"Let's be clear: 70% of workers who receive tips are women," wrote on the social network Twitter this Thursday the independent senator Bernie Sanders, who once again insisted on the need to increase the minimum wage to $ 15 per hour.
Sanders is one of the main promoters of this salary increase, which, despite the endorsement of President Joe Biden, failed to advance in the Senate earlier this year.
The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. It is currently set at $ 7.25 per hour, although the minimum amount is higher in some states.
For tipped workers, the standard minimum wage is even lower: $ 2.13 per hour.
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Is it true that seven out of 10 tipped workers are women?
Yes, the figure, in general terms,
is true
, although it varies slightly according to different estimates and analyzes.
The senator based his Twitter post on a recent analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP), which found that women make up 68% of workers in tip-dependent jobs, even though they are barely 47% of the entire workforce in the country.
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Estimates from the National Center for Women's Law, prepared in 2019 with statistical data from the IPUMS project of the University of Minnesota, indicated that, on average, 72% of workers who received tips in the United States are women.
According to these data, on average two in 10 people in tipped jobs are women of color, and among these, the poverty rate for 2019 was 21%, double the national poverty number for that year.
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The CAP study, published on March 30, concludes that eliminating the minimum wage with tips to increase it to $ 15 per hour, as proposed by the Democratic plan, would help alleviate poverty, boost the economy and promote racial justice, gender and disability.
"When three-quarters of workers' income depends on tips, it happens that the whims of customers can effectively control the earnings and livelihood of those workers," the study notes.
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In general, people of color are overrepresented in the top tip-dependent job sectors.
And Hispanics top that list: They represent 24% of employees in tip-dependent industries but only 17% of the entire workforce.
Poverty and sexual harassment
The restaurant industry uses the most tip-dependent staff.
Six out of 10 tipped employees work in this industry.
An analysis by researchers Sylvia Allegretto and David Cooper of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that, due to their poverty levels, about half of tipped workers and their families depend on tips. public benefits, compared to 35% of non-tipped workers.
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"In the richest country on Earth people shouldn't be working for starvation wages," Sanders said.
In 2018, the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC), a nonprofit organization that advocates for improving working conditions in the food industry, found that women who earn tips and work with a guaranteed salary report half more sexual harassment cases than women who work with tips in states where the minimum wage is $ 2.13 per hour.
In these states, women who earn tips are also three times more likely to be asked by their bosses to wear "sexier" and more revealing clothing than women who earn a fixed minimum wage.
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The Center for American Progress found that workplace sexual harassment against tipped workers did not stop during the coronavirus pandemic.
On the contrary, there were multiple cases of restaurant customers asking workers to remove their masks and uncover their faces to "decide how much to tip."
Currently, 16 states use the tipped federal minimum wage of $ 2.13 per hour.
Another 26 states and the District of Columbia have a higher tipped minimum wage, but still below the current regular minimum wage of $ 7.25 per hour.