Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) returned to her roots as a bartender Friday night to pour drinks in support of tipped workers and a $15-minimum wage.
“I was nervous that I may have lost my touch – still got it! That muscle memory doesn’t quit,” the congresswoman wrote on Twitter.
{mosads}Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender in New York before launching her Democratic congressional bid last year to defeat longtime incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in the 2018 Democratic primary.
Employers in 43 states are allowed to pay workers below the federal minimum wage if they earn the full minimum wage counting tips.
Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), the organizer of the event Ocasio-Cortez attended, and other advocacy groups are lobbying New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to institute a full minimum wage for tipped workers.
Union groups argue that the increase is necessary to combat wage theft, reduce economic disparity and make workers less vulnerable to sexual harassment.
“Any job that pays $2.13 an hour is not a job. It’s indentured servitude,” Ocasio-Cortez told the restaurant-goers. “All labor has dignity and the way that we give labor dignity is by paying people the respect and the value that they are worth… We have to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.”
Conservative critics, including President Trump, have mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s history as a bartender.
Trump took aim at Ocasio-Cortez, referring to the freshman lawmaker as a “young bartender” as he pleaded with Republicans not to kill her proposed Green New Deal resolution so he can run against it in 2020.
“The Green New Deal done by a young bartender, 29 years old,” the president said last month. “A young bartender, wonderful young woman, the Green New Deal. The first time I heard it I said, ‘That’s the craziest thing.’ ”
Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest women ever elected to Congress, passionately defended her humble roots.
“I’m proud to be a bartender,” the self-proclaimed democratic socialist said. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with working retail.”
“There’s nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy,” she continued. “There is nothing wrong with preparing the food that your neighbors will eat. There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family to work.”
“There is nothing wrong with being a working person in the United States of America and there is everything dignified about it,” the New York Democrat said.