PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — In Pennsylvania, like most states, there’s a separate lower minimum wage for tipped workers like wait staff at restaurants and a higher minimum wage for everyone else.
Gov. Tom Wolf has been trying to change that.
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When it comes to their minimum wage, tipped workers at restaurants and bartenders must be paid at least $2.83 an hour. Tips are supposed to get them up to the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
If tips don’t do that, says John Longstreet, president of the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association, “The employer is responsible for bringing them up to the full minimum wage with company proceeds.”
“This has been the law since 1977,” Longstreet told KDKA money editor Jon Delano on Wednesday.
While Wolf would rather have all workers at the same minimum wage of $12.00 an hour, the Republican Legislature has not gone along. Instead, the governor proposed a set of regulations just approved by the regulatory commission.
“This will protect their tips. It clarifies that the money they earn in tips goes into their pocket and is not diverted in any way to the operational expenses of an employer,” says Tom Foley, the deputy policy director at the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry.
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