The minimum wage was in 1968. In todays dollars the wage back then is 10. 90 an hour. Families of three where only one works to try and survive on this minimum wage fall way below the poverty level. This in a country with some of the worst income inequality in the developed world. It is not hard to understand why a majority of americans want the federal government to take action on this. That majority does not include billionaire donald trump, ted cruz or john kasich. These gentleman, of course, are vying for the republican nomination for president. They want to leave the federal minimum wage where it is. The standard conservative argument against raising it rests on the claims that doing so is a job killer and later in the show i will talk to someone who shares that view. On the democratic side Bernie Sanders wants to boost the federal minimum wage to 15 an hour. Thats the amount that fast food workers, their supporters and labor groups have been pushing for years. Hillary clinton supports raising the wage to 12 an hour, but supports state and local campaigns that want to go above that. Both sanders and clinton are calling attention to something that has, anyone who has worked as a waiter or bar tender knows. There are in this country two minimum wages. One for regular workers and one for tipped workers. The wage for tipped workers is lower, meaning tips will make up any difference. We are the only industrialized country in the world that requires tipped workers to take home their income in tips instead of wages. These workers can be paid legally as little as 2. 13 an hour. They have not had a raise in 25 years. That is shameful so clinton and sanders want to eliminate the tipped minimum wage. That is the case now in seven states. Thats the goal of activists who are fighting for a minimum wage of 15 an hour that applies to all workers including tipped employees. Whether america or more states in america will actually eliminate the current twotier wage system is far from certain. Are you ready to fight . Yeah. If you work 40 hours a week, you have a right not to be living in poverty from the west coast to the midwest and the northeast and everywhere in between workers are waging a battle. 270 cities the fight for 15 is a movement to increase the minimum wage to 15 an hour. It is intensifying in several states including new york where the hourly minimum 9. There will be a 15 minimum wage for all employees but all may not include employees who earn tips as part of their wages we want to be sure that tipped workers, 300,000 here, six million of them nationally, dont get left out of these minimum wage increases among the foot soldiers is a tyreless leader in the labor movement. She is the co founder of Restaurant Opportunity Centers united. Its mission is to improve wages and working conditions for the nations restaurant worker what is like to live on 2. 13 . I dont really count those she wants to make sure that tipped workers are included in the fight for 15, so they no longer depend on gratuities. Were here to call for a one fair wage the tipped minimum wage is as little as 2. 13 an hour. According to federal law, when an employee doesnt receive enough tips to reach the actual minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. According to a recent government case. The u. S. Department of labor has reported an 84 violation rate with regard to restaurants actually ensuring that tips make up that difference gentlemens car martin is a 26yearold way tremendouses earning a base of 2. 77 an hour. She works at several restaurants that sympathy preferred we not name for fear of losing her job. The reality is a lot of employers dont make up the difference at all. Reporter she says slow days are a killer. I worked 11hour days, from lunch to dinner and i might get a total between the two shifts maybe 30 in tips. It has been really rough. Ive never had to be on public assistance while working on fulltime. This is something im not proud to admit. I can say that most of my coworkers have been or currently are on food stamps jessica who is an ass pyring artist is an aspiring artist. I look at who is working and i saw all men. White men. The lower the check average, the lower the price, the browner and more feminine the workers get she says women relying on customers to subside eyes their salary are vulnerable to harassment when you ask workers do you experience Sexual Behaviour in the restaurant that is scary and unwarned, 90 say yes she travels across the country speaking with Food Service Workers and meeting with legislators. We have bills and be that as it may on the measures to eliminate the tips she is helping to convince danny myrer to imnature tipping in his establishments tipping will soon be off the table at all Hospitality Group restaurants which include Union Square Cafe and the modern the modern was the first to roll out the program last november. A tip cam threecourse dinner there rose from the 8 to 122 after tips were eliminated. This is the owner of the cheese and wine cafe. He says he would like to follow the example, but as an lone Small Business owner he cant afford to we have trouble staying competitive if we want to raise the wages of our kitchen workers, we have to raise our prices. If were the only ones doing it, we price ourselves out of the market thats why breathalyzer an supports the fight for 15 and has travelled to lobby legislators if we have to all raise the wages, we will all have to raise our prizes but it is an even playing field. I want to raise so they can afford to put food on the table and pay their rent. I believe thats going to lead to us having better employees opponents of an increased minimum wage like this man believe mandating higher pay will only hurt the very people it is designed to help. Employers are in business to make money. Most of these industries in which there is a high proportion of low skilled or minimum wage workers tend to be highly competitive, food retailing, made Services Maid services, hotels. They do not have large margins. They have to scrape for every cost saving that they can. The choice is not between having those people employed at a higher wage or having them employed at a lower wage. The choice is having them employed at a lower wage or not at all. They