Ald. Walter "Red" Burnett (27) speaks with Ald. Andre Vasquez (40) during a City Council meeting on April 15, 2026. [Don Vincent/The Daily Line] 

Despite the City Council’s failure to override Mayor Brandon Johnson’s veto of a measure that would halt the One Fair Wage Ordinance, the council is still pondering a temporary freeze in the five-year escalator that will close the gap between the tipped and minimum wage. 

Ald. Walter “Red” Burnett (27) put forward an ordinance at the March council meeting — the same one at which the One Fair Wage freeze ordinance was passed — that would have only skipped a wage hike this July and delayed the implementation by a year. 

Burnett’s ordinance sits in the Committee on Workforce Development. 

Burnett said Thursday he plans to introduce a substitute in committee that would extend the pause even longer to allow the council to review better restaurant employment data before deciding how to proceed. 

The city’s current tipped wage is $12.62 an hour, or 76 percent of the $16.60 an hour minimum wage. Under the One Fair Wage law passed in 2023, the gap between the tipped wage and minimum wage will shrink by eight percent every July until it becomes equal to Chicago’s minimum wage on July 1, 2028. That phased-in process began in 2024. 

The council failed to muster sufficient votes to overturn the veto at last week’s regular meeting, voting 30-19. Burnett abstained from the vote. 

Burnett’s current ordinance (O2026-0024043) would forgo a tipped wage increase this July and push it to July 1, 2027, delaying the date at which both wages will be equal to 2029. He told The Daily Line that his substitute would delay the hike for two years, pushing full implementation out to 2030 at the earliest. 

Opponents of One Fair Wage have argued that the wage hikes have already hurt businesses and caused restaurant closures. They’ve also argued that the law already mandates that tipped workers receive the minimum wage if the combination of their tips and the subminimum wage fall short of what they’d be making on the minimum wage, but advocates for abolishing the tipped wage argue that the law can be tough to enforce.  

Burnett’s ordinance would establish a system by which employers with tipped employees would have to provide their employees with statements detailing what that employee made from the subminimum wage and tips combined each pay period, their effective hourly rate of pay for the period and any make-up wages provided by the employer.  

The ordinance would also require restaurants to provide the city with monthly data on how much tipped workers are making and how much or how little employers have spent to true-up their paychecks if they are short the minimum wage equivalent. 

Burnett said that would provide greater transparency and more complete information as the council determines whether to reform One Fair Wage. 

Ald. Marty Quinn (13) put forward his own two-year pause ordinance (O2026-0024918) last week alongside Alds. Samantha Nugent (39), Matt O’Shea (19), Derrick Curtis (18), Gilbert Villegas (36) and over two dozen other alderpeople, but Burnett said his version is better because it includes that data collection and transparency component. 

Quinn’s ordinance sits in the finance committee. 

At the council meeting, lead One Fair Wage ordinance sponsor Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26) acknowledged challenges faced by businesses that employ tipped workers but said myriad reasons explained their rising costs, such as persistent inflation and property tax spikes.  

She said last week she planned to meet with the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA) to further discuss ways to help the industry without hurting workers.   

IRA President Sam Toia told The Daily Line that there has been communication with different alderpeople on the various pause proposals following the override failure.  

While he’d welcome a full rollback, Toia thinks the pause would still give businesses a chance to “tread water.”  

The mayor has argued that reneging on or freezing tipped wage hikes for hospitality workers will disproportionately harm Black and brown women in the workforce. 

“We're talking about workers that, more often than not, are making less than $35,000 a year,” Johnson said. “At the same time, we have a federal government which has gone out of its way to drive up prices for working families and small businesses through illegal tariffs and yet another war. Hardworking Chicagoans finally earning a guaranteed living wage is not the driver of increased prices.” 

The mayor’s office has also said its own data shows growth in the local restaurant industry. 

When comparing the number of retail food establishment licensees identified as traditional sit-down restaurants, there was a net increase in 184 licenses from 2024 to 2025, according to data provided by the mayor’s office.  

But Toia said empty storefronts that litter Chicago’s commercial corridors should demonstrate the impact of the tipped wage phase-out. 

Toia said that 496 restaurants closed in Chicago in the first half of 2025 — the most up-to-date number the association has because of the cadence of license renewals. He also said that the industry is not only below the number of pre-pandemic jobs, but the workers who remain have had their hours cut. 

“Before the pandemic, this was an industry of nickels and dimes,” Toia said. “Now it’s an industry of pennies and nickels.” 

After last week’s council meeting, Johnson responded to Burnett’s proposed pause at a press conference by defending the abolition of the subminimum wage, which he called an unjust wage with its “vestiges tied to slavery,” and calling for small businesses and workers to not continue to be pit against one another.