One thing we have learned this week is that wage and hour laws can be complicated.

First the Portland City Council bravely raised the city’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour (effective next year), only to find out that Mayor Michael Brennan and at least some members of the majority did not understand a provision of state law regarding workers who get tips.

Brennan and the others had intended to leave the tipped-worker minimum wage at $3.75, or half the state minimum wage, but because of the wording of state law, they may have unintentionally raised it to $6.35 an hour.

With six months to go before the wage goes into effect, Portland officials have time to try to fix the ordinance to fit their original intent or repeal it and start over. We think they should take a third course of action and leave the ordinance alone.

It may have been a mistake, but the council did the right thing. With as many as 40 percent of minimum-wage workers qualifying for the $3.75 hourly wage, raising it for everyone else doesn’t address the problem the council is trying to fix.

Restaurant owners have lobbied hard against any increase in the tipped wage, arguing that waitstaff can be some of the highest-paid workers in a business. But the image of a server taking home $35 an hour night after night is not a true picture of the tipped-wage worker.

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Under Maine law, you only have to make $30 a month in tips to qualify for the $3.75 wage. If your tips and hourly wage don’t average at least $7.50 an hour, you can file a complaint against your employer – but that’s asking a lot from some of the lowest-paid people in the state.

These laws are complicated, remember? Lawyers and City Council members don’t always understand them, so busboys and counter servers may not, either.

It’s true that some tipped workers can make a lot per hour. It’s also true that they can make very little.

During weekends in the summer the restaurants are full, but there are slow times, too. These workers are still covering rent, health insurance premiums and other expenses that don’t go down when the weather gets bad.

And while restaurant owners are required by law to be fair to their employees, diners in restaurants are not. They can choose to be generous, or cheap. Tipping is a purely voluntary activity, and workers can be uncompensated for their labor through no fault of their own. Restaurant owners can increase prices to offset a higher minimum wage, but waiters can’t do anything to get a cheapskate to pony up.

Portland is the first city in Maine to increase its minimum wage, but others around the country have already done that, including ones in states that have completely eliminated the subminimum wage for tipped workers. The restaurants in San Francisco have not gone out of business, and there’s no reason to think that the ones in Portland will, either.

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Because of their confusion over the impact of the new wage rules, Brennan and the council have been ridiculed this week for not knowing what they are doing. That’s unfair.

They did the right thing by increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and making future increases automatic. This is something the state and federal government should have done but failed to accomplish.

And, even if it was by accident, they did the right thing by giving tipped workers a raise.

They should let the ordinance they passed go into effect so it can help some people who really need it.


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