Isabella Volmert/AP Photo
In May, nearly a year after workers went on strike over workplace safety concerns and low wages, Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III announced a series of nationwide wage hikes.
The resurgent labor movement’s slate of wins of the past year have energized workers across the United States—even in the fiercely anti-union South and least-unionized industries. In this uniquely hostile terrain for organized labor, service workers and labor organizers are looking beyond the standard union drive to build worker power in the South—and workers at the Waffle House restaurant chain have emerged as key figures in the fight for higher wages and better working conditions.
The Union of Southern Service Workers, a nontraditional cross-sector union, is organizing to put an end to the mandatory meal deduction policy at Waffle House, a diner-style restaurant chain and mainstay of Southern culture. The chain serves affordable comfort food and a helping of hospitality at around 2,000 locations across 25 states found primarily in the South. In recent years, Waffle House has become infamous for its violent customer brawls on social media and round-the-clock service through all but the most severe hurricanes, an image built at their low-wage workers’ expense. Waffle House also beats out competitors like IHOP and Cracker Barrel in the race to the bottom for the greatest share of employees earning under $10 an hour.
When employees have brought their concerns regarding reports of missing paychecks and repeated, sometimes fatal, incidents of armed robberies to the company’s attention, corporate gave them the runaround, locked them out of the Atlanta headquarters, and tossed out 450 worker-signed petitions.
Without an avenue for company-approved recourse, a handful of workers in Columbia, South Carolina, began a series of concerted worker actions with a walkout last July, to demand an end to a company policy that forces workers to purchase a Waffle House meal, each shift, regardless of whether it’s cooked or eaten. The mandatory meal deduction costs Waffle House workers $30 million in wages every year and at least $3 per worker every shift, adding to the laundry list of costs saddling food-insecure service workers.
Almost a quarter of the company’s 42,473 employees take home between $2.13 and $10 an hour, in both wages and tips.
According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a living wage in Conyers, Georgia—the home of one Waffle House where workers went on strike—comes out to $24.40 for a single adult. Most Waffle House associates make nowhere near living-wage estimates, as almost a quarter of the company’s 42,473 employees take home between $2.13 and $10 an hour, in both wages and tips.
Federal labor law permits employee wage deductions or credits for lodging and uniforms, among other costs, which are typical in many industries, including hospitality, but these policies have legal limitations. David Weil, a former Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division administrator during the Obama administration, finds the nature of Waffle House’s policy problematic. “My gut reaction is [the mandatory meal deduction policy] is a very broad kind of use of a deduction,” Weil says. “In general, where you have some kind of deduction that workers are uniformly penalized for, regardless of whether they do it or not, I think would run afoul of the law,” the former WHD chief adds.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Labor Department found that Waffle House committed wage theft. According to the department’s enforcement data, there have been 1,172 wage and hour violations, at both corporate and franchised locations, since 2005. The vast majority of the violations come from Waffle House franchisees. This trend isn’t unique to Waffle House. It’s a key facet of the franchise model, the tipped wage system, and an exploitative service sector. Weil, a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, suggests that the franchise structure, one that gives franchisees little room to make decisions independent of their corporate brand, incentivizes wage theft.
The tipped wage exploits workers by design. It’s part of a more nefarious Southern economic development model—characterized by business deregulation, opposition to unions, minimal worker protections, poverty wages, low tax rates, and regressive austerity measures shouldered by the working-class—that experts say is rooted in racism.
“The goal of the [Southern economic development] model is to get labor for as cheaply as possible,” says Chandra Childers, senior policy and economic analyst at the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) at the Economic Policy Institute, and the author of a report on the model. Childers says the origins of the tipped wage date back to the period following the abolition of slavery, when businesses like the Pullman Company trains didn’t have to pay Black porters and maids, if customers tipped.
Today, the tipped minimum wage allows employers to pay service workers a meager $2.13 wage by crediting the tips workers earn in a week toward their $7.25 minimum-wage obligation. Before the wage hike rollout, Waffle House paid their lowest-wage servers $2.90 an hour. Before 1966, there was no federal law requiring employers to pay tipped workers a minimum wage because Southern segregationists built carve-outs into labor laws for occupations dominated by Black workers.
In May, nearly a year after workers, at the first of four Waffle House locations, went on strike over workplace safety concerns and low wages, Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers III announced a series of nationwide wage hikes he called “the single largest additional investment in our workforce” in the company’s history. The new salesperson compensation plan—a wage system consisting of a base hourly rate, a tenure bonus, and shift premiums—rolls out a $5.25-an-hour base wage by June of 2026. Some workers will see base wages climb $1 to $2 more by June 2027.
Cindy Smith, a Waffle House worker of 29 years from Conyers, Georgia, told the Prospect that the company is finally investing in their servers as a direct response to worker organizing and public pressure. Although many of her co-workers at her location feared retaliation, she gathered enough support to lead a series of successful strikes after workers delivered 13,000 signed petitions with worker demands to the company in March.
Smith expects to see her hourly wage rise from $2.92 an hour to $8.45. She can now find a place to live with her son and no longer has to ask herself, “Am I going to have groceries this week? Or am I going to pay the light bill?” Nevertheless, though Smith is grateful for the raise, the increase falls short of the union’s call for a living wage of $25 an hour. “We’re not backing down. It’s a win, I’ll take it as a win. It’s still not enough,” she says.
