Chicago Council Fails to Override Subminimum Wage Veto

Chicago City Council failed Wednesday to override Mayor Brandon Johnson’s veto of a measure that would have frozen the subminimum wage phase-out for tipped workers, delivering Johnson his third consecutive veto victory in as many years.

The override vote fell 30-19, four votes short of the 34 needed under City Council rules. The Illinois Restaurant Association and its aldermanic allies had spent weeks lobbying nine council members who represent wards with heavy restaurant concentrations, hoping to flip at least four of them. None moved.

Wednesday’s result means the hourly pay of Chicago’s restaurant servers, bartenders, and other tipped workers will continue rising toward parity with the standard minimum wage, tracking cost-of-living increases as originally scheduled.

Johnson vetoed the freeze last month, blocking a measure that would have locked tipped workers’ pay at 76% of the minimum wage. The restaurant industry had pushed for that pause, arguing that struggling Chicago establishments couldn’t absorb the added labor costs. Johnson didn’t buy it.

“It’s a victory for working people who need to have fair wages so they can afford to live in the city and stay in Chicago,” said Jason Lee, a senior mayoral adviser. “At a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, lowering people’s wages by potentially thousands of dollars a year would be counterproductive, and the mayor has advocated that we not do that.”

Johnson has now issued three vetoes in three years and defended all three. The first killed a snap curfew ordinance. The second blocked a proposed ban on the sale of most hemp-derived products in Chicago. The third, the one the council failed to override Wednesday, preserved the tipped-wage phase-out schedule.

That’s a clean sweep.

For a mayor who has struggled to pass his last two city budgets, watched a City Council majority reject his corporate head tax, and seen an alternative budget pass over his objections, the veto record is one of the few areas where Johnson has held firm and won. It doesn’t guarantee smoother sailing ahead, but it signals that his veto pen carries weight even when his broader legislative agenda doesn’t.

Proponents of the freeze, led by Illinois Restaurant Association President Sam Toia, knew going into Wednesday’s vote they didn’t have the numbers. They called it anyway. The logic, as Chicago Sun-Times reported, was more political than procedural.

“It’s to look restaurant owners in the eye and say, ‘We fought for you and we’re going to continue to fight for you,’” said 19th Ward Ald. Matt O’Shea, whose Far Southwest Side ward borders suburbs where restaurants pay lower wages than Chicago mandates. “Maybe that puts a little pressure on people to move away from the mayor.”

O’Shea’s ward sits at Chicago’s southwestern edge, where the competitive gap with suburban restaurant labor costs is visible and immediate. His constituents feel that gap directly. But even with that argument, his side couldn’t peel a single vote from Johnson’s coalition.

Toia had specifically targeted nine alderpersons who voted against the freeze despite representing wards with dense restaurant populations. The Illinois Restaurant Association framed those votes as a betrayal of local business interests. The nine held regardless.

The subminimum wage has been a slow-burning fight at City Hall for years. Chicago’s ordinance set a schedule to bring tipped workers’ pay to 100% of the minimum wage incrementally, a plan backed by labor advocates who argue the two-tier wage system disproportionately harms women and workers of color. The Economic Policy Institute has documented similar dynamics in other cities that have moved to eliminate the tipped credit.

Restaurant owners counter that Chicago’s cost environment, commercial rents, post-pandemic debt loads, and the broader economic squeeze make the timeline unworkable. Toia and his members will almost certainly bring that argument back to the council before the next scheduled increase takes effect.

For now, the math favors the workers. The phase-out continues. Johnson holds three-for-three on vetoes. And nine alderpersons who represent restaurant-heavy wards just demonstrated, for a second time, that the Illinois Restaurant Association’s pressure campaign has its limits.

The council’s next regular meeting is scheduled for May.