Under Florida’s Amendment 2, a ballot measure approved by 61% of voters in 2020, Florida’s minimum wage is set to hit $15 an hour for non-tipped workers by Sept. 30, 2026, and $11.98 an hour for workers who earn tips.
Today, the minimum wage is $13 an hour in Florida—a figure that falls far short of what experts estimate to be a “living wage” in the Sunshine State, what it takes to afford housing and food. Ahead of the 2020 election, Florida’s minimum wage was just $8.56 an hour.
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Florida voters approve Amendment 2, boosting minimum wage to $15 an hour
Worker advocates have celebrated the pay increase, meant to help everyday working Floridians afford Florida’s higher cost of living. But some businesses have made controversial adjustments to their pay practices, including the addition of questionable service charges, in order to unload their own labor costs onto customers.
Samantha Padgett, a lobbyist for the politically influential Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, admitted to state representatives during a Florida House committee meeting on Wednesday, March 19 that “many” of her group’s 10,000 members in the hospitality industry have switched to what’s known as a commission-style pay system, where new service charges now serve as the “basis of [servers’] pay.”
“Following the passage of Amendment 2 and the increase of the minimum wage, this hit the restaurant industry especially hard, and following that, many of our members in the restaurant industry have moved to a commission-based pay model,” Padgett told lawmakers, in response to a Republican legislator’s voiced complaints about service charges that have shown up on her own bills at restaurants.
The commission-based model, which recently became the subject of a protest by workers at Orlando’s Hampton Social, represents an effort by restaurant owners to pay “good,” “competitive” pay, Padgett claimed.
What it also means, she explained in a rather mask-off moment, is that the new service charge that consumers are seeing on their bill represents the “basis of their [workers’] income and their wages.”
“Some of our members have applied a service charge so that they can provide health benefits and additional income for their back-of-house staff that continue to work very hard to provide service to customers,” Padgett explained.
But the transparency of the practice, according to some, has been questionable in its rollout.
“Most customers might presume that service fees go to a server, but what’s really happening is that service fees are going to restaurants to meet overhead costs,” State Rep. Demi Busatta, R-Coral Gables, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel after the hearing. “This confusion is what’s frustrating to the customer and frustrating from an employee standpoint.”
The idea that higher wages will directly and unilaterally cause steeper prices for everyday consumers, in the absence of other factors, hasn’t been borne out through research. In Seattle, Washington, for instance, a city that led the country in enacting the very first $15 minimum wage ordinance over a decade ago, researchers found “no evidence of significant price increases,” when looking at the impact on local supermarkets, specifically.
In the food and restaurant industries—which see one of the highest rates of minimum wage violations, as it is—there have been mixed findings. Research from the aughts found that restaurants may increase prices to offset labor costs, but a 2021 working paper that looked at restaurant food pricing from 1978 to 2015 found that prices rose just 0.36% for every 10% increase in the minimum wage.
Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, who sits on the House committee Padgett addressed last week, blasted Padgett’s insinuation that minimum wage hikes are the cause of some restaurant owners’ decision to charge customers more.
“The claim that Florida’s $15 minimum wage is to blame for new service charges at restaurants is misleading and inaccurate,” Eskamani told Orlando Weekly in an emailed statement. Service fees and commission-based pay models “are not new,” she added, “and to make such a statement ignores recent inflation and the current economic instability caused by President Trump’s policies.”
“Workers deserve fair wages and stable pay—and studies show that raising wages leads to lower staff turnover and greater economic stability,” she argued.
The Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, an affiliate of the National Restaurant Association, is not an unbiased party. The group led an aggressive campaign against Florida’s $15 minimum wage ballot measure in 2020, joined at the time by other business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Home Builders Association and the Florida Retail Federation.
The FRLA, which boasts high-profile members such as the Walt Disney Co. and Universal Orlando, also lobbied last year in favor of weakening Florida’s child labor laws, as part of a national movement by business groups desperate to ease labor shortages in low-wage industries.
“Following COVID, the service industry experienced a mass exodus of our labor force from the service industry, especially restaurants,” Padgett told lawmakers. “Slowly, that is coming back, but we still continue to suffer labor issues and labor shortages, which does impact the service that you experience as customers.”
Restaurants around the state have faced criticism, even protests, from some of their workers over their decision since 2020 to adopt a commission-based pay system for workers.
This system, which originates from out of state, can differ some from one establishment to the next. But for some, including for workers at Hampton Social in Orlando and the Living Room in the Tampa Bay region, this looks like drastically reducing workers’ hourly pay to as little as $1 or $2 an hour, while adding an automatic service charge onto customers’ checks.
The model, which restaurant owners say will ultimately boost pay for workers, has been pushed by industry professionals across the country as an option for “managing minimum wage increases.”
But this doesn’t sit well with everyone directly affected.
“We do love this job and there’s a nice community we’ve created here, but seeing that this company doesn’t care about us even though we’re putting in countless hours and effort, is disheartening,” Justin Castillo, a manager of four years at Hampton Social, told the Orlando Sentinel during a protest of their commission-based pay structure last October. “Especially when it’s just for greed and just for money,” he added.
The idea that minimum wage increases will force companies to hike the price of goods and services, regardless of whether their bottom line is actually hurting or not, is a key argument of the National Restaurant Association, a group that has lobbied against minimum wage increases across the country, while simultaneously forcing restaurant workers to pay for the group to lobby to keep their wages low.
“There’s been efforts, multiple efforts across the country, led by the National Restaurant Association, to essentially undo the will of the voters who have voted to pass higher statewide minimum wages,” Nina Mast, an economic analyst for the progressive-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told Orlando Weekly in a phone call.
The NRA and its affiliates have also, like the FRLA, lobbied in recent years to weaken protections for young workers on the job, who are more vulnerable to exploitation.
Still, not all Florida businesses believe that making a minimum wage something closer to a living wage is bad for business, or for working people who are just trying to provide for themselves and their families. Over 100 Florida business owners have signed on in support of a “fair minimum wage” of at least $15 an hour since 2020, including Jared Meyers, owner of Legacy Vacation Resorts in Orlando.
“Our belief system is that employees that are, you know, are respected and appreciated in a financial way, as well as in how we interact with them on a daily basis, perform better. They feel better engaged. They take better care of our guests and customers,” said Meyers, who as of last year, paid his Orange County employees a base wage of $24 an hour.
“When we raise the wage above a minimum wage, that money goes right back out to the local economy,” he added in an interview with Orlando Weekly. “So it’s important to us that the state of Florida is resilient and strong financially speaking. In order for that to be the case, we have to have people who can afford to live here, and that actually will circulate the funds that they receive by way of salary back into the economy.”
Some of what Padgett, the lobbyist, shared last Wednesday, however, may have stuck.
Later in the same committee meeting, Florida Republicans conveniently advanced a different bill (HB 541) that would allow employers in Florida to pay interns and apprentices less than minimum wage. That bill, which still has to clear two more committees before heading to full floor votes, is opposed by the Florida NAACP, Florida Student Power, the Florida AFL-CIO and the Florida Council of Churches, among others.
This post originally appeared at our sibling publication Orlando Weekly.
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This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2025.