Restaurants are pretty low margin businesses unless you are a large corporate chain, and even then they are not very high margin which means that wage increases

Restaurants are pretty low margin businesses unless you are a large corporate chain, and even then they are not very high margin which means that wage increases have huge effects on profitability. For example, Darden restaurant group operates with a gross margin of ~20% (with labor being ~36% of cogs), and SG&A is 5% of sales, for a ~15% EBITDA margin. So every 10% increase in wage costs decreases GM ~3.6% and reduces EBITDA by 25% (15% to 11.4%) This means in order to raise wages restaurants need to either cut costs (automation, reducing # of jobs), reduce tip expectations (20% to 15%, negating wage increases), increase prices (and reduce demand, leading to a lower # of jobs and hurting shareholder value), or be good with a massive shareholder value destruction. My point is that big picture, framing this in any other light than a this is either a transfer from shareholders to employees, or to pay less employees more at the expense of making some employees redundant is disingenuous.