When you leave a few bucks on the table for your waitress at the diner, you probably assume that she'll scrape together enough Washingtons by the end of the evening to get by, since those tips augment the same $8.60-an-hour everybody else gets.
Wrong on both counts.
New Jersey, like many states, has a $2.13 minimum wage for restaurant servers, so "they live on tips" is simply a fact.
And last month, Donald Trump's Department of Labor made it legal for employers to grab a part of that tip for themselves. That's right, the boss gets first dibs, as long as these employees are paid up to the regular minimum wage once their pay is calculated.
It's called "tip-stealing," and it's going to squeeze 140,000 workers in our state especially hard.
How hard? Tipped workers will lose $119.7 million a year in New Jersey - and $5.8 billion nationally - according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. And women will be hit especially hard, as they represent 80 percent of that work group.
The minimum-wage movement is gaining momentum nationally, but it has left tipped workers behind. Their federal wage of $2.13 hasn't moved since 1992, because of the power of "the other NRA" - the powerful National Restaurant Association, which even opposes sick days for workers, because it doesn't care if your waiter sneezes in your soup.
Some legislators are trying to circumvent the DOL rule. Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-Passaic) has re-introduced a bill that will boost tipped-worker wages to $5.93 per hour.
It's a good start, even though it might make sense to fold this population into the standard minimum wage bill that is much further along.
"That is an option," Sumter agreed. "But I introduced this bill (in 2015) without even imagining someone would make tip-stealing permissible."
But that's how things go in the Trump Cafe, because as Brandon McKoy of New Jersey Policy Perspective put it, "Allowing employers to control money earned through good service will invite bad actors to engage in wage theft."
The food service industry is unique in that employers believe workers should be paid by customers. They also ask taxpayers to subsidize their profits, in effect, because these tipped workers are twice as likely to be on public assistance. Saru Jayaraman, author of the groundbreaking "Behind The Kitchen Door," notes that servers have three times the poverty rate of the overall U.S. workforce.
Some states adjust. In seven states, employers must pay the standard minimum wage even to tipped workers, who get to keep what's left on the table as additional income. Some restaurants have moved to a no-tip model, raising prices to provide employees with a less meager wage.
But tipped workers in states like New Jersey need help. It isn't because they lack ambition or character. It is because tips are often random and usually skimpy, and they work in an industry dominated by a lobby that believes they don't need a living wage.
Of all the bills under discussion in a revitalized Trenton, none will have more immediate impact than Sumter's wage proposal. And none make more sense, in contrast to the absurdity of people putting food on our tables who cannot afford to feed their own families.
Note: This editorial has been updated to reflect an EPI sorting error. An earlier version said NJ tipped employees would lose $21 million a year rather than $119.7 million. Also, the NJ Restaurant and Hospitality Assn. supports an increase in minimum wage but does not endorse any legislation currently under consideration, as previously indicated.
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