ALWAYS ESSENTIAL, STILL WAITING FOR CHANGE

A legacy of slavery and a source of race and gender inequity, poverty, and harassment, the subminimum wage for tipped workers has been a topic of debate in the United States for the last decade — a debate that intensified with the pandemic. Given the mass exodus of millions of workers from the restaurant industry post-pandemic, workers are winning dramatic wage increases in both thousands of restaurants nationwide and in dozens of states through policy change.