Hawaiʻi Restaurant Workers

The fight

The campaign in Hawaiʻi has two pieces: a constitutional amendment that would end every subminimum wage in the state, and $30/hour legislation. The coalition is regrouping and evaluating the strongest route for both, with the 2027 legislative session as the target.

An amendment matters here because a statute can be traded away. Writing it into the constitution means no future legislature gets to carve a category of worker back out of the minimum wage.

What the subminimum wage does here

Forty-three states still allow some version of the tipped subminimum wage. Seven — Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — pay tipped workers the full minimum wage plus tips, with no lower tipped rate. Hawaiʻi is not one of the seven. A tipped worker in Hawaiʻi can be paid less than $16 in base wages and told the tips will make up the difference. How the subminimum wage works →

Nationally, tipped restaurant workers’ median income is 37% of the national median. That is the cost of a base wage low enough that a slow shift, a canceled reservation, or a customer who does not tip comes straight out of rent.

The cost-of-living gap

Hawaiʻi’s cost of living is among the highest in the country. The state minimum wage is $16.00. The MIT minimum living wage for a single-income household is $40.60 — more than double what the law guarantees.

The gap is not confined to the bottom of the pay scale. Roughly 60% of Hawaiʻi’s 621,000 workers — about 370,000 people — earn less than $30 an hour, in one of the most expensive states in the country. This is not a narrow fix for a small group. It is most of the workforce.

Who’s in

One Fair Wage works in Hawaiʻi through the Living Wage For All coalition:

• One Fair Wage — the national restaurant-worker network, the research program, and the policy template that won D.C. in 2022 and Chicago in 2023.

The political moment

Affordability is the argument in Hawaiʻi, and it is not close. The state minimum wage is $16.00. The minimum living wage is $40.60. Nobody in this state needs to be persuaded the gap is real — they are living in it.

The question the coalition is working through is the vehicle, not the case: whether the constitutional amendment or the $30 bill moves first, and which one carries the other. Both are aimed at the 2027 session.

What the campaign targets

$30 an hour for all Hawaiʻi workers, and a constitutional amendment that ends every subminimum wage — tipped workers included, at 100% of the floor with tips on top. It is the same structure One Fair Wage has already won elsewhere: a worker-led coalition, a ballot or legislative vehicle, and research showing restaurants do not close when the wage floor rises.

D.C. is the proof. After Initiative 82 began phasing out the tipped subminimum wage, D.C. hit an all-time record for full-service restaurant employment — 31,100 jobs in June 2024, the highest since BLS recordkeeping began in 1990 — and median hourly tips ran 25% above the national average, according to Toast’s payments data. The predictions of collapse did not happen.

Three reports to start with