Did you read Angela’s piece this week, in which servers told her how worried they are that getting rid of tips in favor of a higher wage and commission could actually hurt their bottom line?

“Even with $15 an hour,” one Ivar’s server told her, "I’m sure I’m going to take a financial hit." Since the new minimum wage took effect April 1, Ivar’s has raised all workers in its Salmon House to $15 an hour but gotten rid of tips in favor of an 8 percent commission on all sales. (More about how this works and why Ivar’s is doing it right here.)

It’s the switching out of tips for a commission that could actually reduce workers take-home pay or mean they’ll end up getting paid the same as they did last year. Needless to say, that’s not exactly the outcome activists who pushed for a higher minimum wage were hoping for.

“The point is for workers to get a raise, not to make the same as last year,” 15 Now organizer Jess Spear told me just before Seattle’s new minimum wage took effect last week.

As the tipping discussion heats up again, it's worth remembering that tips for restaurant workers became one of the most controversial issues during the city’s minimum wage fight. Remember the “tip credit”? (Some call it a “tip penalty.”) Essentially, the tip credit—which after much debate did become part of Seattle's minimum wage law for small businesses—allows employers to count tips toward meeting the current minimum wage, meaning they can pay their workers less and leave consumers to pick up the tab.

Before you get too outraged, remember: This isn't so different from the current model, in which even though Washington doesn't have a tip credit, consumers' tips are often what makes it possible to live off a minimum wage job. As Angela wrote, tips "often constitute a larger portion of a server’s income than his or her hourly wage." But minimum wage activists railed against the tip credit, arguing it would send Washington backwards and allow employers to get out of giving tipped workers a real raise.

Spear said a tip credit would be “a giant step backward considering that tipped workers nationally are twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers.”

City council member Kshama Sawant said that because tipped workers are more likely to be women, "even entertaining the idea of a tip credit is like telling women they don't matter."

In other words, not only do lots of workers rely on tips to get by, but any concession in wages for tipped workers would disproportionately affect women and people living in poverty.

Yet, even as they were fighting to protect tips, Spear wrote in the comments section of Slog that: “We need to move away from tipping in general.”

That’s because tips, while incredibly important for lots of workers, are, on principle, very problematic.

Not only do they mean employers pay workers less (in states and cities where they're allowed to), but they're not a reliable source of income because they vary based on customers’ whims. That insecurity can make people who depend on tips more likely to endure harassment and discrimination on the job to please customers—a pattern that only gets worse the more a worker is counting on tips (and the lower their base wage is), according to this survey of tipped workers from the Restaurant Opportunities Center, a restaurant worker organization fighting for higher wages.

And since women and people of color are overrepresented among tipped workers, according to ROC, these problems disproportionately affect them.

“When you have a lower wage for tipped workers,” ROC cofounder Saru Jayaraman said at a minimum wage symposium in Seattle last year, “you are legislating a lower wage for women because these are women-led professions.”

But doesn't all that leave activists fighting to help low-wage workers in a weird spot?

Want higher wages? Keep tips.

Want a more fair, less discriminatory system? Get rid of them.

The answer for Spear is to eventually raise wages high enough that they, on their own, are enough to live on.

“We’ve always said $15 was the compromise to begin with,” she told me. “In a really expensive city like Seattle on $15 you’re still struggling to get by.”

So, she said, we do need to move away from tipping, but only when wages are even higher.

“We are nowhere near where we need to be where workers are guaranteed a wage they can live off and don’t rely on tips,” Spear said. “I would not advocate moving toward a no-tipping model with $15. It’s not enough.”

Sawant told me last week she’s skeptical of Ivar’s president Bob Donegan because of his opposition to a $15 minimum wage in SeaTac, but the net result of his new plan for workers “remains to be seen.” And as long as tipped jobs exist, "we have to fight against a tip penalty."

But on the question itself—should we get rid of tips altogether?—she deferred.

“Our fundamental goal should be to improve the wages, living conditions, and working conditions of all workers,” Sawant said. “If, as a part of that, workers in the tipped sector want to build a movement for a living wage and against tipping, I will support that. But we need them to be in the lead.”