Opinion: Initiative 82 was supposed to help D.C.'s tipped workers. It did the opposite

As a professional server with over a decade of experience, I’m passionate about my job and committed to standing up for my fellow tipped workers. I chose this career path because I love everything about food and making people happy. Until recently, it’s been a career that offered great flexibility and compensation that allowed me to support my family in the expensive D.C. area. Initiative 82 put that all at risk, and I truly want the D.C. Council to follow Mayor Muriel Bowser’s lead to repeal it. 

I emphasize the word “professional” in professional server. When the D.C. restaurant scene was thriving, I was constantly educating myself on current food and beverage trends to be a qualified and highly sought-after employee. Success requires effort and investment, but the return was worth it. Servers at full-service restaurants reported earning a median of $27 per hour in one survey from the National Restaurant Association. The highest paid workers reported making over $40. In D.C. it was even better – tipped workers, including their support staff, used to have an opportunity to make extra during peak seasons. In my experience, servers and bartenders could earn $50-60 an hour during peak times, and around $40 an hour on steady shifts. But those days are now gone.

Since Initiative 82 began to take effect, my work has been cut by up to 10 hours a week. Newly implemented service fees at the restaurant where I work – many restaurants have implemented similar fees in order to avoid financial disaster – have decreased my average tip percentage from 23-25% to 18-20%. Customers are simply not willing to tip more than that when they’re already paying an additional 5% fee. And who can blame them?

Initiative 82 is a confusing and misleading measure. Passed by voters in 2022, it eliminated the tipped wage over several years and mandated that tipped workers be paid the full minimum wage in addition to their tips. Before this, if a tipped worker didn’t make the full minimum wage once their tips were accounted for, their employer made up the difference. In other words, Initiative 82 sought to fix a problem that didn’t exist—D.C.’s tipped workers were already making far above minimum wage and were protected by law.

Voters likely thought they were helping tipped workers by allowing them to get a higher hourly wage in addition to tips. But that’s not the case. When Initiative 82 went into effect in 2023, it had a dire impact on the District’s restaurant industry. Nearly 70% of full-service restaurants reported lower profitability in a 2024 survey conducted by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (which has advocated against I-82). Last year, more than 70 restaurants closed. 

All of that, and Initiative 82 hasn’t even gone into full effect yet—the tipped workers' wage has only been increased to $10 an hour so far. Things will get even worse if the initiative continues and the tipped worker hourly wage is increased by $2 an hour every year until it catches up with the standard minimum wage in 2027.

 Tipped workers never asked for this, and we don’t want it. We rallied against it in 2022 and have been living with the consequences of voters’ misguided belief that it would help us since it went into effect in 2023.      

I’d like to thank Mayor Bowser for her plan to include a measure to repeal Initiative 82 as part of her 2026 budget. I encourage the D.C. Council to vote yes on this measure. The change can’t come soon enough!

Yana Tarakanova is a professional restaurant server at Hank’s Oyster Bar in Washington, D.C.