You could have phrased it better but this is still true. There are employers who get money from the government who essentially give handicap people busy work and filed trips for a couple bucks per week. There’s even “assembly” roles they can get for like $1/assembly (roles like putting screws in bags).

Because Republicans are evil.

More egalitarian venues tend to pool tips, so line cooks get a slice of the tip out at the end of the day.

Federal minimum wage law requires that if front of house tips are pooled to be distributed to kitchen staff (who aren’t traditionally tipped), then front of house must first be paid at least minimum wage pre-tip. So that kind of restaurant, while becoming more popular, isn’t exactly the type of restaurant in the discussion when we talk about servers being paid less than minimum wage before tips.

I worked in damn near every type of kitchen, from restaurant to banquet hall to school to what have you. None of them tipped out the kitchen because of the laws and guidelines around all of it. And the one that DID tip out the kitchen, they would only schedule up to 32 hours/week or whatever to avoid paying health insurance benefits, and your pay was $3+ dollars less than competing restaurants in the area an hour because “you’ll make it up in tips.”

And the tips would’ve been split between all staff, so your share is a lot less than what the servers would get individually. And the entire time you’re going to hear or fight with servers who don’t think its fair they have to split their tips with the kitchen. I’ve heard it: “Why should I? They were my tables and I did all the work?!”

I even watched a cook one night welcome a server to come back in the kitchen and do his job while he went out and did hers. When she said she didn’t know how to cook, he responded, “Huh… All of us on the line could do your job, right now, but none of you could do ours… And you deserve all the tip money because…” 😂

Retirement homes constantly have this issue regarding their wait staff. The servers you want to hire won’t work there because they don’t get tips. We started our servers at like $16/hr and could still only ever get high school and college kids, or people who were retired or needed a second job part-time.

I was a cook at a restaurant chain at Christmas one year. Waiter and I worked identical shifts, and were walking to our cars at the same time. He mentioned how excited he was that he’d made $300 in just cash tips that day. I told him I worked the same amount of hours and only got about $90 after taxes. I asked if he felt he worked over $200 harder than I did that day, and he dropped the subject.

My point being: wait staff and bartenders make too much from their tips that they don’t want them to go away. As someone who was always working on the line and only got 2 tips over the course of a decade-long cooking career… I can’t say I blame them.

Alternative fix: make the minimum wage an actual minimum wage regardless of tips. Let the market sort itself out from there.

Their employer is ensuring that they are taking home no less than minimum wage

You are assuming their employer is on the up and up. If they are not willing to pay them AT LEAST minimum wage, what makes you think they are going to make up the difference?