Labor Is Not a Line Item.

Remarks delivered in support of One Fair Wage

Good afternoon.

You’ve heard the policy case.

You’ve heard the history.

You’ve heard the moral argument.

I’m speaking as a small business owner.

I’ve opened restaurants.

I’ve closed restaurants.

I’ve made payroll when it hurt.

Restaurants don’t run on branding.

They run because people show up.

Cooks.

Servers.

Dishwashers.

Without them, the door doesn’t open.

Here’s the operational truth:

The tipped subminimum wage doesn’t protect restaurants.

It destabilizes them.

It forces workers to build their lives on unpredictable income.

Unpredictability creates stress.

Stress drives turnover.

Turnover destroys culture.

Stable wages create stable teams.

Stable teams create stable businesses.

That isn’t ideology.

That’s operations.

There’s another truth small business owners understand:

We need working people to earn enough to participate in the economy.

If the people in our neighborhoods can’t afford to eat out, small businesses suffer.

Raising wages isn’t anti-restaurant.

It strengthens the customer base we depend on.

Now we need to be honest about history.

The subminimum wage grew out of a post-Emancipation economy that refused to guarantee wages to Black workers. That foundation matters.

When we defend this structure, we are defending something rooted in racial exclusion, whether we acknowledge it or not.

And let’s talk about representation.

The National Restaurant Association does not speak for small Black-owned restaurant operators like me. It does not speak for owners trying to correct history rather than preserve it.

In 2023, it was revealed that the NRA used revenue from its ServSafe training program, paid for by millions of workers, to lobby against minimum wage increases and worker protections.

Workers paid.

The NRA lobbied against them.

That isn’t representation.

That’s extraction.

Here in New York, the Restaurant Alliance continues to defend the same outdated wage model under the language of “protecting restaurants.”

Protecting who?

Because it isn’t protecting the people who hold our businesses together.

If your business model collapses when your workers earn a guaranteed wage, the problem isn’t the wage.

It’s the model.

We are seasoned operators.

We understand systems.

We know when something is broken.

This is broken.

We cannot call ourselves leaders while hiding behind trade groups that defend volatility at the bottom.

We cannot say we value dignity while defending a structure rooted in racial exclusion.

We cannot claim integrity while outsourcing risk to the lowest-paid person in the room.

Let me be clear.

If your profitability depends on someone else’s instability, that isn’t entrepreneurship.

That’s extraction.

And if we defend a wage system born from racial exclusion because it feels financially safer, then we are choosing comfort over justice.

We are choosing preservation over leadership.

And this system will change.

The only question that will remain is simple:

Did we stand on the side of dignity?

Or did we defend the machinery that kept it out of reach?

I know where I stand.

History will decide where the rest of us stood.