The Best and Worst Cities to Work in a Restaurant

Would you rather be a server in New York or in San Diego? Before you answer, you’d do well to consult a recent analysis that shows just how unfair our nation’s outdated and byzantine minimum-wage system is about taking care of the workers who take care of the rest of us when we dine out. When it comes to service industry jobs, the difference between a living wage and barely getting by is, much like real estate, all about location.

PayScale, which collects data on salaries and wages across the country, crunched the numbers regarding what servers bring home in 15 cities with a bustling restaurant industry. Taking both tips and the local minimum wage into account, PayScale came up with an hourly income figure for each market, and the range is pretty staggering.

While tipped servers pull in a relatively decent $21.50 per hour in San Francisco, their peers in Houston have to make do with a measly $11.60. Despite its reputation as a fine-dining capital of the world (and one of the most outrageously expensive cities to live in), New York pays its servers a middling $15.30 per hour, while wait staff in San Diego take home $17.50.

The discrepancies are more glaring when you consider the degree to which servers in different cities must rely on our demonstrably ridiculous system of tipping to make ends meet. One bad night of tips for a server in, say, Houston, makes a lot more difference than for one in Seattle.

That’s because in Seattle, only 43.5 percent of a server’s hourly wage comes from tips, while in Houston, tips account for more than 75 percent. Servers in Miami, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and San Antonio also depend on tips for more than 70 percent of their hourly wage.

It’s no surprise, really, that wait staff in Seattle, Minneapolis, and various cities in California are the least dependent on tips to make ends meet. They’re in states that are among the relative few—just seven in all—that have dispensed with the pitifully inadequate double standard that is the “tipped minimum wage” and require restaurant owners to pay their employees the same minimum wage as other workers.

Currently, the minimum that employees who receive at least $30 per month in tips can be paid under federal law is a measly $2.13 per hour—where it’s been stuck for almost 20 years. Back in 1996, when Congress raised the federal minimum wage, it royally screwed over tipped workers by setting the tipped minimum wage at a fixed rate rather than allowing it to increase by a percentage over time.

While a number of states have raised the tipped minimum wage or abolished it altogether, 17 states still allow restaurants to pay their tipped staff the paltry $2.13 an hour.

That would be laughable were it not of such dire consequence for a growing number of Americans. The poverty rate for tipped workers is 12.8 percent, almost twice as high as for the rest of the population, according to a report last year from the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, the full-service restaurant sector has grown more than 85 percent since the early 1990s, compared with just 24 percent growth in the overall private sector—meaning more people than ever are relying on tips to make a living.

Recently, New York had the opportunity to become the eighth state to dispense with the tipped minimum wage, but the state wage board caved to industry pressure, recommending instead that New York’s tipped minimum wage be increased from $5 to $7.50 per hour. “The continuation of subminimum wages for tipped workers is a gift to an industry that has been kowtowed to for too long,” the editorial board of The New York Times howled. “It smacks of legalized wage theft, and it is unworthy of a state that regards itself as progressive.”

No matter. The restaurant industry still complained, calling the wage hike “outrageous and unprecedented,” in the words of Melissa Fleischut, president of the New York State Restaurant Association, according to The Associated Press.

Fleischut raised the specter of job losses and cut hours for tipped workers, which has long been the bedrock of the hospitality industry’s argument for maintaining the status quo.

But as the report from the Economic Policy Institute found, employment in the leisure and hospitality industry from 1995 to 2014 actually grew faster in states where tipped workers were paid an equal minimum wage—43.2 percent—versus the 39.2 percent growth in states that have a lower minimum wage for tipped workers.

Original article from TakePart