008. Notably, that
was a presidential- election year, when
the motivation for congressional
leaders opposed to the President to
sit by and benefit from his troubles is
strong. But that January, Pelosi not
only responded to the Administration’s
plea for an anti recession program
but, in deference to the White House’s
anti spending obsession, agreed to
rely on tax rebates for the short-term
stimulus. Then, less than two months
before the election, Bush officialscame to Congress seeking billions to
prevent the impending collapse of the
global economy. Again Democratic
leaders agreed to help. Senator Mitch
McConnell would later reciprocate by
announcing that the defeat of President
Obama in 2012 was his No. 1 priority.
Despite this rebuff, I believe
congressional Democrats would still
work with the Administration to avert an
economic downturn if it were possible
for them to do so. The issue is that our
ability to work in a cooperative manner
in 2008 was based on the existence of
a coherent, unified, rational approach
from the President and his chief
economic officials. The sad reality is
that none of these adjectives are likely
to apply later this year or next. Steven
Mnuchin vs. Mick Mulvaney vs. Larry
Kudlow vs. Jerome Powell vs. Peter
Navarro multiplied by random tweets
adds up to an incoherence that will
have Democrats shaking our heads,
not Administration officials’ hands.
In 2008, when it came to working
with Bush’s economic team, we said
yes when asked if we could go there.
Sadly, the answer to that question if
it’s posed again comes from Gertrude
Stein: “There is no there there.”Frank, a Democrat, is the former
chairman of the House Committee on
Financial Servicesdad served in Vietnam and her mom al-
ways scraped by on odd jobs, she says,
but it’s harder to string together a living
these days. She lives a couple of miles
from where she grew up. Is she really
doing better than they did? She tells her
daughter that education is the most im-
portant thing, that she needs to get good
grades, no matter what. “I say, ‘I just want
you to be better than me,’ ” she says. Not
that she’d steer her daughter away from
waitressing, necessarily. If you’re a people
person, Munce says, it can be fun to talk
to strangers all day. Depending on them
for tips, though, is something else.