Corby Kummer: Restaurant Industry Wage Theft Has Worsened During the Pandemic

Award-winning food writer Corby Kummer joined Boston Public Radio on Tuesday to discuss a pandemic-era increase of wage theft in the restaurant industry, following a recent report by the nonprofit restaurant advocacy group One Fair Wage.

“[Forty-three] states still allow a tipped minimum wage, which means as low as $2.13 an hour,” Kummer said. “Employees who are waitstaff have the liberty to take home all their tips based on that. The catch is that it’s on the restaurant manager to look to see, ‘what’s the average hourly earning of those tipped minimum wage staff members of mine,’ and ‘did it equal or better the state’s minimum wage.’ And if it didn’t, they — the managers — have to make up for it by paying them enough money to make them whole.”

“There’s never been much enforcement of this, and there’s less than ever enforcement now,” Kummer added. “There’s evidence that there’s more of this failure to make up for any of these losses than there was before the pandemic.”

Kummer is the executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.