Ballot Questions

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Today, we will be discussing the propositions that will be on the ballot in November, including: Question 1, which addresses whether or not to audit the state legislature; Question 2, which focuses on whether or not to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement; Question 3, which asks if rideshare drivers should be given the opportunity to join a union; Question 4, which pertains to the regulation of certain psychedelic substances; and Question 5, which considers whether or not to increase the tipped minimum wage. TL;DR: Vote yes!!!

This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 60. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state legislature that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. And today we are going to be talking about the propositions that will be on the ballot in November.
So that includes question one, which is whether or not to audit the state legislature. Question two, which is whether or not to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement. Question three, should we give rideshare drivers the opportunity to join a union? Question four is the use of certain psychedelic substances and their regulation.
Question five is whether or not to increase the tipped minimum wage. So for, I'm going to give for those of you who don't listen to the entire podcast, we encourage you to listen to all of the analysis. But here's a shortcut.
Vote yes, a little shortcut. 
And now if you want to know why, we are going to explain to you why for each of these questions. But before we do, let me have my illustrious co hosts introduce themselves.
And I will start with Jonathan. Hello, Jonathan Cohn he/him/his joining from the south end in Boston. I've been working on different progressive issue and electoral campaigns for a little over a decade now.
And Jordan, Jonathan, I like the new boo and vote shot behind. Isn't it so nice? It's very nice. I have a – hold on. I have a t shirt version of that too. Well, Jonathan's going.
I'll introduce myself. Jordan Berg Powers. He him.
And for those of you listening, I'm sorry for the visual cues, but Jonathan has a sign and now a shirt behind him. This is boo and vote, which is a good reminder that elections happen right around Halloween. And I have had years of experience working in politics and working on ballot initiatives.
And for those of you also wanting for visual cues, it's like a nice reason to go onto the YouTube and also subscribe there. You will get a nice picture of my cat, Jane, who has also joined this podcast. 
And Jane is also in favor of all five of these.
Yes, she for sure is, especially the psychedelics. 
And I am Anna Callahan. She/her, coming at you from Medford, currently a city councilor.
And we have our own proposition on the ballot. We're doing our first prop two and a half that Medford has ever had on the ballot. We're one of very few cities and towns that has never even had one on the ballot.
So we're excited about it. We will be talking about that in another different episode. Not today, but today we're gonna start off with auditing the state legislature.
And I want to ask a question, because I heard the state auditor say that the state auditor used to audit the state legislature all the time and that that was considered perfectly normal and that it only stopped under the first speaker of the three recent speakers who was indicted on criminal charges. That was the only reason that it stopped, because they didn't want to be audited. So first, I will toss it to you, Jonathan, and ask you about that story, and also just generally to talk about what question one is about.
Yeah, so let me find this. I was just pulling up the range of time because there is a kind of, as noted, a history of the legislature conducting audits over the years contrary to what the legislature was, the auditor connecting audits to the legislature contrary to what the legislature says. Although the funny thing is, just quickly, an aside on that, when Sabrina was talking to a state senator and like, he was like, oh, yeah, acknowledge that those exist.
Like, are they publicly available in the legislature, the older ones? And we're like, probably not. Well, I think he said that they were all paper copies because it was before digitization. Yeah.
Yeah. So if they're anywhere, they'd have to be in the state house library if the state house hasn't done something with them. 
Well, this sounds like, this sounds like what state reps often call “publicly available,” which we, as they say in the hitchhiker's guide, it's at the bottom of, it's inside of a locked filing cabinet, at the bottom of a basement with no lights, down a stairwell where all the stairs are missing, inside of a building that has “abandoned” signs around it saying no trespassing. [Laugh]
Exactly. So as a context, folks, what question one would, you would formulate, clarify in law that the state auditor has the authority to audit the legislature. For context for folks who are listening and who haven't been actively following this. So last year, the auditor, Diana DiZoglio, sought to conduct an audit of the legislature.
