WASHINGTON WINDOW

In debate in D.C., cities and states over raising the U.S. minimum wage, or overriding it by higher local minimums, one group is largely overlooked: Tipped workers.

These restaurant servers, bellhops, hotel room cleaners and various other attendants, suffer from a lower—far lower—tipped “minimum wage” than the low federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. That hasn’t increased since George W. Bush’s reign.

The federal tipped minimum, $2.13 an hour, hasn’t risen since Bill Clinton was in the White House, in 1993. Imagine not getting a raise for 32 years.

Theoretically, a tipped worker’s boss is supposed to make up the difference between that low figure, plus tips, and the regular federal, state or local minimum wage, whatever it is. In practical terms, many don’t. They let the tipped workers work only on tips. It’s a massive form of wage theft costing workers billions of dollars.

It’s also been going for at least a century and a half. Indeed, some scholars view tipping as a relic of the post-bellum South, when white elites refused to pay Black workers the same wage they paid whites for doing the same jobs. Live on tips, bosses said.

That’s what Pullman car porters found in the 1890s, according to this excerpt of a letter to a friend from Sen. John Sherman, R-Ohio, author of the nation’s original anti-trust law. His letter, quoted in a sermon by the Rev. William Carwardine, pastor of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in the infamous “company town” of Pullman, Ill., called tipping “a species of petty extortion” which humiliated the workers because their tips were a substitute for wages. Does that sound familiar?

“It is a small matter in the individual case, but it is an extortion to pay the [Pullman] porter for each trip you take” as a rail passenger, wrote Sherman in a long analysis of George M. Pullman’s massive exploitation of his workers, and his drastic 33%–at least—wage cuts on them, without cutting what they paid for rent or food, in the 1893 depression. Those cuts and Pullman’s refusal to negotiate led to the famed nationwide strike by the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs.

“The trouble is that these men are not paid enough by the company,” Sen. Sherman continued. “If they were paid adequate salaries, the passengers would not be obliged to come forward to help them out.

“I really think the men need the money in most cases, and I always give, because I do not want to feel or appear mean about the matter,” Sherman added. “There is a sort of compulsion about it, though, that is very disagreeable, and it could all be avoided.”

Avoided, that is, then and now, if tipped workers earned a decent minimum wage, or more. And the same goes for differently abled workers in special care, inmates of the nation’s prisons, caregivers and home health care workers, sharecroppers and fruit and vegetable pickers in the nation’s fields and so-called “independent contractors.”

That last group of millions, including “gig economy” workers, can’t unionize and are denied the minimum wage, overtime pay, workers’ comp and jobless benefits. And they must pay both their share of payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare and the employer’s share, too.

All those workers and more need a raise. Otherwise, they’re just as badly off as those long-ago Pullman porters, and the Pullman strikers of 1893, whom Rev. Carwardine and Sen. Sherman were talking about.