For over four years, I worked as both a tip-earning waiter and as a manager in local restaurants, and I have seen countless cases of my fellow employees walking out with less than the federal minimum wage in their pockets. It is not just the “bad waiters and waitresses” that don’t make any money. It happens to the most skilled, most experienced, and hardest working peoples in the restaurants. It has happened to me, it has happened to dozens of my co-workers, and it will continue to happen unless the State of Kansas joins states like California, Oregon, Minnesota, and Montana and raises their state minimum wage for tipped employees to match the federal minimum wage.

The plight of the restaurant tip earner is no different than the problems faced by some twenty-seven thousand employees in the state of Kansas who make under the federal minimum wage. Under a loop-hole in the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FFLSA), your friendly waiters and waitresses at your local restaurants are only paid $2.13 an hour for their hard work and long hours. The assumption made by the law is that the remaining difference of $3.72 is earned by tips left on the table by customers served by the waiter or waitress. For an eight hour shift, they make under the minimum wage if they make less than thirty dollars in tips. Whether it is due to a lack of customers, an unwillingness of customers to leave a few extra dollars, or a restaurants policy to spread the earned tips amongst other employees, it is quite common for a waiter or waitress to leave the restaurant with less than the federal minimum wage for each hour worked. These are not isolated incidences, and the restaurants should not rely on customers to pay what they are not required to pay.

For over four years, I worked as both a tip-earning waiter and as a manager in local restaurants, and I have seen countless cases of my fellow employees walking out with less than the federal minimum wage in their pockets. It is not just the “bad waiters and waitresses” that don’t make any money. It happens to the most skilled, most experienced, and hardest working peoples in the restaurants. It has happened to me, it has happened to dozens of my co-workers, and it will continue to happen unless the State of Kansas joins states like California, Oregon, Minnesota, and Montana and raises their state minimum wage for tipped employees to match the federal minimum wage.

Now, many people, restaurant owners included, feel that the current practice is more than fair for the tipped employees. People will say “they earn what they work hard for” or that “if they cant make ends meet, they should get a different job”. These arguments ignore the fact that sometimes it is outside of a persons control to decide where they work. Most people working in these restaurant jobs are students, parents, or people in-between professions who are trying to simply survive and pay the bills until next month.

Many restaurants require their employees to share their tips with bartenders, bussers, cooks, hosts, and even other servers. It is not uncommon for servers to share 1-3% of their food sales with each group of their fellow employees. If a server makes $30 in an eight hour shift, they are then required to pay up to 3% of their sales to at least five other groups of employees, this represents a net loss of $4.50 per night. While they all help one another in their work, it is the tipped servers who pay the other employees for the services they provide customers during the course of a shift. This shifts the responsibility from the employer to the tip earning.

However, in fairness it is important to note that federal law requires restaurants to make up the difference if an employee makes less than the federal minimum wage. This seems like a good excuse for the extremely low wages earned by tipped employees, but upon further review it does not hold up and guarantee equal wages to all employees. While many servers do make a substantial income off of tips alone, they are the exception to the rule, and it is essential to look out for numerous employees who slip through the cracks.
A restaurant determines if they are supposed to compensate an employee based on their weekly earnings. This means that an employee can make under the minimum wage on four nights per week, and make over the minimum wage on one night per week, and they do not need to be compensated for the four days they made under the wage if the one night they exceed the wage is enough to bump the average above the federal minimum wage.

There is even a scenario where a server loses money for every tables that are served. At the end of a shift, a server has to claim the amount of tips earned during a shift. This amount that a server claims for tax purposes is at least 8% of your sales. Federal law assumes an 8% tip for every dollar of sales that a server rings up, and taxes the servers hourly wage accordingly, before any other federal or state taxes are taken out. If the actual tip is under this 8% assumed by the government, then the server actually has to pay in order to serve a table! This happens all too frequently, however as long as the 8% of the servers sales is enough to exceed the federal minimum wage, the restaurant does not have to pay compensation to the server, even if the actual income for the shift is under 8% of sales. All that it takes is one or two tables who do not tip a server, and their income plummets as they lose money on every paycheck for every table that does not tip them.

A server also happens to only earn $2.13 an hour in Kansas regardless if they are in the dining room serving customers, or if they are in the back of the restaurant cleaning floor grout and preparing food for the next day. Many people do not realize that servers are usually required to stay for an hour or two after they take their last table in order to do extra tasks required by the restaurant. These tasks include cleaning food preparation areas, restocking and inventorying food items, preparing food for the next shift, placing silverware into napkin rolls, vacuuming and cleaning the dining room, and any other reasonable task that is required by the restaurant to function. The issue is not an issue of fairness of the tasks assigned. It is clearly in the job description and in the necessary functions of the job to perform these tasks. The issue is an issue of fair pay when a server is on their hands and knees scrubbing floor tiles or is cutting tomatoes and cucumbers for salads for the next day.

Is it really worth paying these employees $2.13 an hour to do these tasks? Is it fair to expect the consumer to pick up the tab for the two extra hours a shift that a server is making such low wages for such hard work? The answer here is a clear and resounding NO! Can you really expect young people to do this hard work for less than the cost of a gallon of gas per hour and have them be motivated enough to do the job quickly and efficiently? All too often I have heard, and I have said myself that “Why should I do this if the restaurant is only paying me $2.13 an hour? I would rather be serving customers so I can make enough money to pay for my tuition!”

Now, most people will be quite vocal in opposition to providing minimum wages to tipped employees. Most people will say “but this will raise our food costs!” The facts are, that an increase of wages for tipped employees will have a very insignificant effect on food prices. It is in my experience, as a manager of these restaurants that labor costs only account for about 10% of the restaurants income, assuming proper management techniques. If you increase labor costs from the current $2.13 an hour to the eventual federal maximum of $7.25 in 2009, you will see an increase of labor costs by 340%. While this seems like a large amount at first, breaking it down in terms of a cheeseburger at a local restaurant, it is rather insignificant, especially in terms of the savings you would have by not being required to tip the employee out of necessity. For example, if your average cheeseburger and fries at a restaurant costs $8 at a sit-down restaurant, of that $.80 is your labor costs associated with the burger. If you increase the waiters wage to that of the minimum wage, the labor costs go up to $2.72 with the burger, but the actual cost of the burger only goes up less than two dollars! Factor this small increase in prices, with a decreased incentive to tip to compensate for poor pay, and the average consumer breaks even or can even save money on a meal!

Also contributing to the problems faced by servers is the fact that although the federal minimum wage increased to $7.25 by 2009, the tipped income exemption in the FFLSA did not increase. It is still $2.13 an hour, even after the minimum wage for everyone else was increased. This will only mean that more and more servers will make under the federal minimum wage, and all of the problems associated with that will effect them. Under this scenario, the twenty-seven thousand employees in the state of Kansas who make under the Federal minimum wage will be a conservative estimate, and this number will undoubtedly rise unless we take action in our local communities and in our state legislature and RAISE THE WAGE!