The audit, as she described it, would relate to the budgetary, hiring, spending, and procurement information, information regarding active and pending legislation, process for appointing committees, the adoption and suspension of legislative rules, and the policies and procedures of the legislature. As soon as that happened, the speaker and Senate president were very quickly like, nope, that's not happening. Which led to kind of somewhat of like a territorial dispute of whether or not her office had the power to do so.
Where they clearly said no, she put it in the areas of the law that would indicate that the auditor does have that power and said if they weren't going to comply, she'll go to ballot and she'll get that power, power for herself. Which is what question one is, is making that something rather than a point where they, they litigate between themselves. Something that states that kind of that quite clearly….
And one thing in terms of like giving the auditor power on things, I do reference a bill that I helped to draft part tongue in cheek, but actually would have been good if it had ever passed, which would have actually given, instructed the auditor to do some of this work. But it was a bill called the act relative to the Purpose, Utility, Nature and Timeliness of commissions, the commonwealth, the PUNT bill, having the auditor investigate to what extent legislatively created commissions are actually representative, do they actually produce results? How much state money are they using? Do they end up doing nothing? Are they meeting, are there minutes available and stuff like that? Which is like a very clear thing that should actually exist.
But one of the anime things is people who listen to this podcast quite know that our state legislature is one of, if not the least transparent. And in the US, we are the only state where the executive branch, legislative branch and judicial branch all claim full exemption from public records law. 
And let's be clear that executive and judicial sometimes do, especially judicial, like, what's really unusual is for the legislature to.
Yeah, exactly. They don't feel like they need to give up anything. And then beyond just the public records dimension of it, our legislature withholds a lot of information that a number of kindred states and in some cases majorities of states make readily available.
And one of the things as well, animating DiZoglio in this is that she, since when she was in the legislature, has always been interested on the issue of how much the state legislature is spending enforcing non disclosure agreements because of having her, like before she was auditor, state senator, state Rep, she had been a legislative aide in the state House and had been forced to sign a non disclosure agreement and has always found that the process around them in the legislature to be very coercive and to be abused and has been interested in finding out how much the legislature is actually spending to enforce those. Yep. 
So to close this one up, I mean, actually, unless Jordan, do you have stuff to comment on? Yeah, I think Jordan wanted to tag in.
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Just like I think there's something really probably, I think there's something telling and super problematic that I just want to highlight.
The media just is glossing over. So Commonwealth, Beacon magazine, whatever, they're calling themselves now had a headline that was like, the legislature doesn't plan to try to oppose it. They just plan to, like, fight it at it.
But that's what they're saying is they know that the will of the people will be that they get oversight and they're going to just ignore the will of the people. That's a pretty effed up position. And it's really telling how endemic the system is to the sort of autocratic, we don't care about your silly laws attitude that they let, that the way the media, who is supposed to give the people some context for outrage is just like, oh, no big deal.
They just plan to ignore it. Like, that's a big deal. That's a big deal!
That should be alarm bells. It's not a, like, you know, I don't know. It's a pretty big deal that the legislature, that the public says it wants something, and the legislature's plan is to just be f-you people.
Yep. And those things are always around democracy. The same thing with public, publicly financed laws.
Right? Like, they just like, oh, do you want to have a more representative democracy? What if we give you the finger? and the media is like, that seems fair. That's like, no big deal. We're serious people. We wear suits. We're the adult intelligentsia. No big deal.
And it's just like, it's a big deal! Yeah. What this faux, this faux modernism is just like, it's always, you know, meanwhile, if they, if the legislature, if the people pass something that's like, hates, you know, like we want to hate on marginalized communities, they just, they're like, well, listen, the people spoke.
We can never, no, it's really absurd. It's like the banning english language instruction where it took them forever, and then they're like, oh, let's find a workaround and a lawsuit and a lot of federal lawsuit to make it to undo it, rather than thinking, okay, this was actually a terrible thing from the voters, why don't we, like, yeah. Like, in that case, they act like it's sacrosanct.
Same like the 1986 tax cap laws. Sacrosanct to them in the rent control ban from the nineties is sacrosanct to them. Whenever it's somehow things that actually make people's lives worse. Yep.
