Tipped wage February 15, 2021 If it’s passed by Congress, President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief proposal would do a lot more than fund relief payments and vaccine rollouts. It would also raise the wage floor for all US workers – and give a particularly long overdue raise to restaurant servers, taxi drivers, manicurists, and other tipped workers. For Tanya Wallace-Gobern, getting rid of the subminimum wage for tipped workers is a matter of racial justice. “Passing a living wage bill for tipped and non-tipped low-wage workers is essential to reducing inequality,” she said in a recent briefing. As the executive director of the National Black Worker Center Project, Wallace-Gobern oversees a network of eight centers across the country that aim to build power and transform working conditions for Black workers. The subminimum federal wage for tipped workers, which has been stuck at just $2.13 since 1991, is a clear barrier to their goals.