In 1991, George H.W. Bush was president, talk show host Johnny Carson announced his pending retirement and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high of 3,168.

It was also the last time tipped workers got a raise from the federal government.

Even though the federal minimum wage has increased several times during the past 23 years - it's now $7.25 an hour - millions of waiters, bartenders, hairdressers and other service workers are still earning a base wage of $2.13 an hour.

Under federal wage law, employers can pay workers who customarily and regularly receive more than $30 a month in tips a base wage of $2.13 an hour. If the employee doesn't receive enough tips to reach $7.25 an hour over the course of the pay period, the employer must make up the difference.

In a nation in which many states have moved to raise their state-wide minimum wage for tipped workers, Texas is becoming somewhat of an outlier.

Twenty-four states plus the District of Columbia have already raised the tip wage to above $2.13 an hour. Several more states, including California, Oregon and Washington, prohibit companies from paying their tipped employees a lower base wage. In those states, employees receive at least the full minimum wage and can keep their tips.

Texas and 19 other states can pay their tipped workers a minimum cash wage of $2.13 an hour.

Waiters and bartenders make up the majority of the tipped workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The nonprofit group, which focuses on the low and middle income work force, estimates that 4.3 million employees nationwide are tipped workers. About 2.5 million, or 58 percent of the total, are waiters and bartenders.

Most folks think of fine-dining establishments that generate decent tips when they think of tipped workers, said Heidi Shierholz, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. They don't usually include manicurists at nail salons, car wash attendants, waiters in small cafes or the wheelchair pushers at the nations' airports who rely on tips for the bulk of their income.

Nor do most folks realize the lack of stability the low tip wage creates. Someone who pushes a wheelchair may come out fine some days. But other days, there is not much there.

"You need to have some stability over time to have any planning in your life," said Shierholz, who said the nation needs to raise the tipped minimum wage.

Many of those workers are trying to raise families on highly unstable wages, she said, noting that 34 percent of tipped workers are parents.

A bill pending in Congress would raise the minimum wage in a series of steps to $10.10 an hour and tie future increases to the inflation rate. The bill, introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, would restore the link between the minimum wage and the tip wage and require employers to boost the tip wage to 70 percent of the federal minimum wage.

Prior to 1996, the tip wage was one-half of the minimum wage. But that year legislators froze the tip wage and severed the link between the tip wage and the minimum wage.

It's essential to keep it that way, some groups say.

If the tip wage increases, restaurants would have to either raise prices, lower the wages of other workers or find ways to use fewer employees, said Richie Jackson, CEO of the Texas Restaurant Association in Austin. The group has about 6,000 members statewide from full-service restaurants to fast-food joints.

"There is only a finite amount of profit in a restaurant," said Jackson.

Restaurants are reluctant to raise prices, he said, because patrons have choices. They don't have to go out to eat; they can eat at home or bring food with them to work.

It's also not easy to cut the wage structure for the employees who toil in the "back of the house," but restaurants may have to do that if they have to raise tip wages, he said.

Or Texas restaurants will have to follow the example of their counterparts in the states that do not permit employers to pay a lower tip wage, he said. In those states, restaurants have cut their work force by installing self-serve kiosks, using pre-shredded lettuce or having their secret tomato sauce made off site.

Shierholz has heard the arguments before and denies there's any "doomsday scenario."

She cited California, where restaurants are required to pay their servers the full minimum wage of $9 per hour before tips, and pointed to National Restaurant Association data that show restaurants there are projected to create 9.1 percent more jobs during the next decade. That works out to 141,100 new jobs over the next 10 years, according to the association's website.

The poverty rate of tipped workers in California is lower than it is in other states, Shierholz said.

The overall poverty rate of tipped workers is about twice as high as non-tipped workers.