By the way, if you want to hear a little more about times that the state legislature actually just completely broke the law, then we have an entire podcast on it, these unbelievable stories about how, you know, the voters passed something and they were just like, nope, screw you. Totally not doing it. So please do check that one out as well.
I will say to close this one up about proposition one or question one, that folks who listen to this podcast, and if you haven't been listening for a while, go back, listen to the first few of this season to get a sense for what we're talking about. This is really important. It's fundamental to the state legislature functioning maybe a little better than it functions.
Now. Proposition or question two? Yeah, we're yes on question two this time. So question two is a question around the MCAS graduation requirement.
So the first thing I want to say is there's a lot of misinformation. So just be really clear. It's not – It's a narrow bill, it's a narrow ballot initiative. It simply says that the MCAS will no longer be the sole requirement for, or it won't be the requirement for if you've done enough to graduate from high school. That's it.
That's what it does. It does not get rid of the MCAS. Despite what they're saying.
It does not get rid of all the things it should get rid of the MCAS. I would love to get rid of the MCAS. It does not do that.
What it does is it opens up teaching to, say, some of the pressure that we're putting on and the narrowing of the curriculum that goes on because of the MCAS. We need to lift a little bit of the cap on that. I think of it as like, um, you know, when you, um.
If you shake up a can of soda like this, just like, tilts it a little so that some of the excess bubbles get out. It's not getting rid of the whole problem. It's a whole system wide problem.
Um, and so that's what it does. And it frees up teachers to no longer have that as the sole thing that they should be spending all of their time and energy on to get kids through the system. But it's still there.
The MCAS is still there. There is still this thing that happens. Um, and so that's the first thing.
And I think it's important to note that this is, again, something that's super popular. Everyone knows that the MCAS is a failure. No one will plausibly tell you to your face that the MCAS will give you good information about how schools are going, because we know from decades upon decades upon decades upon decades of studies that it does not tell you how successful a kid will be in school.
It does not tell you how good a kid will be in college. It does not tell you their likelihood to go to college. It does not tell you, It does not tell you kids future earnings. It doesn't tell you the things that we know will make you, in fact, it inhibits the things we know lead for kids to be successful. Critical thinking, the ability to take information, to make new information, it inhibits those things.
It does not want those things to happen. So all. So the things is, you know, the people who are for it can't plausibly make a case for it.
The thing they can do is lie to your faces, and that's what they're doing. The charter is doing the thing that, what right wingers often do, which is when they can't win on the merits of their ideas, they will lie to you. They will tell you things that are untrue because that's their only thing.
So they're going up on ads saying, this will get rid of, this will get rid of metrics, this will get rid of any accountability. And, boy, would I wish that that were the case, because the MCAS is a very expensive tool to tell you where black, brown, and poor people live. That's all it correlates to successfully.
So it's really expensive to do that. You know, um, one of my favorite things is recently, um, there's always this racist article that comes out that blames kids for the problems of the, of the results, um, and. Or teachers.
And this year, it's that they're, the kids are absent from school. Well, imagine a scenario where you're in class and all of your day and night is memorizing, um, math problems and reading things.
Maybe school isn't attractive and they're leaving because it's not actually relevant to their lives. That's a problem, but not for the kids, right? Yeah, it's just like, it's just there's no self reflection in this process at all. It's always that the elite people who have no education degrees, no experience in classrooms, no curriculum, right.
These, like, older people who have never spent a day, but they are in the media telling you, beware. Ooh, look at these things. And people who are experts are like, this is bad, don't do it.
And the kids are like, this is bad, don't do it. And so I think, so it's time for it to go. It's a ridiculous thing that has continued this long.
I was one of the first to go through this, and when I was a kid, we were protesting it's implementation because we knew that this would happen. This is the most. It's like the most predictable.
It's as if Massachusetts is continuing to be hit by a train that's going one mile per hour. Like, it's just like we all know what's happening and we don't need to do it. And just a few things to kind of build on that with is that it's also the idea of the MCAS being like an individualized punitive tool is also just a fundamentalism misuse.
