Subminimum wage system is age-old injustice

The subminimum wage for tipped workers is a legacy of slavery.

After the Civil War, many employers in hospitality and rail service hired newly freed Black workers into jobs where tips often replaced wages. Tips became, for too many workers, the wage itself. That injustice still lives on today in the form of a lower minimum wage for tipped workers.

We should call that system what it is: an old injustice that never ended.

Today, it does not just hurt Black workers. It hurts tipped workers of every race. It leaves millions of people with unstable incomes. Too many workers finish a shift without knowing whether they earned enough to cover rent, groceries or child care.

It also leaves workers more vulnerable to harassment. When your livelihood depends on pleasing the customer in front of you, even when that customer is drunk, crude or predatory, the power imbalance is obvious. No worker should have to put up with humiliation to earn enough to live.

No decent society should accept that as normal.

Yet for decades, the corporate restaurant lobby has fought to preserve exactly that arrangement. Its argument is always the same: pay workers fairly and the industry will suffer. But what it is really defending is a business model built on paying some workers less and making customers close the gap.

Mayor Brandon Johnson and some other City Council members are right to reject that model.

Today, tipped workers in Chicago can still be paid $12.62 an hour before tips, while the full city minimum wage is $16.60. The city’s 2023 law was designed to close that gap over time, ending the tip credit by July 1, 2028. And when the City Council moved last month to freeze that progress, Johnson vetoed the measure and fought to keep the phaseout in place.

He deserves credit for that.

Because this fight is bigger than restaurants.

We are living through twin crises of affordability and democracy. The first shows up at the kitchen table. Rent is too high. Groceries are too high. Child care is too high. Too many families work hard and still cannot get ahead. The second shows up in the growing number of working people who no longer believe democracy can improve their lives.

Those crises are connected.

When government moves quickly to protect loopholes for powerful interests and slowly to raise wages for working people, faith in democracy erodes. People start to believe the system is rigged because too often it is. But when leaders stand up to lobbyists and fight for the people who do the work, democracy starts to feel real again.

That is why this matters.

The issue here is dignity. It is whether a woman serving your dinner should have to tolerate harassment to make enough to buy groceries. It is whether a man working a late shift should have to wonder if a weak night in tips means his child goes without. It is whether labor will be respected in this country or merely used.

A tip should be what it was always supposed to be: extra. It should not be an employer’s excuse not to pay a real wage.

And the principle should not stop with tipped workers. In a country as rich as ours, the minimum wage should be a living wage, with no carveouts, no loopholes, and no second-class categories of worker.

Chicago has a chance to say something to the nation: work has dignity, and every worker deserves a full wage.

Mayor Johnson is right to keep fighting. Now the city should finish the job.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.