By Jonathan Maze
Nation's Restaurant News, May 1, 2015
A year ago, Pi Pizzeria raised the lowest wage for workers to $10.10 an hour, giving some 275 employees at eight locations increases in pay — without raising menu prices.
“We looked at what goes into turnover and productivity, and how much it costs to train and hire a line cook,” said Chris Sommers, CEO of St. Louis-based Pi parent Euclid Hospitality Group. “We realized that with lower turnover, it’s easy to pay for this. We have loyalty. And good people are not jumping ship to go down the street to make an extra quarter.”
Today, Sommers is lending his voice to a group of business owners who are supporting a renewed push to increase the minimum wage. On Thursday, a group of Democrats introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which proposes increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 in one-year increments. ...
A few small-business groups have come out in favor of a minimum wage increase, including Business For a Fair Minimum Wage. The group helped organize business owners in the mid-2000s, before the last minimum wage increase [passed] in 2007, to $7.25 an hour. ...
The proposal seemingly has little chance of being passed, as Republicans control both the House and the Senate and have blocked efforts to raise the minimum wage in the past, including the proposal last year to increase the wage to $10.10. And $12, plus future increases, is an even greater hike.
“It’s not going to be easy,” [Business for a Minimum Wage CEO Holly] Sklar acknowledged. “That’s one of the reasons it’s important to have a solid business case, publicly.”
Improving the economy
Sklar’s group argues that raising the minimum wage would increase the buying power of more employees, which would help their businesses, and also improve the economy.
“If more people are walking around with money in their pocket, there’s more money to buy pizza,” Sommers of Pi said.
Most of Pi’s restaurants are in the St. Louis area, but it also has units in Miami, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.
Sommers said none of his workers were paid the minimum wage of $7.65 an hour in Missouri, but he had been thinking of increasing wages for some time.
“It was a concern to me that people were working so hard in our restaurants and were at best creeping by,” Sommers said. “They couldn’t afford a car repair. They couldn’t afford to put gas in the tank. People were showing up late or not showing up and getting penalized because they had no transportation.” ...
Copyright 2015 Penton