US Tipped Minimum Wage

Incidentally tips are like this for many regular non-gig-economy food service workers too - many areas allow an employer to pay less than the minimum wage as long as the total pay (including tips) meets the minimum. So a person who gets $0 in tips gets (say) 7.25/hr from their boss, but if they get 5/hr in tips they might just get 2.25/hr from the boss and not come out ahead at all - your tips are just a fee being handed indirectly to the boss. Of course, if they get more than 7.2

I tend to agree, yet I also believe if I'm not mistaken this is kind of how servers at restaurants work too. They have some minimal base wage, then tips. If their tips do not take them to minimum wage, the employer must pay the difference to get them to minimum wage. In essence, we as customers are subsidizing the restaurant owners to get their employees to at least minimum wage pay. So the question is why are we just now getting outraged when this has been being done to people for a while

Unfortunately, in a lot of states in the US, there is a huge gap in minimum wages. $7.25 per hour for normal jobs, yet it is only $2.13 for tipped workers. For the lower end, this usually means that their paycheck goes mostly to taxes and their entire living money comes from tips.Legally, the employer is supposed to ensure that the wages plus tips equal out to the $7.25 per hour. Legally, they are paying minimum wage. We need the laws changed to fix this issue, but the government doesn

Businesses already pay the exact minimum wage of $2.13/hour. The employees either make an additional $5.12/hour in tips or the employer must make up the difference at every pay period. Employees routinely underreport their tip earnings beyond the $5.12/hour to not pay taxes and fly under the DoL radar.Edit: I should add that lots of states and some cities have their own minimum wage laws but they are all structured the same. There is a minimum wage like $10/hour but if an

For jobs where tipping is expected, in most states the expected tips can be taken away from the minimum wage - so a server could be paid $2 per hour + tips.

Important to add: in fields where tipping is standard (notably, restaurant waitstaff), in many areas of the US the minimum wage is much much lower. Nationally, $2.13/hour. That pays their taxes... For all intents and purposes, restaurant and bar staff are gig workers that are working for a variable rate determined entirely at the customers' discretion. If you don't tip them, they're essentially working for free, or rather, the rest of us are subsidising your service

Restaurant wait-staff are often paid minimum wage with the expectation they will make it up with tips. It's a travesty.

> in general, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, but for waitstaff and some other "tipped" jobs, the minimum wage is less than a third of that, at $2.13.In the United States, pay for tipped employees is regulated by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which among other things requires that they always be paid a minimum wage.https://www.dol.gov/whd/reg

The reality of the situation is that waiting tables is generally not a minimum wage job in the US, because of tips. Sure, a restaurant might be required to make up the difference between earned income and minimum wage on a slow day (although hearing from my server friends this may or may not happen), but the market wage for waiters can be 1.5-2x minimum wage in a low-end chain, and much higher at high-end restaurants. Service is thus explicitly not priced into the food, because the employer is n

While that may be technically true, I imagine any waiter not able to pull in tips to exceed the minimum wage would soon find themselves out of a job, especially in at-will states. In practice tipping just transfers the cost from the employer to the consumer.