Like, as you noted, there are plenty of flaws with how the MCAS itself is designed. And that, like, it doesn't cover a number of territories. It's a specific to only type of encourages the very strong teach the test mentality.
But if you were to assess things, the idea of, like, evaluation, only an assessment makes. Can make sense even if thought on execution. If you're looking at like, okay, this school isn't like, has lower numbers.
It needs more resources, right? You could look at that on like a larger scale level where you. Which, granted, you could figure that out by looking at income data, too, to your point, but on that level, you can see how you can get macro data on the school level, bringing it down individualized. It doesn't help students to learn because you're taking away time in the classroom to focus on test prep.
If you're a student who doesn't fail, you have to lose. You have to lose learning time again to keep taking the test. And teachers don't even get the results of their current students.
They get them in the fall. So you're not even creating a system where teachers can help students learn where they see students need help, which a teacher can do through, like, tests, quizzes, projects, writing assignments that exist throughout the year. And that so much of the opposition is either based on the idea of one that teachers don't want to teach and students don't want to learn.
Where I kind of, or to this, a kind of paternalistic attitude to, if we don't have this, then think of all of the, like, think of all of the poor children in the, in those school districts and how they won't get the resources or like that they won't get a good education. As though the existence of a testing requirement gets them a good education. The existence of a testing requirement has not gotten any.
It does not bring additional resources to any school when what under resourced schools need is more money. Like, this isn't helping them solve that problem. Yep.
And like, it hasn't closed, it hasn't closed the gaps. People think that it, like, people who pretend that it's somehow an equity tool, hasn't been good at that.
It's gotten worse. Every innovation, the height of sort of equality on education was when we were the most integrated schools. And every attempt that's been done to sort of fix it has actually increased the, increased the divide also in like, kind of a few quick things. 
One, what's kind of striking with this is at the end of the day, some of the people who are the biggest backers of this send their kids to private schools where they don't have this requirement because it is a public school requirement. And it's always a very revealing thing in education policy spaces to see where the rich people who like to have a lot of say on what public schools do, what is the environment they send their own children to? And why doesn't that environment, and barring them being the people who think sending their kids away to some boarding school where it's probably right with abuse is a good example, what are the, like, the, like, kind of elite, like often lefty private schools end up doing that they'll send their kids to.
Why don't you do that? And in general, why don't you pull those lettings rather than a kind of, like, drill sergeant mentality that they like to impose on public schools. Yeah. And the short answer is, because of money, they get the short answer.
It's a huge industry. Yeah, it's a huge industry. And it's just about making money for a corporation.
It's not about our kids. 
Question three. Wow, great.
That was question two. As you can tell, we have some opinions on it. 
Question three is about being rideshare drivers, the opportunity to join a union, and this has had quite a history after Uber has gone around the country trying to pass ballot questions to ensure that their drivers cannot join unions.
So, Jonathan, if you want to go ahead and give us the lowdown. Yeah, Jonathan, you can give us a lowdown. And then, Jordan, I know you want to talk a little bit about some related things in terms of the governor and everything else.
Okay, just quick about what this does is. Question three gives the ability for Uber and Lyft drivers to kind of form a union and collectively bargain with Uber and Lyft. It creates a system that work because of, as I know, Jordan goes more into depth because of the way in which Uber and Lyft drivers are being misclassified as independent contractors.
They don't have the ability to actually have things like collective bargaining that you can get as workers, or employees. So this has to, this goes like an end route around that into the law to give them the ability to do that and to create an infrastructure where they have that. Some of the examples, like the problems that exist because of the business model about Uber and Lyft is you have a situation where they lack a number of the workplace protections that you have in any other job and bear a lot of extra costs, particularly if you're paying for your car.
That is something that the employer is benefiting from, but that's like a huge individual investment to make in order for the capacity to work there. Same for the fact that Uber and Lyft drivers aren't paid for time not driving. So even if that there is like an ostensible minimum wage, if they're only paid that during active driving time, not driving to the place or not driving to the next thing you need, like person in car, that the wage numbers that Uber and Lyft will often present are quite inflated.
