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This article was originally published on the website of the Economic Policy Institute.

Under federal law, employers of tipped workers are only required to pay their tipped staff a base wage of $2.13 per hour-an amount that has not been raised since 1991-provided that the sum of an employee's weekly tips plus their base wage equates to an hourly rate of at least the minimum wage.

Consequently, tipped work is overwhelmingly low-paying, even after accounting for tips. In 2013, the median hourly wage for tipped workers, including their income from tips, was $10.22 per hour, compared with a median hourly wage of $16.48 for workers overall.

Low-paying tipped work disproportionately harms women: as the figure below shows, 67 percent of tipped workers are women, yet they still make less than their male counterparts-$10.07 for women at the median versus $10.63 for men. (These data include tips.)