Last month, residents of Washington, DC, voted in overwhelming favor of Initiative 82, the District of Columbia Tip Credit Elimination Act of 2021, which eliminates the subminimum tipped wage of $5.35 an hour. The measure, a repeat of a 2018 referendum, ensures that by 2027, all tipped workers will receive the city’s full hourly minimum wage of at least $16.10. With the passage of Initiative 82, DC joins seven states that have prohibited the use of a tip credit for tipped wage workers—Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
The current landscape of wage inequality in the restaurant industry is the outcome of years of discrimination, starting shortly after the US Civil War, when formerly enslaved people, especially Black women, were hired to do service jobs for zero-dollar wages. In 1966, the new federal minimum wage covered service industry workers, but employers could use tips to top up a subminimum wage. Three decades later, Bill Clinton signed the Minimum Wage Increase Act, but the tipped minimum wage was excluded from this increase due to pressure from the restaurant industry, locking food servers’ wages in at $2.13 per hour.
The racialized and gendered wage gap resulting from this wage suppression has widened over the decades, making working-class livelihood dependent on customer bias. Research has also shown that workers in tipped jobs are more likely to suffer not only substandard wages, but also sexual harassment and unsafe working...
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