The Kenmore is among the restaurants owned by Doug Bacon, who is leading a group opposed to a ballot question on tipped wages. (Photo by Gintautas Dumcius)

SIX OF THE 10 questions vying to be on the ballot this year in Massachusetts have California roots.

Five of the questions deal with rideshare app drivers and are being pushed by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart – all of them from San Francisco. The sixth question, which would hike the minimum wage for workers who depend on tips, is being spearheaded by a nonprofit group called One Fair Wage that is headed by the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California Berkeley.

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and the author of a book of the same name, said the restaurant sector’s staffing crisis is proof that the businesses need to raise wages in order to recruit staff. 

One Fair Wage is organizing in more than a dozen states to eliminate what it calls the sub-minimum wage. The organization’s website says its members include nearly 300,000 restaurant and service workers and nearly 3,000 restaurant employers. 

In Massachusetts, employers can pay tipped workers $6.75 an hour, but gratuities have to make up the rest of pay of up to $15 an hour. The Massachusetts ballot question would require employers to pay the full minimum wage of $15 an hour. Workers could still be tipped on top of the full minimum wage.

Jayaraman said restaurant workers have been waiting for the Legislature to address tipped workers’ wages for more than a decade and launched the ballot question because they are tired of waiting. “Enough is enough,” she said.

Ballot questions, whether they succeed or fail, will have a major impact on Massachusetts. Follow the debate with in-depth coverage by CommonWealth Beacon.

Rep. Sam Montaño, who represents the Boston neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Mission Hill, is among the lawmakers supportive of bringing tipped workers to a full $15 minimum wage, but less than enthused by the efforts of the group behind the ballot measure. The lawmaker said the coalition behind the ballot measure hasn’t been communicative and didn’t tell supportive lawmakers they were going to the ballot.

“Honestly, the ballot measure is obviously more of a blunt tool,” Montaño said. “If we got to finesse this in the Legislature, we might have a better deal that works for the restaurant industry and for making sure folks are getting paid equitably. Nobody wants to go to the ballot. That’s not anyone’s preferred method of legislating.”

Restaurateurs are rallying against the ballot measure, arguing it would upend their industry. Doug Bacon, who owns multiple restaurants in Boston, also suggests One Fair Wage doesn’t really understand Massachusetts. “People coming in from academia, from California, are trying to tell Massachusetts people what’s best for them,” said Bacon.

He pointed to a second section of the proposed ballot measure that is controversial within the industry. The second section, he said, eliminates the ban on sharing tips with people who don’t interact with customers such as office workers and managers at the restaurant.

Currently, just waitstaff, service employees, and bartenders can participate in what’s known as a tip pool. “Compensation will go down (for waitstaff) because more people will be in the tipping pool,” he said.

Bacon is an executive board member of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, which is backing the opposition and has also filed a lawsuit saying the ballot proposal illegally combines two separate policy topics: hiking the minimum wage and tip-pooling.

Overall, the ballot measure would force restaurateurs to change their business model, potentially through the addition of service charges, elimination of tipping, or price hikes, according to Bacon.

Bacon declined to say how much his campaign is willing to spend to defeat the ballot measure. “We’re prepared to work very hard to educate the public about this ill-conceived proposal,” he said. “It’s going to be expensive but we’re also planning to wage a grassroots campaign.”

Bacon’s restaurants include The Kenmore in Kenmore Square, the Westland in Fenway, The Avenue Bar and Grill in Allston, and Harry’s Bar and Grill in Brighton, among others. While attending Boston University, Bacon worked as a waiter and bartender in Back Bay restaurants. 

Jayaraman dismissed Bacon’s concerns about the tip-pooling leading to waiters and waitresses making less. There will be a better team-building environment within the restaurant’s entire workforce, she said. 

Jayaraman said other restaurant owners are backing her ballot measure, including those behind Mamaleh’s Delicatessen in Brookline.

But on the grassroots side, a top union may end up sitting on the sidelines if the measure does land on the ballot in November.

“I think our position is, frankly, mixed,” said Carlos Aramayo, president of UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents hospitality workers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It has 12,000 members, some of whom work in hotel restaurants and bars. The union also has service workers at casinos, Logan International Airport, and Fenway Park.

Aramayo said the union supports the first part of the ballot measure involving a full minimum wage for tipped workers. But he said the union does not support the second part, dealing with tip-pooling and expanding the beneficiaries beyond the service workers who work in the front of the restaurant with customers.

“What I worry about is you’re going to take gratuity, good middle class income, and you’re going to dilute that among a much bigger group of people,” he said. “That does really blow up the model that we have fought hard for for many years.”