What do you think the federal minimum wage is? If you guessed $7.25/hour, you’re only partially correct. The truth is, tipped workers like restaurant servers are actually making as little as $2.13 per hour right now in 16 states across the country – it’s shameful, and it’s totally legal. 

Paul Constant, a member of our Civic Action team, recently wrote a Business Insider piece about this issue, and we’d like to share the most important points of his piece with you today.

The tipped wage has racist roots. Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, explained on a recent episode of our podcast Pitchfork Economics that the subminimum wage for tipped workers goes all the way back to the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, “when the restaurant lobby first demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves, not pay them anything at all, and have them live entirely on this newfangled concept that had come from Europe … called tipping.”

Tips don’t ensure servers are paid what they’re worth. The tipping system isn't some libertarian's ideal free-market system in which the most efficient workers are tipped according to how well they do at their job. Women and people of color who work for tips always earn significantly "less than white, male tipped workers," Jayaraman said, "because of the biases we all carry as customers. That got even worse during the pandemic."

The restaurant industry can afford to pay higher wages. Tipping allows a restaurant to outsource its payroll to its customers, but plenty of restaurants thrive without paying poverty wages. States around the country require restaurant owners to pay their employees at least the state's full minimum wage, and there’s been no negative impact on the restaurant industry.

The pandemic has worsened conditions for restaurant workers, and many of them have decided that the subminimum wage isn't worth the hassle. Jayaraman serves as president for the nonprofit One Fair Wage, which last year surveyed 3,000 restaurant workers who left their jobs during the Great Resignation and found that 54% of respondents said they were abandoning the industry entirely. 

Of those leaving restaurant work, "nearly eight in 10 say the only thing that would make them stay or come back is a full livable wage with tips on top," Jayaraman said. "They are not having it. They're not putting up with it anymore."

Thanks for reading! If you have a friend who doesn’t know about this issue and you think they may find it interesting to learn more, you can click here right now to send them an email with the link to Paul’s article. With just this click, you can get another person on board with our campaign for a living wage!

– Civic Action