Minimum wage laws are always a bad idea, as are all price controls. First and foremost, they eliminate the freedom of employers and employees by eliminating low-skill jobs. This hurts youths, mostly, but all low-skilled workers whose jobs will simply disappear. Why? Because the job they do isn’t worth the minimum wage. This means no business can create a job that is worth less than the minimum wage. Why should that be illegal? Why are unpaid internships legal? Price controls, whether for wages or goods, always screw up the free market.

Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried because no one is smart enough to manage an economy of hundreds of thousands of businesses, tens of millions of workers, and hundreds of millions of consumers. The intention is good, but if a $20 minimum wage is good, why not $50 or $100 per hour? Because at some point, everyone, even the socialists, agrees that the market distortions destroy the economy. Setting a higher minimum wage does nothing to change productivity, which is the driver for wages in a free market. The fallacy in this thinking is that every job must provide a “living wage.” This is silly. And makes employment for teenagers unlikely.

The tipped minimum wage is a great example of how screwed up things can get. This new law allows local communities to undo the forced tipped-employee minimum wage … by passing another minimum-wage law. This should be a signal to eliminate all minimum wages, but of course, that won’t happen. Why eliminate one dumb law when we can pass another dumb law to locally nullify the first dumb law? Are more laws are always better than fewer laws, dumbness be damned?

That’s four separate minimum wage laws: one for non-tipped employees, one indexing the wage of tipped employees, one that allows communities to override this last law, and, finally, a local law that would set the minimum wage of tipped employees. Why can’t we all see this as patently ridiculous? At the very least, the state shouldn’t have passed the third law. Lawmakers should have just eliminated the law indexing tipped-employee wages. Then we’d have just two laws instead of four. That’s two laws too many but better than four laws too many.

The fact that “super progressive” Democrats are on both sides of this bill should signal to any thinking person that the wages are too complicated, too industry-specific, too local to be decided by fiat. Let the market reign and protect small business.

Bill Wright, bill@wwwright.com

The “Restaurant Relief Act” lets local governments base the tipped minimum wage on the state wage instead of their local one. In Colorado, employers can pay tipped workers up to $3.02 less than the minimum, if tips make up the difference. In Boulder, where the minimum wage is $15.57, the tipped wage is $12.55. Under HB25-1208, the city could now lower it to $11.79, using the state’s $14.81 wage as the baseline — a 76-cent cut, or $1,580.80 per year for a full-time worker.

Supporters — including the Colorado Restaurant Association and Boulder Chamber — say the bill offers a lifeline. Restaurants face crushing labor costs, inflation and the lingering effects of the pandemic. Potential closures don’t just hurt business owners — they mean lost jobs, shuttered gathering spaces and lower sales tax revenue, which Boulder depends on for services like snow removal and road repair.

But HB25-1208 doesn’t solve that problem — it just passes it along. Instead of offering structural support or rethinking how we pay workers, the state handed cities a politically fraught choice: cut wages for tipped workers or risk more closures. This isn’t new. When Boulder passed its minimum wage increase, restaurants raised concerns about the automatic impact on tipped wages. Council approved it anyway, promising to revisit the issue later — tossing the hot potato forward. Now the state has done the same. And Boulder is left to decide: do we prioritize short-term business relief or long-term fairness in how we compensate labor? There’s nowhere else for this issue to go — and no one wants to be the one holding wage cuts in their hands.

This moment shouldn’t just be about whether Boulder lowers the tipped wage — it’s a chance to finally talk about tipping itself. The system is inequitable by design, even within the same restaurant. Servers and bartenders may earn $30 to $40 an hour with tips, while back-of-house workers — often undocumented — make far less and are excluded from tipping altogether. Yet most equity arguments ignore them. Tipping began as a workaround for underpaying workers, and now it’s everywhere: I tap my card for a loaf of bread and get asked if I want to tip 25%.

Meanwhile, some restaurants — especially in high-cost cities — have experimented with no-tipping models by raising wages and building service costs directly into prices. That’s not what this law enables. It simply gives the city permission to lower wages and reinforces the system we already have. But it does force the bigger question: What kind of system do we actually want?

Hernán Villanueva, chvillanuevap@gmail.com

In Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man For All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More, prior to his beheading, hands his executioner a purse of coins and remarks, “Fear not your office, you send me to God.” The tip is payment for a clean and efficient cut, for a service to be rendered. It also confirms Hilary Mantel‘s observations in the “Wolf Hall” trilogy of a disparity in class and economics. Those with means offer gratuity to those in need, and the power of the state is supreme. Shift now to the United States and the birth of “tipping culture.” Stephen Barth, University of Houston professor and hospitality attorney, asserts that tipping came out of a post-civil war servitude model during Reconstruction. Black porters in the railroad industry literally received pennies for their hourly wage, but if they could ingratiate themselves to white clients, there was the possibility of a tip. As in Europe, it was the line drawn between the haves and the have-nots. Pullman porters in the 1940s had their salary jump to $60 a month for 400 hours of work, which works out to 15 cents an hour. Tips became necessary to sustain a living wage. The first federal minimum wage law required salaried employees to be paid 25 cents an hour, but no minimum wage was mandated for tipped employees. In 1966, the federal minimum wage for non-tipped workers was $4.25 an hour. Tipped workers remained at 50% of the federal minimum wage.

It is my opinion that we should deconstruct the servitude model. In the many restaurants in which I worked as both a line cook and dishwasher, the financial disparity between the front of the house and the back of the house was quite apparent. In those days, I was happy to just have a job at the Aristocrat. The best restaurants of my employ focused on building an efficient and cohesive team. The idea of team is undermined when there is an economic disparity. But a shared responsibility does not mean equal responsibility. My son Daniel, who works in fine dining in North Carolina, notes that as the chef, he plays a critical role in meeting customer satisfaction; he must prepare tasty food in a timely fashion. A dishwasher, though important, plays a less critical role. Everyone contributes to the restaurant experience. In today’s restaurant culture, a tip is calculated not only on service but the size of the bill. I think it would be best to pay everyone a living wage commensurate with their responsibility and then split equally a 20% service fee that acknowledges the “restaurant experience.” We want restaurants in our community to thrive, as well as the labor staff that supports them. Tipping is not guaranteed income, and the size of a tip is also dependent on the prestige of an eating establishment. So, how do we achieve a sense of parity? The first step is to dismantle the tipping culture of servitude and have employers pay a living wage to all who recognize a shared responsibility and add a service charge to be distributed between the front of the house and the back of the house. That said, if I were in Thomas More’s shoes, I’d probably tip the executioner.

Jim Vacca, jamespvacca1@gmail.com