Herman Cain’s Enduring Lobbying Triumph. It's kept restaurant workers poor for decades. Mother Jones, 7.30.20.
Herman Cain, who died this week of COVID-19, lived quite a life: He was a fast-food magnate, a zealously anti–immigrant presidential candidate, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump to the very end, and more.
But his accomplishment with the most lasting impact happened during his days as the No. 1 lobbyist for the restaurant industry. During the 1990s, as president of the National Restaurant Association—an outfit representing mainly chain restaurants—Cain transformed the NRA “from a sleepy little trade association to earning a spot in Forbes magazine’s 1997 Survey of Washington’s 25 most powerful pressure groups, coming [in] at number 24,” as labor reporter Mike Elk put it in a 2011 piece. Cain earned his stripes as an ace lobbyist in 1994, when he emerged as a key cog in the successful corporate campaign to kibosh President Bill Clinton’s push to reform the healthcare system.
In 1996, Cain won his greatest triumph as a lobbyist. In a 2016 piece on the racist history of tipping, my colleague Maddie Oatman explained:
America’s first minimum-wage law, passed by Congress in 1938, allowed states to set a lower wage for tipped workers, but it wasn’t until the ’60s that labor advocates persuaded Congress to adopt a federal tipped minimum wage that increased in tandem with the regular minimum wage. In 1996, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, who was then head of the National Restaurant Association, helped convince a Republican-led Congress to decouple the two wages. The tipped minimum has been stuck at $2.13 ever since.
Restaurant employers were supposed to help servers earn tips to make up the difference between this tipped minimum wage and the regular minimum wage. But the result was by and large a disaster for restaurant servers.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1996, the tipped minimum was half the regular minimum wage; by 2014, it was “equal to a record low 29.4 % of the regular federal minimum wage of $7.25,” where it remains today. Around 2/3rds of workers making the tipped minimum are women, EPI reports.
Forcing women to rely on the whims of customers for the bulk of their livelihoods exposes them to sexual harassment: “Tipped workers have a median wage (including tips) of $10.22, compared with $16.48 for all workers.
While the poverty rate of non-tipped workers is 6.5%, tipped workers have a poverty rate of 12.8%.” Tipped workers rely on food stamps at a rate twice that of the general population. Around 2/3rds of workers making the tipped minimum are women...https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/07/herman-cains-enduring-lobbying-triumph/
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