lose a job reporter others in the fight against 15 use the new york city restaurant colors as ammunition. Servers there are paid you will full minimum wage and back of the store workers make up to 15 an hour. It is not turning a profit. Colors is different than most restaurants. It is a nonprofit restaurant. We actually have a Training Program during the day in the restaurant. So were not trying to make a profit. I think its important to look at the seven states that have fully eliminated the twotier wage system. Theyve had the same wage for tipped and nontipped workers. These have higher restaurant receipts more than more states come to the table and improve the lives of people like Jessica Martin or makes them worse remains to be seen. She hopes her minimum expectations will be served you make your ends meet, you can live a normal functioning life there are those who believe a 15 minimum wage in america is a job killer. You will hear from one of them coming up. Inside story takes you beyond the headlines beyond the quick cuts, beyond the soundbites. Were giving you a deeper dive into the stories that are making our world what it is. The only Live National news show at 11 00 eastern. We start with breaking news. Lets take a closer look. This year five states and nine cities will decide whether to adopt a 15 minimum wage. As we saw earlier some critics say raising the minimum wage to have disastrous consequences from employees and businesses. Future of capitalism sites editor says it is a terrible idea. Why do you think so . It would kill jobs and stop new jobs from being created. These restaurant workers are going to be replaced with ipads. It is already happening. If you fly out of jfq airport and sit down at a restaurant, there is an ipad at each place and you can place your order. You can even pay by swiping your credit card at the ipad. The higher those wages go, mandated by law, the more people to be replaced with machines new york has 9. I travel all the time. Theyre replacing those workers even at higher at 7. 25. At some Point Technology is going to replace workers but thats not a good reinnot to pay them a higher wage. The living wage is different depending on where people are. A living wage in manhattan, which is a high cost of living place, may be higher than a living wage in a low cost living place like oklahoma or texas. Trying to have washington impose a onesizefits all minimum wage tailored to high cost of living places doesnt make sense i dont take issue with that point. I guess the issue is that the answer to the fact that technology is going to replace workers isnt necessarily a reason to not pay workers very little. Technology has replaced workers in the textile industry. The answer wasnt to go down and pay them what they pay them this bangladesh or philippines or china. We have lost some of those jobs and we have replaced them with highervalue jobs. Right, but if laws had raised the wages higher, i think the jobs would have gone overseas and been replaced by machines faster because at some point the owner of a business has a decision to make. At the end of every year, do i want to buy machines or close the factory and contract with something overseas or do i want to give my workers here a raise. Thats the decision for the owner to make, not for the politician to make lets talk about fighting poverty. You can say if youre thinking about it from that perspective as an anti poverty tool, minimum wage is a blunt instrument. Tell me by what you mean by that and thats a better instrument if your larger goal is having people earn a minimum wage that is fair or a living wage that is fair no matter where they live my first job as a High School Student was as a bank teller earning minimum wage. I didnt have a lot of expenses. I was living with my parents. My parents were doing all right. Raising the minimum wage would have just given me and my relatively comfortable suburban home more money that i didnt really need at the time. A lot of minimum wage people are retirees who also have social security, there may be spouses whose husbands or wives are earning more money. They may be affluent teenagers affluent teenagers lots are regular people putting foomd on the table for the family. Thats the problem. If thats the case you have got one wage earner in the house and three people in the family, youre below the poverty line. I hear you on the side of people who are just entering the workforce and those who are looking for Supplementary Income towards the end of their working lives, but what do you do for the lump in the middle . I think thats a real polling problems that politicians on both sides are working hard to solve. It involves School VouchersTraining Programs, apprenticeships, additional skills through community colleges, so that people are actually creating value that is worth more than their wage and their ploer wants to give them a raise to keep them because theyre adding so much value rather than having to be ordered by the government to pay people more than what theyre actually worth the issue is when you talk about vouchers, when you talk about public training, reTraining Programs, its like a woman who lives on her own as a way tremendouses has to be on public assistance. In the end, if its vouchers, the taxpayer is subside dieing it. If its a reTraining Program, the public is subside eyeing it. Were subdsidising it. Why isnt it okay for the public to do that but not the Company Making the profit do it . I think that way assist transparent and we can judge whether its effective or not. It falls on everyone but not just knows who chose to be employers wouldnt it be more transparent and more direct to understand whether that restaurant, that coffee shop, whatever Small Business, can sustainable because it can pay its people a way that makes sense as opposed to spreading the shortage of them not being able to earn their wage over all of society . It depends who it makes sense for. If it doesnt make sense for this employee, your 26yearold artist is a great example. She may give up on being an artist and decide to be something else, be a coder. If her way tremendousesing job pace more than it could because of a law, she might not want to be a coder. She may stay in that deadend job forever. We