RAISE THE TIPPED MINIMUM WAGE! $2.13 is NOT enough!

The federal tipped minimum wage is atrociously low at $2.13/hour.  For more than twenty years now, tipped workers in the restaurant industry and elsewhere have toiled for this miserable wage, in part due to the fact that restaurant workers have not had a voice. As a result, waiters and waitresses have three times the poverty rate of the rest of the United States workforce, and more than half of all restaurant workers live below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

In this year's 113th Congress, the Miller-Harkin Fair Minimum Wage Act and the WAGES Act would increase the full and tipped minimum wage and:  

• - raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10/hour over the next 3 years.
• - raise wages for more than 29 million Americans.
• - Starting in 2015, adjust the minimum wage each year to keep pace with the rising cost of living, as 10 states currently do
• - And raise the minimum wage for tipped employees to 70% of the regular minimum wage.

This act would go a long way towards restoring the minimum wage to its historic value; it would be more than $10.40 per hour today if it had kept pace with the rising cost of living over the past forty years.