Lapeer — Woodchips BBQ is nestled between an eye doctor and small brewery near Lapeer’s historic white courthouse. Inside, diners are tucking into smoked pulled pork spiral mac ‘n cheese or BBQ egg rolls.
Michelle, my server, explains what’s good on the menu after I sit down. Unfortunately, her job could be on the chopping block if out-of-state activists get their way.
Patrick Hingst, the owner of Woodchips and several other restaurants around town, battled the state’s Covid-19 closures in 2020. Now he’s up against the threat of new regulatory hurdles for restaurant owners.
Hingst explained that in 2018 a California-based advocacy organization came to the state petitioning Michiganders to raise wages for workers. The effort was spearheaded by activist and attorney Saru Jayaraman from One Fair Wage.
“This is not from people in the industry,” he told me. “They’re not even from the state.”
Hingst said One Fair Wage and its canvassers are not telling people the whole story when they go door-to-door asking people if they think the minimum wage should be higher. In reality, the language of the petition is incredibly burdensome to businesses.
Instead of letting the issue go to voters, the Republican-led legislature made changes through a procedural process that softened the impact in 2018. GOP lawmakers adopted the measure and then amended it within the same legislative session.
Then last year, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the adopt-and-amend process violated the state constitution. But then, the Supreme Court went a step further and said the petition’s statutory language would become law on Feb. 21.
“For the first time in the history of this state, the Michigan Supreme Court removed clear and unambiguous text from statutes and invoked judicial power to rewrite vast portions of those statutes,” Michigan Supreme Court Justice Brian Zahra wrote in a dissent.
In short, out-of-state activists got a law on the books that no one in the state voted for, except a Supreme Court with a Democratic majority in the name of equity.
Hingst said it’s hard enough to compete with the concrete jungle along M-24. Now he’s staring down the reality of progressive activists crafting rules for his business. He wrote a frustrated post on Facebook just after the Supreme Court’s deadline kicked in.
“This has to end,” Hingst wrote. “We need a future that can inspire our youth to want to build a better Michigan, rather than escape to states that provide better economic opportunities and less corrupt government.”
The backlash was as swift as it was predictable.
Though the commenters were seemingly unaware, Hingst says he pays his employees more than what’s required by the current minimum wage laws. The lowest-paid employee at Woodchips gets $14 an hour, more than a dollar higher than the current minimum wage. On average, Hingst’s workers earn over $20 an hour.
They get 12 days of PTO, profit sharing, insurance options; and every year, the 10 longest-tenured employees get an all-expenses-paid vacation. What more can you ask from a restaurant job near Michigan’s thumb?
Amber, who’s worked at Woodchips nine years, says she’s here because she loves “the culture of this place.”
Across the table from me at Woodchips, Hingst is generally reserved, but passion wells up when he talks about operating high-quality restaurants, the people he employs, and the pandemic struggles they overcame together.
Hingst’s first start in food was working at McDonald’s at age 16, before going to Michigan State to become a lawyer. As he took courses, he became disenchanted with law and eventually found his way back to making food and running a business.
While he’s operating three restaurants and has big plans for Lapeer, Hingst tells me there’s little money in it. He’s middle class, he says. What he makes he reinvests in the businesses and in the town. He’s in the process of trying to build the first new building the downtown has seen in years.
He said that part of his motivation for starting Woodchips was to build something so those living in the area would be proud to be from Lapeer. He also wanted to help rejuvenate the downtown and make his part of the world better.
Recent years have made it more difficult to serve up great barbecue and beers to the local community, but they’ve also buoyed Woodchip’s reputation.
After abiding by the first Covid-19 shutdown orders in the spring of 2020, Hingst said he talked with his team during the second round of restaurant closures that fall. The staff was unanimous: Stay open and work.
Hingst said state and public health officials would come by to intimidate him and demand he shut down the restaurant. He would politely refuse to comply. Then the officials would cower, he said.
Other restaurants in town took note and decided to open, too. Then the officials came and threatened $1,000-a-day fines. Soon, Woodchips was the only restaurant open in town. It lost its liquor license for defiance. The restaurant ended up paying about $1,300 in fines.
Concurrently, Woodchips BBQ became famous for defying the lockdown orders, with people coming from all over the state to visit and have delicious food.
After Hingst’s post last week, the State Legislature passed Senate Bill 8. The bill softened the burden for restaurants, while increasing the tipped wage slowly over the next few years. The governor signed it Friday, undoing some of the most onerous burdens placed on businesses by the judicial branch.
Hingst says he’s hopeful they can make it work. But One Fair Wage is already cooking up another ballot initiative to hold a referendum on the most recent law, foisting their agenda onto the lives of him and his employees.
Setting what you must pay servers affects a business’s bottom line. In many places, that means replacing waitstaff with QR codes on the table, offering carryout service only, or switching to walk-up bar service.
The big fast food companies are going to be fine. They’ve already automated their dining rooms with expensive, soulless tech. Hometown institutions like Woodchips won’t be able to keep up. All of Woodchips’ servers are women, many of them single mothers. They would all have to find other work.
What One Fair Wage won’t tell you is that if they get their way, server positions could become an expensive luxury reserved for high-end restaurants in big cities, while jobs dry up for people out here who need them most.
Someone needs to tell the activists to stay out of our state. Small business owners are not trying to make a buck at some else’s expense—they’re just trying to make it.
Brendan Clarey is deputy editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
