Organizers are gearing up for their final push in a referendum campaign to undo Michigan’s 2025 minimum wage law. They held a series of events in southeast Michigan Friday featuring actress and activist Jane Fonda to get the word out.
The law, passed last February, will raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour next year. But it will also allow businesses to pay tipped workers, like servers and bartenders, half of what everyone else makes, once fully implemented in 2031.
It replaced a policy that would have also raised the minimum wage over time. But the original version would have created one base pay for all adults, regardless of whether they make tips.
The group behind the referendum, One Fair Wage, wants to bring it back after fighting for that higher pay for years. Tameka Ramsey is the group’s state director for Michigan.
“When you have billionaires taking space trips for fun but you can’t pay people a living wage, we’re fighting to make sure that everyone, tipped workers, hourly workers are getting their fair share and nobody has to work two or three jobs in order to take care of their family,” Ramsey said during a morning event at Yum Village in Detroit.
A successful referendum would allow voters to reject the 2025 law and have the original policy go into effect. One Fair Wage needs to submit at least 223,099 signatures by March 24 to get on the ballot.
One Fair Wage leadership said it wants to submit at least 300,000 to have a healthy cushion in case some are ruled invalid. So far, it said it’s collected about 50,000 since launching before Christmas.
If the group does qualify for the ballot, the 2025 law would be paused until voters can weigh in. John Sellek, who worked with a coalition of hospitality industry businesses and workers to pass it, said that could spell trouble.
“Increased costs for anybody (are) a problem because everyone is suffering from higher costs in everything that they buy. Restaurants are no different. If wages continue to be artificially changed in a way that restaurants can’t handle, there’s no secret pot of money to pay that with,” Sellek said.
Minimum wage increases have been in court — and at the ballot box — for years
The fight over whether tipped workers should receive a full base wage or a partial one, with the expectation tips make up the difference, has played out for the better part of a decade in Michigan.
In 2018, One Fair Wage collected signatures to get the question on the ballot. The then-Republican controlled legislature, however, used a maneuver known as “adopt and amend” to pass it into law before it went before voters and then water it down.
One Fair Wage sued and, in 2024, won when the state Supreme Court declared the maneuver unconstitutional. Businesses and hospitality workers panicked at the Supreme Court’s suggested fix and successfully convinced the state Legislature to again change the law before it could take effect.
One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman said that was wrong.
“Restaurant workers have led the fight for $15, for a living wage for all workers in Michigan and have been at the forefront of that. So, for them to be the ones cut out, is grossly unjust and unfair,” she said.
State Senator Kevin Hertel (D-St. Clair Shores) sponsored the 2025 minimum wage law. He sees it differently, arguing it was right to listen to the throngs of small business owners and restaurant workers who showed up to the state Capitol in favor of keeping the lower tipped wage.
“We met with small business owners, we met with the employers, we understood the effect that it would have, and we increased the wages so that everybody is making more without creating that entire shock to the system that we think would have a pretty dramatic impact,” Hertel said.
The 2025 law, while keeping the lower tipped wage intact, sped up the timeline for the overall minimum wage increases faster than One Fair Wage’s original plan would have.
That means non-tipped Michiganders could see their current minimum wage dip a little in the short term should the referendum succeed. It’s another factor both sides of the issue would have to weigh at the ballot.
One Fair Wage and Save MI Tips, the hospitality industry coalition, have dismissed each other’s level of base support.
On one side, Save MI Tips has accused One Fair Wage of being a primarily out-of-state organization. Sellek said it should leave Michigan’s 2025 law alone.
“To intentionally seek to disrupt a major compromise that was years in the making that took place between Democrats, Republicans, and the governor last February is incredibly selfish and self-serving,” he said.
Meanwhile, One Fair Wage said the opposition relies too much on funding from big money interests like well-off restaurant chains. Fonda referenced the years of pushback the campaign has faced.
“The fact that our opponents are so set on destroying what we’ve tried to do which is to allow people to earn a livable wage and have some dignity,” Fonda said, “What this tells us is this is an important issue. This is a foundational issue.”
