So How Should Your Favorite Restaurant Pay Its Servers? Well, It's Complicated
A fierce debate is taking shape within the restaurant industry as a push to raise the minimum wage threatens to upend the tipped wage structures for servers.
Jillian Melton and Paul Sklar work at two restaurants hundreds of miles apart. And when it comes to the $15 minimum wage debate, their differences in views could almost be as vast.
The push by Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage would also eliminate a decades-long practice of paying restaurant servers as little as $2.13 an hour under the expectation they would earn far more through tips.
It is a pay structure prevalent in most states, including in Tennessee, where Melton was a server at the chain restaurant Seasons 52 until she was laid off during the pandemic. But
