Photo by yostinator

Popular Columbia Heights bar and restaurant Meridian Pint announced today that it would offer paid sick leave to tipped employees, reversing course on comments made to us in an article we published two weeks ago.

Here’s the background. As the D.C. Council At-Large Special Election race has heated up, one issue that has repeatedly come up is a D.C. law that provides paid sick leave for almost all D.C. workers, spare a few exceptions—including tipped restaurant workers. A number of local and national social justice advocacy groups have been pushing that to change, and the issue filtered down into the race for the open council seat that will be decided next Tuesday.

Elissa Silverman was first to come out in favor it, and four of her fellow candidates have followed suit. The only outlier has been Republican Patrick Mara, who opposed the law during his first council run in 2008 and still maintains that it would impose an unfair burden on restaurants, many of which are small businesses with narrow profit margins. Mara often adds that he isn’t merely speaking theoretically, but also as a one-time co-owner of Meridian Pint.

For our article, we called John Andrade, Meridian Pint’s primary owner (he also owns Adams Morgan’s Smoke and Barrel), to get his thoughts. He told us that while he takes care of his tipped staff by offering sick employees the chance to make up lost shifts, he doesn’t want the government mandating whether or not he should have to pay them for the hours they miss. Additionally, he argued, after-tax pay is so low that simply paying out the hours an employee missed due to sickness wouldn’t be worth much.

But in an op-ed published in Popville today, Andrade says that staff and customer responses to his original comments have caused him to change his mind:

While I believe that many restaurants in DC can barely afford to stay open, much less pay for sick leave, Meridian Pint is a great example of a restaurant that can and should afford to go above and beyond this law. Therefore, as of this week Meridian Pint will now offer paid sick leave to all of its employees including tipped employees.

The truth is, that the ‘Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act of 2008’ is one of the most important laws that restaurants must abide by yet most of us in the industry are not aware of it and often overlook it. The attention that has been brought to my doorstep this past week has opened my eyes to the seriousness and magnitude of this oversight. I have become the poster child for so many of us in the restaurant industry who overlook the most basic needs and rights of our staff members. Our staff members are the life of our restaurants and without their good health and commitment we would not exist.

It’s a noteworthy reversal, seemingly inspired by this Change.org petition— It also speaks to one of the problems in the existing law—enforcement is lax. The Post noted late last year that the city hasn’t actually done an audit of law’s implementation to ensure that D.C. employers are complying, even though it is supposed to.

As for the At-Large campaign, it really doesn’t go either way. Mara divested from Meridian Pint earlier this year, and even if he hadn’t, Andrade’s move could well prove his point: restaurants that can afford this should do it, but the government shouldn’t force them to. A number of local restaurants already offer paid sick leave to all employees, including Busboys and Poets.