From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is good food.

We've talked about tipping before, usually from a consumer perspective.

I'll never forget the story about a woman being asked if she wanted to leave a tip when getting her car from a tow lot.

Yeah.

This time, we're looking at the practice from behind the kitchen door.

In several states, employers are allowed to pay tip workers less than a minimum wage,

which is sometimes shockingly low. The theory is that these employees will supposedly

make up the difference in tips. In practice, that benefits

business owners far more than it benefits most of their workers. A.L. Press of the New Yorker recently

reported a story about attempts to raise the minimum wage for servers in various places around

the United States. But powerful organizations have fiercely opposed

this. He dug into how the restaurant industry is fighting tooth and nail to prevent raising

the federal minimum wage for tipped employees. Hi, A.L. Hi, thanks so much for having me on the show.

Oh, this is a subject as a former restaurant owner and line cook I am very passionate about.

Can you start with just a basic explanation, like the tip credit versus minimum wage and explain what these terms mean.

And also the difference between federal minimum wage and state minimum wages.

Yeah.

So first, just as like kind of admission, I have written a fair amount about labor issues in my life.

The last book I wrote was called Dirty Work. It was about workers who do various morally troubling

jobs. And I've covered the labor beat at the New Yorker and at other places for a while. And I have to

say, I was not aware of the tip credit,

even though I had once worked in a restaurant myself and sort of vaguely remembered, oh, yeah,

...