Across the country, a movement to abolish the subminimum tipped wage has gained ground. As of 2025, seven states — Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington — have enacted what advocates call “One Fair Wage,” guaranteeing tipped workers the same minimum wage as everyone else, with tips on top — a rejection of a two-tiered wage system that keeps service workers’ lives unpredictable and subordinated to the caprices of bosses and customers. In New York, Illinois, and Arizona, efforts to replicate this model are currently advancing through ballot initiatives and legislation.

But as the push to scrap the tipped minimum wage gains momentum, it is also encountering resistance. In Washington, DC, where voters overwhelmingly passed Initiative 82 in 2022 to phase out the tipped minimum wage, under pressure from industry lobbies seeking a repeal of the new law, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced in June that the city would pause its implementation. This week, the DC city council voted to amend the law, slowing down changes and capping eventual increases of the subminimum wage, now to be implemented by 2034, at 75 percent of the full minimum wage. In Chicago, where the city council passed a One Fair Wage ordinance in 2023, a new proposal in the city council (opposed by the pro-labor mayor, Brandon Johnson) would freeze the tipped wage at 68 percent of the full minimum wage.

The justification offered on both cities is identical: that abolishing the tipped wage will devastate independent restaurants and inadvertently hurt workers who already make good money from tips.

The industry’s mouthpieces, including the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW) and the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), have launched an aggressive lobbying and media campaign to entrench this narrative. They claim to speak on behalf of restaurant workers, but they are not worker organizations. They are extensions of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), an industry group historically aligned with large corporate chains like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Olive Garden — none exactly known for their commitment to workers’ rights or well-being.

These groups are manufacturing a crisis. In DC, RAMW has promoted a figure that “44% of full-service restaurants expect to close by the end of 2025.” But the actual basis for this claim is flimsy: the number comes from a nonrepresentative survey conducted by RAMW of its own member restaurants, which represent a relatively small minority of DC restaurants that tend to be aligned with conservative industry politics.

The number of DC restaurant closures in 2024 did rise slightly compared to the previous year, but restaurant openings also increased, outpacing closures by a margin of two to one. And RAMW’s own data show that the majority of restaurant closures in 2024 were unrelated to rising wages for tipped workers. Some closures were tied to the end of pandemic-era subsidies and aid programs, and many were tied to increasing rents demanded by landlords.

RAMW’s narrative that One Fair Wage is to blame for restaurants’ struggles ignores well-documented structural causes for closures, in order to falsely pin the blame on worker demands and needs. In reality, in an independent investigation of the health of the restaurant industry, the DC Office of the Budget Director found that the city’s restaurant industry is “healthy, with a growing workforce, an increasing number of restaurants, and rising average wages.”

Yet the falsehoods continue to circulate — not just in industry newsletters, but in major outlets that fail to challenge the NRA’s data or speak to a single tipped worker not affiliated with the group. Workers — especially line cooks, dishwashers, bussers, and low-wage front-of-house staff — are rendered largely invisible.

But the truth is not hard to find. Reports from the Economic Policy Institute, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and One Fair Wage show that tipped workers in subminimum states are significantly more likely to live in poverty. Nearly 60% of Illinois Black women who are tipped workers report that their tips often do not even bring them up to the full minimum wage. Sexual harassment rates in tipped environments are alarmingly high. The system creates not just economic precarity, but a culture of dependence: workers are trained to please, to stay silent, to endure exploitation for the chance at a good shift or a generous tip.

This isn’t accidental. The subminimum tipped wage was popularized in the United States after emancipation, when white employers sought to avoid paying wages to newly freed Black workers. In Europe, tips were a bonus; in the United States, they became a substitute for wages altogether. The practice migrated from train porter jobs to restaurants and hotels, consolidating power in the hands of owners and customers, and ensuring that workers remained underpaid and controlled.

It’s not that tipped workers don’t have concerns. In high-end restaurants, tips can account for the majority of a worker’s income. A poorly designed transition to One Fair Wage could reduce earnings if employers eliminate tipping or cut hours. But these concerns are why workers should be substantively consulted about this change, rather than simply scrapping it. Solutions like pooled tips, stronger wage theft protections, union representation, and guaranteed livable base wages are crucial to ensure that no one loses income and that back-of-house workers are no longer excluded from the tipping economy altogether.

In states that have already eliminated the subminimum wage, the industry has not collapsed. Quite the opposite: according to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, full-service restaurants in “equal treatment” states have seen stronger growth in both jobs and total establishments than in subminimum states. Customer tipping behavior remains stable. Restaurant employment and sales are higher.

The restaurant lobby knows this. So why the misinformation? Because One Fair Wage represents not just a wage increase but a shift in power. It challenges the long-standing requirement that workers must smile for survival. It questions the industry’s reliance on obedience, gratuity, and deference as substitutes for rights.

The NRA and its affiliates are spending millions to stop these wage increases. They are testing their strategy in DC and Chicago, hoping these cities can serve as cautionary tales to block wage reforms elsewhere.

As Eyal Press has reported for the New Yorker, this is part of a broader national strategy spearheaded by the NRA and quietly embraced by the Trump administration: a politics that masquerades as populism while stripping workers of real power. In states like Arizona and Massachusetts, restaurant associations have funded “worker” front groups, flooded legislative bodies with misleading data, and convinced tipped workers to fight against their own economic interests by stoking fears about disappearing tips and rising prices. Their aim is to protect corporate profits by ensuring that labor remains cheap, disorganized, and deferential.

And yet, workers are organizing. Ballot initiatives are moving forward. The restaurant industry has not collapsed in states that eliminated the tipped wage — it has grown. What’s collapsing is the myth that this system is fair.