So this creates kind of a. And it creates a model for what that would look like if you think about even the existence of drivers in the way in which people can sometimes be a driver for a short period of time and then go out of that and all that kind of nature of it sets a kind of threshold for who would be in, who would account for that purpose of a union. Like defining that you would need support from 5% of active drivers being drivers with above median trips.
And then the union organizers, once they get 5%, can get access to contact info for others. They would need 25% of active drivers to become the official bargaining representative. And that they would need a simple majority of all drivers with more than 100 trips in the last quarter to get an actual kind of contract approved with kind of Uber and Lyft, that this exists in the context in which Uber and that as I think our Jordan want to talk a little more.
There had been in the lawsuit from the attorney general, starting with Healy continuing with Campbell about Uber and Lyft misclassifying their workers and violating what in Massachusetts is called the ABC test to tell whether or not somebody is an employee or not. And because of that, because we have a very strong ABC test, the Uber and Lyft wanted to rewrite Massachusetts labor law to formally exempt themselves from it, and had a ballot question that they had tried two years ago. It got kicked off the ballot because of being accused of asking multiple questions.
And then they filed this go around like ten versions. I think it was with different combinations of that to see what would pass muster and the willingness to have multiple of them go forward. Their ballot questions ended up getting ruled, given a go ahead by the courts, but they ended up pulling them after a settlement with the attorney general on the lawsuit.
And I'll tag in Jordan to talk about. To talk about the settlement. Yeah.
So I think it's important to note that, I mean, I guess the simplest terms is that attorney General Andrea Campbell sold out workers, black and brown workers mostly. And that's a continuation of Maura Healey not doing the thing she needed to do to actually just move this through the courts quickly the first time around, that they are always looking to be deferential to people in power and corporations and not hold them to the same standard that they hold regular people. 
And this is actually the clearest example of that, because we actually have a history of people trying to create their own industries outside of the taxi industry. For years, there was a livery service that was mostly run by Latino people, and the police violently put that down. There was penny cabs that you could get outside of Dorchester Ave.
Which the police arrested people, put people in jail, fined them constantly, and those are mostly run by Black people. And here are these people who do the same thing as penny cabs and as liveries and not only face no consequences, were basically allowed to just operate in total violation of the clear laws around it. So the ABC test is really simple.
It just says that for a person to be an independent contractor, their work performs. Their work has to be outside of the direct control of their employer. Obviously, you're not driving an Uber out.
You can't drive for Uber outside of Uber. You can't do that work outside of it. The work the individual performs is not the part of the court offerings, the employer's business.
All Uber does is to connect people. That's what they do. So that's what the drivers do.
And the workers, typically an independent contractor is for other clients. They're not driving for other people. They're either driving for Uber or Lyft.
So they're not doing other. You know, that's just. So they fail all three of the tests.
Sometimes people fail two, sometimes people fail one. But at the very least, all of the drivers are failing at least one of these tests, which means that they're employees of Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft know that.
And rather than comply with the law, because it would be, it would cut into their profits, they decided to try to change the law, confuse people, and put a bunch of money into lobbying to get our legislature to not and our. And our elected officials to not act. I think the other piece that's really important is that Massachusetts legislators knew what they were doing when they voted for this.
They knew who it was going to regulate. It was going to regulate the gig economy. And this always happens.
They do this thing where they're like, oh, look, we care about you workers, but then when push comes to shove, when it actually comes to actually holding these large corporations accountable, they always balk. They never side with you. They never fight for you.
They never fight for the regular people. And that's really at the heart of the problem. The ballot initiative is a small step, maybe a sideways but somewhat forward step, in trying to correct this problem, but it originates.
It's a fix to the fact that the legislature and the executive offices are refusing to actually just uphold the law and treat uber and Lyft to the same sort of rules that you or I would have to abide by. And this gets to a meme that Jordan sent me, which I always, which I always like to quote, which is like, Airbnb is just illegal housing and hotels, Uber and Lyft are just illegal taxis. “Innovations” – it's just allowing people to break the law.
