After 23 Years, Your Waiter Is Ready For A Raise
When Woody Harrelson's character got hired as a bartender on Cheers, he was so excited, he insisted on working for no more than the minimum wage. "I'd work like a slave," he said, "and, of course, I'd wash your car."
Most bar and restaurant workers would prefer to bring home a little more cash. They may be in luck.
As part of his plan to raise the minimum wage, President Obama has called for substantially increasing the base wage paid to tipped workers for the first time in decades.
"It's easy to forget the overwhelming majority of tipped employees are low-income workers," says Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos, a liberal research and advocacy group.
The Democratic bill endorsed by Obama in his State of the Union address last month would raise the overall minimum wage in stages, from the current $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. Tipped workers — a group that includes waiters, bartenders and busboys — would see their base wages rise to $7.07 an hour.
That bill, like all legislation in Congress these days, faces an uncertain future. And its fiercest opposition comes from the National Restaurant Association.
For starters, the NRA argues, most tipped workers make more than the federal minimum of $2.13 an hour. And it's true: Thirty-one states mandate higher minimum tipped wages than the feds — though those mandates vary widely. In Arkansas, for example, the minimum is $2.63, while in Washington and Oregon it's more than $9.
Even in states that haven't raised the tipped minimum, restaurants are required to make up any shortfall between $2.13 and the regular minimum wage that isn't covered by tips.
"Tipped employees at restaurants are among the highest-paid employees in the establishment, regularly earning $16 to $22 an hour," says Scott DeFife, executive vice president for policy and government affairs at the NRA. "Nobody is making $2.13 an hour," he adds.
But labor advocates take issue with the NRA's numbers. In 2012, the median income for food and beverage serving workers was $8.84 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bulk of tipped workers are barely making ends meet, advocates say.
States Where Servers Have The Highest Base Wages