People eat at restaurants in Pittsburgh's Schenley Plaza on Sunday, May 2, 2021.
During a pandemic recession that has hammered the service industry, Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration is attempting to sell its minimum wage proposal by focusing on tipped workers.
In Pennsylvania, the tipped minimum wage is $2.83 cents an hour, an amount set in 1998.
As a part of his annual budget, Wolf proposed raising the minimum wage for the seventh consecutive year. That plan calls for raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour on July 1, and then gradually raising it every year until it reaches $15 an hour in 2027. That proposal would also eliminate the existence of a separate, lower tipped wage, something long sought by the group “One Fair Wage.”