Tips in restaurants are a reliably contentious topic: How much do you tip? Should tips vary according to service level and if so, how much? What is the overall morality of a tips system? What does it say that restaurants expect customers to pay one set of workers separately from the official “price” of the meal? Meanwhile, servers feel, with good reason, that their tips are often dependent on their willingness to tolerate sexual harassment and other customer bad behavior.
Sometimes it’s even made explicit: In one 2018 New York Times article, one server recounted a customer patting his lap, beckoning, and saying, “I’m a great tipper.” Another described a customer asking for her phone number and then, at the end of his meal, “he had the tip money in his hand—he was like, ‘So you gonna give me your number?’” The pandemic made it worse: An April report from the group One Fair Wage found that nearly 3 out of 4 women working for tips in restaurants had experienced sexual harassment, and nearly half said the harassment had gotten worse during the pandemic. Both of those numbers were worse for women of color.
Servers in most of the country are almost entirely reliant on tips since the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour. Even many states that have significantly raised their minimum wages have retained extremely low minimums for tipped workers. Voters in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Maine, will have the chance on Tuesday to vote to abolish the special tipped minimum wage.
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Washington, D.C., voters actually passed a measure doing the same thing back in 2017, only to have the D.C. council overturn it. This time around the council doesn't look likely to repeat that if voters pass the measure again.
At the time the D.C. council overturned the tipped minimum wage increase, it instituted a requirement for restaurants to report tips as oversight to ensure that tips really are bringing workers up to the minimum wage. But just 11% of restaurants and bars have reported quarterly as required, and only 35% had reported even once in the past year. Sadly, while José Andrés is out doing wonderful things in the world, in the District of Columbia his restaurants are failing to report their tips and his company has contributed money to oppose the proposal to increase the tipped minimum wage.
The full minimum wage in the District of Columbia is $16.10 an hour, while for tipped workers it’s $5.35 an hour. In Portland, the ballot measure that would eliminate the lower level of $6.50 an hour for tipped workers also raises the minimum wage to $18 and makes gig workers like app drivers eligible for the minimum wage. Some states have already taken this step: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington already require tipped workers to get minimum wage, and it will go into effect in Michigan in 2023.
And because it’s already happened in some places, there’s data to address some of the most common objections to eliminating the tipped worker subminimum wage. The group One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley have a recent report using those comparisons to rebut the opposition.
One claim is that restaurant workers will actually lose out: Servers and bartenders who currently make well over the minimum wage from tips will now see their income go down because people won’t tip. According to the report, which compares D.C. to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, the data disagrees. Seattle in particular has one of the highest tipping averages in the country, with 38% of people tipping more than 20%.
This argument also ignores the fact that lots of servers and bartenders aren’t working in the high-end restaurants where tips lead to relatively high incomes. Workers in more affordable restaurants often live in poverty if they have to rely mostly on tips. That shows up in higher poverty for food service workers in D.C. than in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle. Doing away with the tipped minimum wage would substantially reduce these inequities within the industry: “In D.C, the lowest earning servers and bartenders make only 37 percent of what their highest paid counterparts make. Compare this to Los Angeles where even the lowest paid server would earn approximately half (or 54 percent) of what the highest paid earner does.”
Opponents of these measures also argue that having to pay workers the minimum wage will hurt their businesses. But according to the report, the number of full-service restaurants in Los Angeles was growing faster than the number in D.C. prior to the pandemic, while employment in L.A. restaurants rebounded faster in 2022 than employment in D.C. restaurants.
Proposals to pay tipped workers the minimum wage are an important move against sexual harassment, inequality, and poverty. In D.C. and Portland, Maine, voters have the chance to make those changes.
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