Letter to Mayor Biss and City Council: Vote down the proposed Fair Work Week Ordinance

Submitted by the Evanston Restaurant Association

We are 50 Evanston food business owners (and counting) who are writing to you regarding Evanston’s proposed Ordinance #24-O-23, establishing Evanston’s “Fair Work Week.”  As you know, we have reached out and spoken with all of you, individually and in small groups, to express our concerns about this ordinance.  Some have asked, “Why would you be against an ordinance called the ‘Fair Work Week?’”  The answer is simple…this is a misguided proposal that would destroy workplace flexibility while devastating a broad spectrum of industries that drive Evanston’s economy.  We believe our employees value the flexibility and support we provide for them.  This ordinance hurts the very people it is claiming to help.
Small businesses are the backbone of this country, and this city. We invest countless hours to create our vision here in the community. We support the schools, pay our taxes, and hire your children. When someone is in need, we are the ones who hold the fundraisers and extend helping hands.  Each business here is the embodiment of hopes, dreams, risk, terror, endless hard work, challenge, frustration and ultimately vision.  The food businesses who made it through the first three years of the pandemic now find the world in a very different place.  Costs are higher, (including ingredients, packaging and labor) and finding qualified staff is more challenging.  We struggle with supply chain issues and inflation saps our income flow more every month.  And, the pandemic continues to linger. Nationally, the average profit margin in restaurants is about 3 to 5 percent.  That means 95 to 97 percent of what restaurants take in as revenue goes into the food, employees, taxes, rent and everything else that comes with running the place. Please take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of a small business owner already struggling with these challenges.

Now is the time to support and celebrate Evanston businesses as opposed to adding increased regulations and governmental overreach. The City recently spent $245,000 on the Evanston Thrives study.  A key component of the study was to “Build a toolkit to ensure more equitable investment and support for local businesses.”  The study highlighted several action steps that could assist the small business community in a variety of ways.  We welcome the continued discussion of this study and the eventual implementation of the recommendations.  In the meantime, the best way the City can help small businesses is to enact ordinances that actually encourage growth, hiring and community involvement.  The proposed bag tax, cashless ban and fair work week ordinance do not achieve those goals – they hinder them.  All of those ordinances go against what Evanston Thrives was trying to initiate – supporting small businesses and promoting economic growth.

In the handful of municipalities across the nation that have enacted this type of ordinance, it has only applied to very large corporations, and/or chains. The proposed Evanston ordinance is the most restrictive of any current ordinance in the entire country.  The Evanston ordinance, in its current iteration, would apply to all businesses with 15 or more employees.  This is far more restrictive than what is currently in place in other communities:

Seattle:  Minimum of 500 employees, or employees in full-service restaurants with 40 locations worldwide.

New York:  Limited to fast food establishments with 30 or more locations nationally.

Chicago:  Companies with 100 employees, 250 for food businesses.

Berkeley:  Restaurants that employ 100 or more staff globally.

A bipartisan group of Colorado lawmakers rejected a similar bill last week.  Hundreds of food service workers asked for the bill to be defeated, further indicating strong employee resistance to this type of ordinance.

As for the Evanston ordinance, the term “in writing” or “written” appears nineteen times. The ordinance requires every covered business to retain records of each such written or writing for three years. The City can demand to inspect each of these records in any covered business at any time. An employee has a private right to sue each of us for any slip or oversight – not for a change in schedule or double shift – but for the failure to retain any of these 19 writings. And they can sue up to two years after the fact. There are thirty distinct new causes of action under which we can be sued, fined or both under this ordinance.

Think of how something as simple as the weather affects restaurants with outdoor seating.  Rain. A cold snap. Dog days heat. For any weather change, a restaurant must shoulder added costs. And up to two years later, we can be fined or sued for not always keeping perfect written records of schedule changes wrought by Midwest weather.

The financial impact comes most harshly when businesses do right by their employees. An employee needs to miss work to take care of a sick child or a dying parent? The employer must pay extra when another employee voluntarily agrees to cover the shift. Cook County requires mandatory sick leave, yet when Evanston employers follow this law they would need to pay extra to cover those shifts. Limiting the law to only larger businesses only makes this punishment worse. Federal law requires employers with more than 50 employees to grant FMLA leave of up to 90 days. Alas, under Evanston’s Fair Work Week ordinance, an employer granting an employee FMLA leave to care for an elderly parent faces Evanston fine or lawsuit if they bring in another employee to cover the multiple shifts missed and don’t pay extra or keep written records. If multiple employees get sick at the same time – and we are still emerging from the pandemic – the costs skyrocket.

This government’s attempt to intervene in the small business world – to regulate something as complex and shifting as restaurant workforce scheduling – is not acceptable. A city that should be supporting and promoting its restaurant and hospitality industry instead ties our hands and threatens with fines and lawsuits. What makes this feel even more mystifying, though, is the fact that no one – outside of academia and some members of council – asked for this. There are no worker petitions, there are no employees filling City Council chambers. The city is proposing a raft of record keeping requirements and future lawsuits to solve a problem that we see no evidence exists. The “whereas” paragraphs in the ordinance did not come from worker petitions or complaints. Outside research studying the effects of Fair Work Week laws enacted for larger businesses does not provide any adequate evidence that this is needed here in Evanston.

There was no effort by the City Council or administrators to connect with small businesses before putting this proposal forth.  The Evanston food business community initiated the meetings with the Mayor and Council members – not the other way around.  As the Evanston Thrives study indicated, Evanston’s current focus is reactive, not proactive.  That needs to change.  The small business community wants to collaborate with the city to address issues that are affecting our community.  We are willing and ready to answer questions, provide feedback and listen to concerns.  We are not willing nor able to accept continued governmental overreach and unnecessary punitive restrictions.  The City’s approach towards small businesses should be one built on trust, respect and understanding.

This is a poorly written ordinance that will only serve to hurt the very employees you are claiming to help. There is no need to table it – please just vote it down now, as Colorado did last week.  It is the right thing to do for our employees, our businesses and our community.

Sincerely,