It can often seem like there are no limits to how far many captains of industry will go to deceive, pressure, and take advantage of the workers they depend on. Exhibit A in this syndrome is the restaurant industry—or, to be fair to the many honorable restaurant owners out there—I will limit this discussion to the industry’s powerful lobbying organization: The National Restaurant Association, sometimes referred to as “the other NRA.”

In January of 2023, a New York Times article revealed that restaurants across the country were requiring job applicants to take food safety classes in order to get hired, usually from a training service owned by the NRA. The NRA then uses a sizeable chunk of its profits from those classes to fund its lobbying efforts. Since the NRA has consistently lobbied against mandated wage increases, this means that cooks, waiters, bartenders, and table bussers are subsidizing efforts to prevent them from earning a dependable, livable income.

The class fees—which, by the Times estimate, totaled $25 million, harvested between 2007 to 2021 from some 3.6 million restaurant workers—helped double the amount of money the NRA spent on lobbying and politics during those years. Those lobbying efforts have been extremely successful. Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has remained at a pitiful $7.25 an hour—which today is a mere fraction of the $25 to $30 an hour that a typical American worker needs these days just to cover the basic costs of living.

For most waiters and others who work for tips, the pay can be even more pitiful. With tipped restaurant workers, restaurants are allowed to pay a special “subminimum” wage of $2.13 an hour, a rate that has not been changed for 35 years.1 To be fair, restaurant wages are heavily boosted by tips, which brings the average income for waiters and waitresses to around $15 an hour. Still, even the restaurant industry reports that today, more than 75 percent of its workers are living paycheck to paycheck.

There’s something odd about the NRA’s persistent fight against minimum wage increases. Quite apart from how insulting it is for any business to ask its workers to survive on wages that don’t amount to a livable income, it actually hurts restaurants, if not immediately then eventually.

A graphic example of the NRA’s narrow outlook occurred in 2021, when a minimum wage hike was being considered in Congress. While the NRA was in full battle against the legislation, Newsweek published an article revealing that at many individual restaurant chains, the executives themselves weren’t particularly worried about the legislation. During an earnings call, Denny’s chief financial officer Robert Verostek told investors that in California, which had already seen increases in its minimum wage, Denny’s restaurants had “outperformed” the chain’s outlets in lower-wage states. The California franchises, Verostek said, “had six consecutive years of positive guest traffic—not just positive sales, positive guest traffic—as the minimum wage was going up.” Executives at other restaurant chains, including McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, and the Cheesecake Factory, gave investors much the same message; some even welcomed the wage increase.2

The executives’ sunny opinions happen to match the majority of high-quality studies that have been conducted on the effects of wage hikes.3 So why does the NRA perpetually lobby against legislation that would raise wages?

When I called the NRA to ask, Vanessa Sink, the organization’s director of media relations, explained the executives’ views this way: “Everybody has a different outlook, and a different story to tell.” She was insistent that restaurants, and even its workers, made out better with tips than with higher wages, and that most people don’t want the system to change; and she sent me a number of studies and fact sheets that reportedly proved this point.4

“Those numbers just aren’t true,” says Saru Jaramayan, the longtime executive director of One Fair Wage, an organization pushing for higher wages for people in the service industries, which employs more than 70 percent of the country’s non-farming workforce. OFW is particularly concerned about restaurants, whose workers have been found to be twice as likely as other wage earners to live in poverty, work without health benefits, and be dependent on food stamps. “People are so angry right now,” she said in a speech this March at the 2026 Bioneers conference. “If you tell them, ‘We can’t raise the minimum wage, prices will go up,’ they say, ‘What are you talking about? Prices have already gone up!’”

Would it matter much if food prices did rise? Not really. Most studies and restaurant reports show that significant wage increases would not cause menu prices to rise by more than a few percentage points. Obviously, if wage earners were to make a true livable wage, say $30 an hour—instead of the $15 or less that they average today—they wouldn’t have much trouble paying an extra 50 cents for their burger.

Jaramayan has been fighting against these blind spots for more than two decades. She’s worked with federal and state legislators, city officials, and individual restaurants, explaining how a business can raise wages and still survive, or even thrive. To make her case, she points to polling that shows overwhelming support for higher minimum wages in state after state. She cites data showing that the seven states that adopted higher wages for tipped workers, roughly 25 years ago, are among those with the strongest economic growth, even among restaurants.5

Jaramayan and her team also get into the weeds, helping restaurants build new business models, based on a “toolkit” developed at UC Berkeley’s business school. The toolkit shows restaurant managers where to compensate for new labor costs, so they can transition to higher wages gradually and avoid sudden shocks to their finances.

One of the restaurant owners who has received OFW’s help is Adam Orman, co-owner of Loca d’Oro, a “casual fine dining” establishment in Austin, Texas. Orman’s employees start at $17 an hour, and can move up to more than $30 an hour. All employees get paid time off, health benefits, and paid sick leave. The higher labor costs are covered by a 20 percent service charge on each bill.

To make all this work, Orman embarked on a PR campaign. He wrote Op-Eds in the local newspaper, and included explanations on the restaurant’s menu. “It started as just a thing we were doing,” he told me, “then it turned into more of a crusade.” Orman’s goal was to make the restaurant become a real community, where everyone would earn a livable wage and be treated with respect.

After his experience at Loca d’Oro, Orman doesn’t understand why people hold a dim view of raising the minimum wage, fearing that doing so might create job losses. Even if that were true (and in most cases, it isn’t), Orman says “nobody says that about corporate mergers and acquisitions, even though that’s precisely the purpose of a merger—for a lot of people to lose their jobs.”