Statement from Boulder Progressives opposing Colorado HB25-1208 - Local Governments Tip Offsets for Tipped Employees

In four local jurisdictions, people supporting the needs of low-wage employees worked hard with their local leaders to raise the minimum wage, striking the right balance between workers and owners of businesses for their individual communities. We are deeply troubled that HB 25-1208 is an end-run by business owners on the careful compromises that were struck, to the detriment of hardworking hourly employees in tipped positions in Boulder, Boulder County, Denver, and Edgewater.

We take as a starting point the concept of what a tip is supposed to be. This gratuity is given to service workers as a bonus for good service – it was never intended to be a base-wage pay-as-you-go system, and it is certainly not understood by patrons paying tips to be a wage subsidy for the owners of those businesses. In fact, unfair efforts to deprive tipped workers of the full value of their tips have been attempted time and again by unscrupulous managers and business owners, and are generally regarded as illegal. Requiring tipped workers to use a portion of the gratuities they receive to subsidize restaurant owners’ obligation to pay their workers at the least minimum wage is unfair.

In Denver, for example, this change would cost full-time waitstaff around $8,300 per year. Expecting people who are making less than a living wage to sacrifice thousands of dollars is unacceptable. It is not simply an inconvenience to tipped workers. It is a life-altering blow that will take away their ability to afford necessities like transportation, daycare, and rent.

In Boulder, the tipped minimum wage for 2025 is 80.6% of the local minimum wage, which is close to the 79.61% in the rest of Colorado. This bill would reduce Boulder’s tipped minimum wage to only 75.72% of the local minimum wage, a dramatic reduction. The situation would be even worse in Edgewater (71.37%), unincorporated Boulder County (71.15%), and Denver (62.68%).

Colorado minimum wage law has for some time included a tip credit of $3.02 per hour as a worker-paid subsidy for the restaurant industry. Before that tip credit is changed, we are requesting that state legislators interested in this issue do the hard work of bringing together both workers and business owners to discuss what is just and fair for workers, and supportive of a successful restaurant industry. That didn’t happen here. Accordingly, we urge you to vote H.B. 25-1508 down or to ask the sponsors to withdraw it and start again by bringing workers and owners of businesses to the table together to consider solutions that benefit the industry as a whole – workers and owners alike.