But calling it innovation when, you know, like, when somebody held up, when somebody had, like, an extra room in their house and they're a landlord, all of a, you know, they're a black person, all of a sudden, they're like, the people come down. But if you call it, you know, if you're like, oh, I have an Airbnb, all of a sudden we're just like, well, we got to figure out how to regulate you. Well, you had a way.
You just made it illegal before, right? Like, it's just. It's just absolutely ridiculous that these things continue. Rich white bros get to make their mega millions, and everybody else can't even make a dime.
Yeah. Well, let us move on to question four, which is the use of certain psychedelic substances and their regulation. And, Jonathan, take it away.
Yes, let me pull up and I can pull up my notes. So, question four, as you noted, is the question about psychedelics, and it would allow for a group of naturally occurring psychedelic drugs, psilocybin, which is the kind of active ingredient magic mushrooms. Psilocin, mescaline, which is the active ingredient in peyote, DMT, and ibogaine, to be grown, shared, used at home in limited quantities and offered by licensed professionals in a more clinical setting.
So it creates a regulated framework for supervised use where you would have trained facilitators at licensed psychedelic therapy centers. It would eliminate criminal penalties for limited personal use or kind of a limited personal use, very limited homegrown would require participants who, if you are going to one of the kind of licensed therapy centers, to have to go through safety screenings prior to them. And one thing that's also important to recognize with this is it's different from question four in 2016, and that it's not retail sales, that it's not like that.
You're not going to have. You're not suddenly going to have your psychedelic storefront dispensaries exactly like those won't be coming about. They would be if this were the case.
You would get hilarious tv ads out of that being the push. But this is a much more controlled thing with that. And that a number of these things, particularly psilocybin, have ended up.
Have had a lot of good research around them showing their benefits for things around like depression and anxiety, particularly post traumatic stress disorder. I associate a lot of the research around psychedelics is coming from the VA because of, obviously, the VA's interest in seeing how to deal with post traumatic stress disorder. And that this is something that has, and like a number of other treatment purposes, has proven to be successful.
Oregon and Colorado have passed similar laws, and it would, for regulatory purposes, would end up creating a kind of a natural psychedelic substances commission that would then, like, regulate the program. And before that gets created, how would create this advisory board to put together some recommendations on different kind of different programs, to create different regulations, to create etcetera, beyond what's in the ballot question itself. Yep.
You know, it seems like we've stopped losing our minds over marijuana. Yeah, that's good. Finally, we will stop losing our minds over psychedelics, which, you know, have had reasonable uses for a very long time.
Yeah, around them. Exactly. It's something like, if there's something and it has proven benefits, people should be allowed to do it.
You should have good, you should have sensible regulations. But the days of like, kind of a default, we should. We need to be quit spending money and resources on criminalizing to the un criminalizing things.
It's just. It's just not a good use of public resources or focus. Any comments, Jordan, before we go on to question five? 
Question five is the tipped minimum wage.
And just, I figure a lot of listeners will probably already know this, but in case you don't, if you are a tipped worker, and that can count a lot of different jobs today, if you're a tipped worker, you don't have to be paid the minimum wage. You can get paid a lot less than minimum wage. I mean, it's horrible.
It's crazy. So this is designed to bring the tipped minimum wage up to the Massachusetts minimum wage. And on that note, let me go ahead.
And, Jordan, if you want to give a little bit about this one, obviously, we're a yes on this one, but, yeah, just the history of it, again, really quickly, I know we've talked about it on other podcasts, on podcasts in the past, is that the. When the minimum wage was being raised or created by the forties during the New Deal, and there was a concern about paying black people and the things that black people did where they were farmers, and they were a lot of industries that required tipping. So your person who helped your elevator, somebody came in the door, and waiters were often black people or black women.
And so, wanting to get it through and get it through with the south, they made a deal to exempt all of these jobs that were primarily done, bye, black people, from the minimum wage increase. And so the minimum wage increase passes, but its history is rooted in sort of the racism of America. And so that continues, and it continues because those jobs then get moved into by jobs that women often do, so farming less so.
