Editorial: Serve up a test case on malt shop’s illegal wage

In the vein of two wrongs don’t make a right, Route 66 Malt Shop in Nob Hill has cooked up a scheme to pay less than the minimum wage approved by city voters last fall.

This was bad legislation that in the end will hurt many of the people it was intended to help.

But 66 percent of voters approved increasing the minimum hourly wage for most employees from $7.50 to $8.50 and for tipped employees from $2.13 to $3.83. The law that took effect this year also includes future increases based on changes in the Consumer Price Index — a job-killing policy that hopefully will be reversed.

So malt shop owner Eric Szeman can bemoan the challenge of making the new payroll, threaten layoffs and say he’ll have to shut his doors. But the law is the law, and it is unacceptable that Szeman believes he can have minimum-wage servers sign a contract allowing him to flout it.

City Attorney David Tourek is being pragmatic and fiscally responsible when he says it is not the place of the City Attorney’s Office to handle employer-employee disputes. There are plenty of private attorneys who handle that area of law, and the law provides for them to recover their fees.

But in a case this high profile and outrageous, he should send a message that reinforces what he has said publicly: The malt shop contracts are illegal.

Szeman is adamant that he can simply disregard the law. So unless Tourek reverses course, the City Council and Mayor’s Office should consider urging or directing him to take this one on to send a message to other would-be scofflaws, while making it clear it’s not the job of the city attorney to be the primary enforcer of this ordinance. That’s why it has a private remedy and provision for attorney fees.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.