In 2023, Allegretto published a study that compared “high-road” states that have no tip credit and “low-road” states, where restaurant workers get $2.13 in base salary. In the high-road states, the poverty rate of waitstaff and bartenders was significantly lower. And restaurant jobs had not grown scarce. In fact, between 2012 and 2019, the number of businesses and the rate of employment growth in full-service restaurants were higher in these states.

The N.R.A. claims that there’s no need for restaurants to pay tipped workers the full minimum wage, because servers already do so well. “You can bring home a really impressive paycheck,” Kennedy told me. Before we met, the organization had sent me some industry data, including this statistic: “The median hourly income of a tipped server is $27/hour, with the top earners making over $41/hour and the low end making $19/hour.” It came from a survey of more than two thousand full-service restaurants that the N.R.A. itself conducted. No economist would regard a lobbying group as a reliable source for such information. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly pay of waiters and waitresses (including tips) was $15.36 in 2023. A quarter of full-time servers earn less than twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Although waiters in fine-dining establishments can make several times this amount, there are far more low earners who work at places such as IHOP and Cracker Barrel. Restaurant servers are also much less likely to receive health insurance, paid sick leave, and other benefits than other private-sector employees.

Allegretto acknowledged that small, family-owned restaurants could “struggle disproportionately” if the tip credit were eliminated, and that these institutions helped give many communities their charm. “We definitely don’t want to lose the restaurants that make your neighborhood so wonderful to live in,” she said. But there are ways to help such businesses—lowering their tax burden during a transition period, for example. Countries that have never expected servers to rely on tips, including Italy and France, are full of family-owned restaurants. “Why are we the only country in the world doing this?” Allegretto asked. “The model we have is very unfair, and it’s not necessary.”

One afternoon, I met a bartender named Max Hawla, who lives in Washington, D.C., where the debate about tipped workers has been particularly heated in recent years. Hawla is in his early thirties, with a laid-back manner and a boyish face framed by a mop of reddish-blond hair. In 2018, he was working at a bar in Dupont Circle when he heard about Initiative 77, a ballot measure backed by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which proposed to raise wages for D.C. servers from less than four dollars an hour to the standard minimum wage by 2026. After his manager told him that the measure would “mess up our wages,” Hawla became opposed to the idea, to the point of changing his profile picture on Facebook to an Initiative 77 sign with a slash through it.

Despite stiff opposition from the N.R.A. and the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, voters approved Initiative 77, by a nearly twelve-point margin. Later that year, under pressure from the restaurant lobby, the D.C. Council overturned it. When Hawla heard this, he was relieved. Sometime later, he visited a friend in Seattle. One night, they went to a speakeasy and chatted with the bartender. Hawla thought that he had a “very bro-ish, bodybuilder vibe,” and was the kind of guy who probably made a nice living just on tips. Hawla decided to ask him what he thought of the tip credit.

“What’s a tip credit?” the man said. There wasn’t one in Washington State or in Montana, where he’d grown up.

“You know—because you get tips, your employer can pay you a lower wage,” Hawla explained.

“Well, that sounds stupid,” the bartender said, noting that he made fifteen dollars an hour, and still got good tips on top.

In 2022, a proposal to phase out the tip credit in D.C. was again placed on the ballot. This time, Hawla voted for the measure, having come to believe that he’d been fed “a lot of misinformation” that was designed to get tipped workers to fight against their own interests. The proposal, Initiative 82, passed by nearly fifty points, seemingly settling the matter. But this past January a friend alerted Hawla that the D.C. Council was hosting a public hearing on the issue. The friend, a fellow-bartender named Rachelle Yeung, had been working a shift at a brewery when a canvasser dropped off a flyer encouraging servers to attend the hearing and testify about the “negative impact” Initiative 82 was having. “Have you or your co-workers lost hours?” the flyer asked. “Lost jobs?”

Workers who’d experienced these problems were instructed to contact a server named Joshua Chaisson, whose e-mail address was printed at the bottom of the flyer. Chaisson had personally handed a flyer to Yeung. A week later, Chaisson, who goes by @MrTipCredit on X, appeared at the hearing in a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo “SAVE THE TIP CREDIT RWA”—the initials of a group called the Restaurant Workers of America. This organization, which Chaisson co-founded, first attracted media attention in 2018, after its members began speaking out against campaigns to eliminate the subminimum wage. Some media outlets credulously depicted it as a grassroots network of servers who opposed an imprudent policy shift. “We keep screaming from the rooftops, ‘Please don’t help!’ ” one member told BuzzFeed News. The tone of reporting on the group changed after the Columbia Journalism Review published an article revealing that most of its members were restaurant owners, each of whom paid between a hundred dollars and five hundred dollars to join. BuzzFeed News later reported that the Restaurant Workers of America’s most prominent spokesperson, Chaisson, had strategized with the P.R. firm founded by Richard Berman, the man who created fronts for lobbying groups.

