Chuck and five collage.jpg

Clockwise, from left: Chuck's Fish restaurant on U.S. 280 in Birmingham, Five restaurant and bar in Tuscloosa, and Charles "Chuck" Morgan Jr. and his 30-pound king mackerel, for whom Chuck's Fish is named.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- While Democrats and Republicans in Washington butt heads over raising the national minimum wage, in Alabama, two popular Birmingham and Tuscaloosa restaurants have proactively rewarded their lower-wage workers with a minimum hourly rate that is $3 more than the state and federal standard.

Chuck's Fish and Five, both of which have one location each in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, began paying their kitchen porters, prep cooks and line cooks a minimum of $10.25 an hour on May 12, Cris Eddings, co-founder and managing partner for both restaurants, told AL.com on Thursday.

In Alabama, the minimum wage is the current federal standard of $7.25 an hour.

"We've always paid our employees well over the minimum wage, but we have set a new company standard minimum wage of $10.25 an hour," Eddings said. "Nobody is ever going to start below that at any entry-level position at our restaurants."

Between the four restaurants, Chuck's Fish and Five employ around 200 workers, Eddings said, and the majority of them earn more than the company minimum wage.

Most of the minimum-wage workers are "back of the house" employees who help the chefs prepare the meals and are responsible for keeping the kitchens and restaurants clean.

"The people that work so hard for us -- our porters and line cooks -- we want to make sure that they have just as much of a chance to earn a decent living, and we want them to be capable of climbing the wage ladder just as rapidly as anybody else in our restaurants," Eddings said.

Charles Morgan III is pictured here inside Chuck's Fish restaurant in Tuscaloosa not long after it opened in 2006. (Tamika Moore/tmoore@al.com)

"Across the board, we want everybody to have the same chance to achieve the same quality of life no matter what position you're in in the restaurant. If you work with us, you're going to get paid well.

"We also want to attract dedicated people," Eddings went on, "and if we pay them better, we think they will work harder and take more pride in their work. We want people to actually want to make a career in the restaurant industry if they work with us."

Elsewhere around the country, though, lawmakers in Massachusetts are considering a bill that would gradually raise that state's minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2017, and in Seattle, the city council last month approved a citywide minimum wage that requires fast-food franchise to pay their workers at least $15 an hour.

Nationally, President Obama called on Congress to "give America a raise'' during his State of the Union Address in January, and he has pushed for a wage increase that would incrementally raise the federal hourly minimum to $10.10 over three years. A bill to do that has sat in a House committee for more than a year.

The owners of Chuck's Fish and Five are not trying to make a political statement or push other Alabama businesses to pay their workers more, Eddings said, but just want to try to ensure that their employees make a decent living.

"Ultimately, we're doing this because we feel this is the right thing to do, and we certainly don't need anybody dictating to us what they think is a livable salary," he said. "We think it's wonderful if other businesses followed suit, but that's not to judge anybody else's businesses practices whatsoever.''

In addition to the company minimum wage standards, Chuck's Fish and Five also offer their employees a 401K program with an employer match, health insurance coverage, paid gym memberships, and monetary incentives for nonprofit charity work done within the community, according to Eddings.

"It is important to us that the people who spend a large portion of their lives working to make our restaurants successful make enough money to be able to eat in the restaurant that employs them," Charles Morgan III, Eddings' business partner and the co-founder of Chuck's Fish and Five, said in a separate statement.

"Some businesses and industries might be attracted to the state of Alabama because of the low minimum wage," Morgan added. "The reason we're here is because of the abundance of talented people in the work force."

Morgan is the son of Birmingham-bred civil rights lawyer Charles "Chuck" Morgan Jr., who, the day after four black girls were killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, famously blamed Birmingham's white business establishment for cultivating a climate of racial hatred in the city.

After receiving death threats, the elder Morgan closed his Birmingham law office and moved his family to Atlanta, where he established the regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union. He died in 2009.

The Chuck's Fish restaurants are named in honor of the senior Morgan and the 30-pound king mackerel that he caught to win a fishing tournament with his friend Julian Bond in the late 1980s. Photographs of Morgan and his big fish are on the walls of the restaurants.

"The restaurant is basically named for that photograph," the younger Morgan said in a 2009 interview with The Birmingham News/AL.com "That's 'Chuck's fish.' That's about his only fish, but it was a good one."

Chuck's Fish is located at 508 Greensboro Ave. in Tuscaloosa and at 5426 U.S. 280 in Birmingham.

Five is at 2324 Sixth St. in Tuscaloosa and at 744 29th St. South in Birmingham. Five also has locations in Athens, Ga., and Gainesville, Fla., and is opening another later this year in Knoxville, Tenn.

To read more stories by Bob Carlton, go here.