You left out the part where they are still guaranteed minimum wage if they don't get enough tips.

Try working at a restaurant and actually getting them to pay you that. They don't.

Surprised this comment is 15 hours old and never got the "But they're legally required to! Complain to the Department of Labor and sue them!" response.

While I'm sure most restaurants stay legal, there's a non-zero number of restaurants with owners that don't make up the missing pay and let workers end up making less than minimum wage, but the workers don't complain because they're truly desperate for work, or their local government won't do anything about it.

Now I'm remembering the Amy's Baking Company episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares where one of the owners, Samy, admitted that he takes all the tips his wait staff make, despite being illegal (Source: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs15.htm)

I'm sure you're right, because that's the general attitude they operate with in that industry, but I was a server for six years and most of my friends still are, and it's totally unheard of for a server to end the night below minimum wage. I've never known a server to come away with less than kitchen staff and the norm was much higher. A really bad night at a cheap buffet was 60 in five hours. If it was slower than that servers and kitchen staff would just be sent home.

They did at my crappy small chain (in a Southern state without as many worker protections). It was automatically done in their payroll software based on declared tips/hours (where most servers didn't declare cash tips and were thus more likely to make the non-server minimum wage).

is the minimum wage not legally enforced?

Surely it is if $2.13/hour leaves enough left over to hire a lawyer, or the employee is confident that the payout will be greater than a decade of lost opportunities as "someone who sues their employer".

you're only right in the US centric view of things; it's totally abnormal else where.

The minimum wage stuff is not true in California, at least.

Maybe federally, but in Oregon, where I live, restaurant workers make at least state minimum wage ($9.75), and in Portland, the wage is going up to $15.

I feel a good first start would be to get rid of the tipped-job-exception from the Federal minimum wage law and set it a fixed minimum regardless of job classification.

> in general, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, but for waitstaff and some other "tipped" jobs, the minimum wage is less than a third of that, at $2.13.

In the United States, pay for tipped employees is regulated by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which among other things requires that they always be paid a minimum wage.

https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs15.htm

If anyone is claiming that a particular restaurant violates the law by paying lower than minimum wage to their servers, then that's the problem right there, not anything to do with tipping or tipping culture. If anyone is not being paid minimum wages they are owed, the US Department of Labor will be happy to intervene:

https://www.dol.gov/whd/contact_us.htm

A lot of waiters don't report because they can't afford to lose their job over the odd slow week where they're stiffed $20 and then get blacklisted at other restaurants. And no, that's not a lot of money to lose out on, but it adds up.

And yes, it's illegal to fire someone over reporting, but it happens all the time. And it takes time for a lawsuit to go through, so you've gotta find work somewhere else in the meantime. And now you have to also take time to sue your old company. When you're barely afloat, it's not worth rocking the boat because you might drown.

That's reality for a lot of people. You can't just say, "this is the law so it's not happening."