Sean Kennedy, of the N.R.A., told me that his group has no financial ties to the Restaurant Workers of America, though he acknowledged that the organizations have had “intel-sharing conversations.” In recent years, Chaisson appears to be keeping a lower profile—he didn’t respond to a request for an interview—but he’s continued to push for maintaining the tip-credit system. His crusade against Initiative 82 might seem strange, given that he waits tables in Portland, Maine, more than five hundred miles from the nation’s capital. Nevertheless, at the hearing, he blasted the measure for creating a “dumpster fire” in D.C., saying that restaurants were closing at a record pace and servers were losing hours and jobs. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics paint a less dire picture. Since Initiative 82 was adopted, employment at full-service restaurants in D.C. has hovered at about thirty thousand jobs. Nonetheless, in June the D.C. Council overrode voters for a second time. It paused the minimum wage for tipped workers, which was scheduled to go up to twelve dollars an hour in July, at its current level—ten dollars an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $17.95.

Nina Mast, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, has studied the methods of the restaurant-industry lobby closely. She’s an expert on child labor, which has grown increasingly pervasive in recent years, as states have loosened restrictions on the number of hours that teens can legally work on school nights, and permitted their involvement in alcohol service and hazardous jobs such as roofing. In Iowa, Florida, and several other states, the restaurant lobby has pushed for these policies, she told me, in part to address what the lobby claims were labor shortages caused by the pandemic. Recently, Kennedy was quoted in a press release introducing a federal bill that would let teens work longer and later. N.R.A. associations and their members have portrayed the changes as harmless, family-friendly reforms. “What they do is recruit mostly white teens who work at a family-owned small business to testify that working a few extra hours a week will benefit them,” Mast said. “Of course, this is strategic. They don’t want lawmakers to hear from teens who are getting injured working in slaughterhouses owned by multinational corporations or who can’t stay awake in school, because they’re being scheduled to work late on school nights. But these are the young people who will be harmed.” The N.R.A.’s agenda went far beyond defeating efforts to eliminate the subminimum wage, she added: “The N.R.A. and its state affiliates are heavily invested in lobbying for anti-worker policies across the board, in areas from paid sick leave to overtime pay.”

Jessie Danielson, a member of the Colorado State Senate whom I met in May, has seen this more sinister face of the restaurant lobby. Danielson is a progressive Democrat and an outspoken champion of workers’ rights. One bill she recently co-sponsored would require the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to publish on its website the names of employers who engaged in wage theft—a widespread problem in the restaurant industry—and report these violations to licensing and permitting bodies. Last year, a study published by the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations estimated that, in the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area, forty-five thousand workers a year were paid below the minimum wage, costing them, collectively, at least a hundred and thirty-six million dollars in earnings. Among the occupations subject to the highest violation rates were servers, hosts, and chefs. Few people would defend employers who steal money from their workers, but the Colorado Restaurant Association opposed the wage-theft bill. Danielson also sponsored a bill called the Worker Protection Act, which sought to eliminate an onerous requirement for workers seeking to form a union: that they hold a second election, and win seventy-five per cent of the vote, a burden unique to Colorado. The Colorado Restaurant Association opposed this measure, too. “Does this lobby oppose anything that gives workers rights?” she said. “In my experience, yes.”

The Colorado restaurant lobby did support one piece of labor legislation this year—a bill, H.B. 1208, that proposed lowering the base pay of tipped workers in cities that have raised their minimum wages above the statewide level. One such city is Denver, where the measure would have cut the minimum wage for tipped workers from $15.79 to $11.79. The bill’s supporters claimed that this was necessary because labor costs were decimating Denver’s restaurant industry. They cited the fact that since 2022 the number of licensed establishments in the city had fallen by twenty-two per cent. This figure, which appeared in the Denver Post and was circulated widely, came from the Department of Excise and Licenses. But, as Denver Labor, a division of the city’s auditor’s office, pointed out, that department didn’t give licenses only to restaurants; it issued them to all food and retail establishments, a category that had recently been redefined, with many food trucks and concession stands removed from the department’s database. As the department itself made clear, this meant that the statistic was an unreliable barometer of the restaurant industry’s health.

After meeting Danielson, I visited the offices of the Colorado Restaurant Association to speak with Sonia Riggs, its president and C.E.O. Riggs maintained that labor costs were devastating Denver’s restaurant scene. “I talk to restaurateurs every day who are crying or are looking for an exit strategy,” she said. “When you hear those stories over and over, it literally breaks your heart.” Riggs went on to frame H.B. 1208 as a matter of fairness, not only for struggling owners but also for back-of-house workers who didn’t get tips. “Why are the lowest-paid people in the company the least important and the ones that nobody wants to help?” she asked. Servers in Denver, she said, earned an average of thirty-nine to forty-two dollars an hour—far more than chefs and dishwashers.

This was another statistic touted by H.B. 1208 supporters. It came from a survey of a hundred and thirty restaurants which was conducted by a possibly biased source: the Colorado Restaurant Association. If true, it would mean that the typical server in Denver makes more than seventy thousand dollars annually. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, the average salary of bartenders and servers in Denver is less than forty thousand dollars; economists say that this isn’t enough for a single person to cover living expenses in the city, much less to support a family. “These are economically vulnerable people,” Matthew Fritz-Mauer, the executive director of Denver Labor, told me.