But obviously, that continued to be black and brown folks and women continued to be in waitressing. And so those. And so because of the sort of the view of who these people are, those the sort of inequality around this continue to persist.
There's this perception that, oh, well, if you tip and you tip well, that you'll make up for sort of like not having. Not sort of minimum wage. And the two things that are faulty with that is that because we have a culture of tipping, most people will tip even when there is actually people are paid a minimum wage, because we all know that the minimum wage isn't enough to get by, and people actually are pretty free to tip in those places.
Um, and the other piece that I think is really important around this legislation is ultimately, it's really about protecting people who are marginalized. And waitresses are often experience a lot of unwanted sexual advances and unwanted things to be said to them. And the inability, And so your ability to get by being on people who know that your ability to get by is based on whether or not they pay you, means that there's a power imbalance that, unfortunately, a lot of people, especially a lot of men, necessarily exploit for their own reasons. Um, the other mistake is that people say, well, like, oh, I work at a place where there's silver alcohol and I always get more than a minimum wage. Most places where serve alcohol do, are not the majority of restaurants.
And even if you do sell, a majority of places that sell alcohol still don't make the minimum wage, even through tipping. Um, so these are all misnomers that happen. There are, of course, places where tips are really great.
And guess what? Your tips will still be great because you're going to work on fancy place. Yeah. And the thing I wanted to bring up about this is that, you know, there's this worry that, oh, if we raise the tip minimum wage, then people won't tip as much.
And it's like, do you think that the average person in the state has any clue what these people are being paid? I bet the average person, if you ask them what the minimum wage for tipped workers is, they would literally have a totally blank stare on their face because they don't even know what you're talking about. Aside from not knowing what the minimum wage for tipped workers would be, they're literally like, what do you mean? Like, is it not the minimum wage? Like, they have no idea that this is the reality. So tipping is not going to change.
Like, this is, the fear is like, oh, no, let's not raise it because then people won't tip as much. It's like, I just, I do not believe that that is an accurate portrayal of reality. And Jonathan, I believe you're.
Yeah, no, and you can see that in data. There was a study recently on the, on the COVID published on the website Quartz that showed that, like, the range of states for, like, what percentage of people tip and the percentage that they tip is a fairly narrow range that looks quite similar across states with really no bearing on whether or not on how much the servers are actually being paid, influencing if people tip more or more of them tip, because as you noted, it's largely a cultural thing. And especially if you're at a high end restaurant, the people going to high end restaurants, especially if you're like trying to, if you're trying to impress a potential client or if you're trying to impress your date, do you know what's something that is a common cultural practice in the US to try to impress somebody paying more money for things so that that's still going to exist, that suddenly doesn't going out the window, the ability to throw down extra money on the table to say, look how rich I am, it still exists and that will still exist in high end restaurants and bars.
And I'll also say that, like, I think one of the things recently that radically changed how much people are tipped in places like coffee shops is that they got this new thing from like, you know, toast and clover and whatever, that automatically, as soon as you're paying for anything, asks you if you're going to give them a tip. You know what? It used to be that people wouldn’t tip at coffee shops because there's no wait staff because they're not going there at your table to serve you and to take your dishes and to see what you need. That wasn't a thing until they popped up with this thing that automatically just asks you to give them a tip.
And now I always tip like, I don't know, it just changed. It's the cultural thing. So I think this question of, you know, the tips changing because of a law that no one, very few people will actually be cognizant, that happened is just not real world.
So there we are. There we have it. There is our, the questions on the ballot.
I will use this opportunity to let you all know that you always have a nice link right below here to pop a few dollars a tip. Now that we're talking about tips, pop a tip into our coffers, because we do have some wonderful young folks who do our video editing. They do social media, they do graphics for us and all that wonderful stuff, and keep this podcast going and make sure that it gets out to as many people as possible.
We do need and really appreciate your donations. And with that, I will ask for final words from my two compatriots about these ballot questions. My final word is vote yes.
Yes. Yes. Vote yes.
Yes. Yeah. Vote yes.
Fabulous. Thank you so much, everybody. Thanks to everyone listening.
Forward this all to your friends and we'll talk to you next week.