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It's kind of a semantics argument I guess. Their employer is ensuring that they are taking home no less than minimum wage - because they are paying them up to minimum wage as necessary.
To properly address this would require fully overhauling our tipping culture and laws around pay for tipped workers, which sounds great to me as a consumer. But if you ask a waiter or bartender, many would MUCH rather leave things the way they are, because they make an absolute killing and taking 100% of pay from their employer would result in a substantial pay cut.
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.
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?
Yes, I'm assuming they're obeying labor laws of the United States. Businesses operating illegally are kind of outside of the scope of the conversation, don't you think?
Alternative fix: make the minimum wage an actual minimum wage regardless of tips. Let the market sort itself out from there.
I don't disagree. But for the sake of playing devils advocate a bit - restaurants already take YEARS to achieve profitability because costs are so high. If you suddenly triple all of your wait staff's salaries, small, local restaurants making good faith efforts to operate ethically would probably be the ones to suffer.
And yet - I've heard that if McDonald's were to pay employees $15/hr, because of economies of scale, it would raise the cost of a burger by mere pennies.
So if your local mom and pop's can't afford to operate now, and all you're left with is Chili's and Olive Garden and McDonald's who priced them out of business with capital investment and economies of scale, mom and pop go away and all we're left with is the corporate garbage. And when the competition is dead, prices will steady climb. Meanwhile, those m&p restaurants all have waiters now making $0/ hour.
I'm not an economist. Obviously. And maybe it wouldn't be so dire. It just feels like "let the market sort itself out" would work great for the CEOs and not anybody else. I haven't seen the market self correct for my benefit in years. But in our failing capitalist society, I think there are about a thousand ways the worker and the consumer end up fucked either way.
Very few small mom and pop shops might need to raise prices, many of them already pay decent wages far above the minimum actually, but corporate restaurants and chains like McDonalds can absolutely afford $15 an hour without raising prices because they already pay above that amount in other places. There is already the assumption that if McDonalds could raise their prices then they would. What they pay their staff isn't a factor in the equation unless they were close to net zero or below, but unlikely because McDonalds makes Billions in Net Revenue annually in the USA alone. If the corporation decided it would be more profitable to close lower traffic operations in small towns then that would be a good thing for local restaurants.
If this sort of idea really hurt the small times more than the corpos wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to stop it from happening using lobbying groups.
So how do restaurants outside the US that do not rely on the patrons paying their staff survive?
They didn't fuck their system in the first place. I'm not sure how we unfuck ours with so much wrong at every step.