I believe it is on the owners to provide fair wages to workers. When the plumber, electrician, mechanic, sales rep, or whoever else tells you they don’t make a livable wage, you’re going to feel it is your responsibility to tip them too?
If you don’t want to tip people that can’t otherwise make minimum wage, use restaurants that pay minimum wage. You don’t get to steal those workers’ labour because the restaurateurs and legislators have failed them.
Others industries have to pay minimum wage - your contribution isn’t factored into their base requirements for survival. This is a silly comparison. Do I support an increase in minimum wages? Abso-fucking-lutely - but electricians aren’t routinely being paid less than $3/hr.
You recognize that restauratuers and legislators are the ones failing workers, yet you attribute the lost wages to the paying customer. What can we as paying customers do to fail the workers so that you recognize restauratuers and legislators as being responsible for their fair wages?
If you fail to tip them, you’ve failed them too. It’s not complex.
You argument absolves the restaurateurs if consistently applied because the legislators failed them upstream (that’s not to speak of absolving the legislators because of the voters) - I’m saying the legislators failed them, then the restaurateurs failed them, then the people that refused to tip them failed them. There’s not a single point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK for you to decide to be the ultimate point of failure.