William Simpson
Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III says the restaurant chain is making its “largest additional investment in our workforce” in its 68-year history, increasing waiters’ base pay to three dollars an hour.
The raises take effect this month and follow a more than year-long campaign led by a union representing service workers in the South. The effort involved strikes and petitions calling for higher wages, safer working conditions and the end of mandatory salary deductions for meals.
Waffle House’s base pay — excluding tips — will increase to at least $5.25 per hour for all of the company’s 2,000 locations by June 2026, with additional increases based on seniority and shifts, Rogers said in a statement. video to employees.
Many restaurants in the US offer what is known as a “minimum tip wage.” Under labor law, they can only offer $2.13 per hour if that amount combined with tips at least matches the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, where it has been since 2009.
Waffle House isn’t changing its policy of having servers keep their own gratuities because it would be “crazy to go the route of service charges instead of tips,” said Rogers, who also dismissed the idea of pooling tips.
Rogers also said Waffle House will try to offset the additional labor costs by increasing menu prices, noting that customers in the chain’s urban locations would be among those charged more.
The company did not disclose any actions to address other worker concerns, including safety, especially at locations that are open 24/7 and are known to attract disorderly customers.
In April. a fight at a Waffle House near the Ohio State University campus led to a shooting that killed a manwhile in February one early morning filming in a Waffle House in Indianapolis killed one person and injured five others.
Waggle House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Privately owned Waffle House operates about 2,000 locations, including hundreds in Georgia, where the company is headquartered.
Some states have taken steps to raise wages for restaurant workers, who are more likely to live in poverty than workers in other fields. In April, for example, the minimum wage for most fast-food workers in California rose to $20 per hourthe highest base in the US restaurant industry.
Before California’s wage increase, the highest-paid fast-food workers in the U.S. were in Washington state, which has a minimum wage of $16.28 per hour.
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