BOSTON (SHNS) – Women’s rights advocates who support eliminating the below-minimum wage for hospitality workers temporarily turned a conference room in a government building into a restaurant Wednesday morning, as “servers” took breakfast and drink orders from “customers.”

While customers selected from a menu of bagels, pastries, eggs, bacon and sausage, the roleplay did not include a scenario in which they ultimately had to pay their servers and demonstrate the crux of a potential ballot question that looks to gradually phase out the existing $6.75 minimum hourly wage for tipped workers.

The leader of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women, which aims to promote equity for women and girls, said the body supports bills to pay tipped workers the state’s full $15 hourly minimum wage with tips on top. Commission Director Shaitia Spruell said the body is not permitted to support the ballot question initiative, though it did bring members of One Fair Wage — the coalition leading the ballot campaign in Massachusetts and other states — to the event at the McCormack Building.

“This issue is a really important issue for the women of the commonwealth,” Spruell said. “We know that women make up a lot, a big chunk of the tipped workers in Massachusetts, and a lot of those women are women of color. Those women of color have families, they have children going to our schools, they have responsibilities even beyond their kids, their homes, their families. So increasing the minimum wage would support these women tremendously.”

Spruell, one of the servers, wore an apron emblazoned with the One Fair Wage logo.

The event advisory promoted Rep. Christine Barber and Boston City Councilor Gabriela Coletta as attendees. But no elected officials came to the small gathering, which initially had two tables being served.

A controversial provision in the potential ballot question allows for a tip-pool arrangement, in which gratuities earned by customer-facing employees would be distributed among all restaurant workers, including back-of-house cooks and dishwashers.

A spokesperson for the Committee to Protect Tips, which opposes the initiative petition, said pooling tips together undermines advocates’ demand for wage equality.

“This is not a solution to impact wage equality in any way, and if they believe servers aren’t making enough, why is their solution to give away some of the wages?” spokesman Chris Keohan told the News Service. “What they’re saying is that by implementing tip pooling, they will be taking money directly out of our servers’ (and) bartenders’ pockets and that would be distributed to people throughout the restaurant. If there is a wage equality issue, why are they taking money away from the people they say have the wage equality issue?”

State law requires employers to make up the difference in workers’ pay if bartenders and waitresses do not earn up to $15 an hour when combining their base pay and gratuities. But under existing state law, ballot proponents say many tipped workers regularly fail to achieve that $15 threshold. The pay structure disproportionately harms women and people of color in the service industry, One Fair Wage and the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center said in a new research brief.

Female tipped restaurant workers earn $7,000 less annually than their male counterparts, the research found.

There are 79,000 tipped female workers in the commonwealth, representing 70 percent of the tipped workforce. The report said 25,000 tipped workers, or about 23 percent of the workforce, are people of color.

Those demographic groups earn less than their male counterparts, which the report attributes to customer bias in giving gratuities and “occupational segregation that keeps women and especially women of color in more casual, lower-tipping restaurants where tips are less.”

Betty Marcon, a former California restaurant owner, said she works with a division of One Fair Wage to help restaurant owners throughout New England provide equitable wages to their workers.

“A lot of restaurant owners in the commonwealth will tell you that if this particular legislation passes or the ballot measure passes, then it will be detrimental to to the restaurant industry, it will be catastrophic. I’m here to tell you that that’s not true,” Marcon said. “A lot of restaurant owners really need to step up and pay their fair share of the workers’ wages. Because what’s happening now is customers are paying wages — they think they’re paying tips, but’s that’s not what they’re paying, they’re paying wages.”

Christopher Carlozzi, Massachusetts state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, warned that Maine overturned a similar voter referendum on tipped workers.

“Small businesses oppose phasing out the tipped wage in Massachusetts because not only will it increase the cost of operating a restaurant, it will also result in a reduction in pay for servers, as other states that enacted this policy already proved,” Carlozzi said in a statement. “Maine had to reverse their move to phase out the tipped wage, and it was not just business owners flooding hearing rooms asking for the reversal, it was the servers who lost take home pay due to the change in policy reducing their tips. Massachusetts should not make the same mistake.”