should be careful about creating incentives that dont align with what is the longterm best interests of people a good conversation. Great to have you on the show. Thank you for being with us. Coming up little or nothing, thats the choice for disabled americans who make way less than the federal minimum wage and its all perfectly legal. Al Jazeera America proud of telling your stories. Somebody to care about us man. Were live in ferguson, missouri. Brick by brick, i will open it. It will take more than a few rocks to stop me from doin what i have to do. Suddenly heroin seems to be everywhere. Theres no way i am willing to give up my family for a drug ever again. Getting to the heart of the matter. Proud to tell your stories. Al Jazeera America. It is still legal in the United States to base some employees below the minimum wage. Disabled workers are earning as little as 2 an hour. It has created a painful divisions even within the disabled community. At the crux of the matter are the socalled sheltered workshops, businesses that are authorized to employee workers wages. Shelt erred workshop been excused of being exploitative, abusive and discriminatory. Others say requiring them to pay the minimum wage may mean thousands with no employment. Reporter 50yearold ms jordan has never had had easy. She has been determined not to let her disability get in her way of an independent spirit. She and her 13yearold daughter live in a modest apartment i basically take care of myself. I dont have nobody coming in here to do my laundry, buy groceries. I do it all on my own reporter she has worked most of her life im labelling boxes for a big company. I do two skids a day. Probably about 500 to 700 boxes. Reporter like an estimated 420,000 disabled workers in the u. S. , she is paid below the minimum wage. She earns about 3. 65 an hour, 4 less than missouris minimum wage. Her wage fluctuates based on how many boxes she labels. She works at industrial aid, the contract packager employers over 130 adults with disabilities producing over 500,000 packages per week its not right that we get the pay that we get because we work very hard. I would like to make more money because my daughter is getting older but by the time you get your disability check theres not much left reporter industrial aid is a shelt erred workshop with government approval shelt erred workshops can employee workers disability workers, at subminimal wages. These began in the 30s. A section of the president s standards act allowed businesses to pay less than minimum wage if they hired disabled workers. Many disability providers began to develop this concept of a shelt erred envirpd sheltered environment where people with disabilities would come and work on contracts, that they would get from various businesses and then end up paying less than the minimum wage. Reporter this man heads the National DisabilityRights Network and says shelt erred workshops are a wellintentioned idea gone wrong. A report segregated and exploited. Wosh shoms that segregate those from the general population are harmed the people theyre designing to help to pay people less than the minimal wage raises serious questions about exploitation and whether people are given an potential. All of our revenues are being put into the organization to support the mission. Reporter the heads of the shelter workshops say their Business Model is dependent on subminimum wages. They appealed to city hall to convince a bill exemploymenting their exempting their team to the wage. They can only work at 20 to 50 of the standard. It would put us out of business in a short period of time reporter this man sponsored the legislation which passed in october 2015 the model for sheltered workshops is that they do receive some public funding. The income source is the Business Revenue that generated by winning contracts and the bankrupt wage increase would have made them very incompetitive to win any of those contracts , so put a lot of people with disabilities out of work it has been a fight to prove my intellectual ability all my life. Workers, these workers, they deserve at least the respect of a minimum wage reporter painful divisions within the disabled community were exposed at the hearings im scared. I am scared to death that the workshops will go away because it gives him meaning and if his job goes away i have to quit my job to stay home with him. Reporter the future of sheltered workshops across the country is threatened by stepped ofup enforcement of a 1999 ruling that people with disabilities work in more integrated settings. Shelt erred workshops would be phased out within five years i should be home by Late Afternoon at some point. Reporter this mans developmentally disabled brother makes about 1. 93 an hour in a workshop. He is also on the board drives about half an hour almost every week to visit his brother. He says the workshop is the best thing that ever happened to him. Im sure its not something that works out to minimum wage, but its not an issue. He is very happy, he feels very good about that pay check. He feels good about having accomplished that. If you see him working at his electronic recycling program, he is thrilled about that tremendous amount of selfesteem that he feels out of it. Reporter the thought of he and his co workers losing their jobs here, illegality rally brings him to tears. The families give me a se the families i think worry about the guys, the gals, just being at home, you know, with perhaps little meaning to their daytoday existence. We dont want to see the workshop closed down. I dont want that. If the government shuts us down then i wont make any money back here the woman who was attending the minimum wage hearings in protest was disappointed that her side lost, but she wants to make it clear she doesnt want to see the shelters closed either there is people that seismic less but theyre happy with what they make because they love coming there. I know theres some people there that cant hold a regular job. Can. This is all about your choices. Reporter she is meeting with a job coach from a local Nonprofit Organization hoping that he will make minimum wage or more in the near future thats our show today. Thanks for joining us. The news continues here on al Jazeera America