Lawmakers from over the bridge to renew push for service worker minimum wage in Ocean City city event
OCEAN CITY, Md – Maryland lawmakers from across the state will gather to participate in a “Server for an Hour” event during the Maryland Association of Counties Summer Conference at On The Bay Seafood Thursday.
As part of this initiative, elected representatives, ranging from county council members to state legislators, will don aprons and serve customers to promote awareness for phasing out the subminimum wage for service workers in Maryland.
Montgomery County Council Member Will Jawando says the venue, On The Bay Seafood, already offers their workers full wages with tips on top in what they are calling a model for the whole state.
Montgomery and PG County will introduce measures to implement the practice this September and say a state-wide effort will be re-introduced this January.
Jawando says it’s a way to protect workers, but representatives from the eastern shore say it’s a mistake they stopped last session and will seek to block it again.
“There are ways to make sure that you can still be a profitable business and not have it be on the backs of paying people a sub-minimum wage, which is just not fair and people can’t live off of,” Jawando says adding ” one of the parts of the movement is to help business owners to do that, to show them how they can look at their profit and loss statement and make it work between the combination of potential service charges or maybe, you know, or price increases.”
Delegate Tom Hutchinson says he was glad to see the state-wide effort fail in 2023, and says businesses in his district would be harmed if the law were to come into effect state-wide.
“In Cambridge, there’s, RAR brewery and all the servers that are there, that’s a big employer that’s added a lot of jobs to the community, and I think it would be detrimental to them,” he said.
Hutchinson tells us the measure would also harm workers under the age of 18 in these positions, as he says the lower pay allows them to work in positions that may otherwise be filled by older workers.
