Muriel Bowser is proving that Black faces in high places don’t break systems, they grease them. While slashing wages for tipped workers and handing billionaires stadium deals, D.C.’s mayor is the engine of gentrification in D.C.
Earlier this month, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser introduced legislation to repeal a law that gradually increases the minimum wage for hospitality workers who rely heavily on customer tips for their bread and butter. If the D.C. City Council approves Bowser’s proposal, it would represent the second time that the city’s elected officials have overturned referendums in which a majority of voters endorsed pay raises for restaurant workers. Fifty-six percent of voters approved the initiative in 2018, and endorsed it by an even wider margin, 74 percent, when it was put on the ballot four years later.
In a May 6th press conference to unveil her 2026 budget proposal, Bowser said that reversing the wage increase was necessary to ease the financial burden on restaurateurs who experienced a record number of closures, 74, in 2024, according to the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington.
Additionally, Bowser said that it was important to “cut red tape” to reassure investors who might otherwise be rattled by a commercial environment that includes rising rental and labor costs, the Trump administration’s chaotic trade policies, and its deep cuts to the federal workforce. Said Bowser:
“We are a hospitality-based economy…it’s the hospitality sector that allows people to buy homes, put their kids through college…and afford to live here. And if restaurants close, there are no jobs.”
Concluding she said:
“We need to have a policy environment that makes it easy to do business in D.C.,”
Midway through her third term, Bowser’s pro-business strategy is characteristic not only of her tenure but of each of the four African Americans who succeeded the iconic Marion Barry in the mayor’s office. Since Barry stepped down in 1999, the erstwhile “Chocolate City” has undergone a stunning transformation, openly courting affluent childless couples, driving up the cost of housing, privatizing its school system and pushing out African Americans who accounted for 61 percent of the population in 2000 but only 42 percent today.
That number is likely to continue to plummet, according to affordable housing advocates, labor leaders, and rank-and-file employees who complain that Bowser isn’t done nickel and diming the city’s workers, despite economic forecasts that the city will lose $1 billion in federal revenues over the next three years. In addition to her proposal to rescind the legislation raising wages for tipped workers –known as Initiative 82 or I 82–she announced in April a plan to commit more than $1 billion of taxpayer money to build a $4 billion stadium for the city’s NFL franchise, the Washington Commanders, at the site of the old Robert F. Kennedy venue that was shuttered in 1997.
While Bowser and other city officials assert that the deal will generate $2 billion in new tax revenues, Geoffrey Propheter, an expert on stadium financing deals and a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver, told reporters that the city is effectively giving the Commanders as much as a 90 percent reduction in rent over the life of the lease agreement.
“This whole entire thing is a land grab.”
Benjy Cannon, a spokesman for UNITE HERE Local 25 representing hotel, restaurant and casino workers in the Washington DC metropolitan area, told Black Agenda Report:
“The stadium deal would give almost a billion dollars to a billionaire football owner and does not come with a public commitment to bring either good jobs or affordable housing which DC sorely needs as seen by the growing homeless population. And the attempt to repeal I-82 is profoundly anti-democratic. What message does it send to DC voters to say that this policy that you twice voted for, well, you can’t have it?
Cannon and others note that consumer spending fuels the local economy, and a livable wage is the lifeblood of a sustainable economy as evidenced by the United States’ recovery from the Great Depression. Conversely, lowering employees’ wages incentivizes consumer borrowing and the combination of increasing debt and shrinking household income has sapped the global economy of its vitality in the 52 years since the U.S. engineered the coup that overthrew Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, and installed the rightwing dictatorship of Agosto Pinochet.
Pinochet’s bone-deep budget cuts created the template for ruinous government financial policies known as “austerity,” that spread from Chile to Chicago, and Cairo to Cape Town. Progressive economists compare cutting wages during an economic downturn to cutting off the engine of an airplane in freefall; it only accelerates the descent. By one key metric, the velocity of money, business activity nationwide is near a historic low
Saru Jayaraman, president of the nonprofit organization, One Fair Wage, told Black Agenda Report:
“This is why the Democrats keep losing elections; they are not the party of the working class. DC residents are experiencing the worst cost of living crisis in memory and Bowser wants to roll back wages of our most vulnerable workers.”
Employers are typically allowed to pay tipped workers a sub-minimum wage. In D.C., I-82 increased the minimum pay for servers and tipped workers in yearly increments, from $5.35 per hour in 2022 until it is scheduled to match the hourly minimum wage for all employees in the city, $17. 50, in 2027. The city’s minimum wage for tipped workers is currently $10 per hour but another pay increase is scheduled to go into effect in July. At the behest of local restaurateurs, Bowser hopes to block that wage increase.
The irony is that repealing I-82 would hurt African American women, like Bowser. In the restaurant industry alone, more than 27 percent of Black workers live in poverty, roughly 37 percent of tipped workers are mothers, and nearly half of those women are single moms.
Even more ironic is that tipping proliferated in the United States after the Civil War when the restaurant and hospitality industries hired newly emancipated Black women and men but encouraged customers to tip their employees in lieu of paying wages. While African American men who worked as Pullman porters were ultimately able to organize and win wage concessions, the National Restaurant Association formed in 1919–the same year as the outbreak of anti-Black pogroms known as Red Summer–to stop African American women servers from winning similar concessions, Jayaraman said.
Donald Trump campaigned on eliminating taxes on tips and while Jayaraman said the gesture is mostly symbolic–only about a third of restaurant workers earn enough to pay taxes on their tips–a bill is winding its way through Congress.
“It’s pandering but Donald Trump is going to deliver a little bit of money for tipped workers while Muriel Bowser is talking about rolling back their wages. How insane is that?
The movement to end the sub-minimum wage goes back more than a decade, and Jayaraman said that racism and sexism were two of the biggest hurdles initially. Bartenders, usually white men, tend to collect more in tips than other members of the wait staff, and organizers had to persuade them that they would continue to earn more than their coworkers under I-82. Said Jayaraman:
“We have talked to lots of white male bartenders who say that we deserve to make more money than waitresses.”:
It is not clear that the D.C. City Council will approve either the stadium deal or the repeal of I-82 but older residents in the city have begun to compare Bowser to another big-city mayor with ties to the district. Not Marion Barry, who almost single handedly expanded the Black middle class and made neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland the world’s most prosperous majority-Black population in the world mostly through doling out city contracts to African Americans, but Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was Barack Obama’s chief of staff and would go on to serve two terms as Chicago’s mayor. For his austerity policies that included closing 5o public schools in a single calendar year–almost all in Black and Latino neighborhoods, Emanuel was known derisively as “Mayor 1 Percent.”
A few D.C. residents have taken to calling Bowser “Mayor 1 percent…with braids.”
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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