Editorial: Tipped minimum shows wiggle room on issue
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Gov. Tom Wolf has spent years pushing to increase the Pennsylvania minimum wage.
The state’s minimum has sat at the federal bottom line of $7.25 per hour since 2009. But anyone who has done a gratuity-motivated job such as waiting tables knows that isn’t the least amount of money someone is allowed to get paid.
No, the real minimum in the Keystone State is $2.83 an hour. That’s all a company has to pay a tipped employee if they make at least $30 in tips per month.
At least, it was.
In a unanimous vote, the Independent Regulatory Review Commission gave the nod to Wolf’s proposal to make a radical change in that figure.
The new ground floor for the $2.83 wage is $135 in tips — a more than 300% increase that is long overdue. How long? It adjusts for 45 years of inflation that has gone largely uncorrected.
This is not news to anyone. Whenever discussions of minimum wage arise, the fact that a significant percentage of the restaurant industry alone is built on minimum wage employees who make a salary obscenely beneath the minimum is noted.
Which makes it unfortunate that it has taken so long to get to a very obvious compromise.
Year after year, the Democratic governor has advocated for dragging the wage higher, starting at $12 per hour but setting it on the path to $15 per hour. However, with opposition from the Republican Legislature, that was going to be nothing but an ugly slugfest, if not an outright impossibility. Wolf’s seven years in office with no change in minimum wage proves that.
But the unanimity of the tipped threshold change makes it clear that there was a middle ground if only both sides had not been resolutely focused on pulling off a win for their respective parties.
That means for seven years, Pennsylvania waiters and waitresses have been working for peanuts when they could have been guaranteed a more reasonable paycheck.
Maybe another compromise could be less about moving the overall minimum — which many companies seem to be moving to $12 or higher on their own — and more about increasing that tipped minimum.