Editorials of The Times

New York could soon join seven other states that have done away with the unjust policy of letting employers pay waiters, bartenders and other tipped workers less than the minimum wage, a move that would help lift thousands of low-income families out of poverty.

In much of the country, tipped workers live in a parallel universe as far as labor law is concerned. Under federal law, employers can pay such workers as little as $2.13 an hour — a rate that has not changed since 1991 — as long as their hourly wages plus tips add up to $7.25 an hour. This discrepancy hurts workers by putting them at greater risk of wage theft, sexual harassment and other workplace exploitation — bosses can easily withhold or steal tips, especially from workers they don’t like or who refuse their propositions. These are hardly idle threats, as demonstrated by the recent allegations of abuse against chefs and restaurant owners and the multimillion-dollar wage theft settlements secured in recent years. The Department of Labor’s wage and hour division estimated that nearly 84 percent of full-service restaurants it investigated between 2010 and 2012 violated labor standards, including but not limited to tip violations.

Most states, including many of the 29 that have a higher minimum wage than is federally required, maintain a subminimum wage for tipped workers, who number about 4.3 million nationwide. In New York City, the minimum wage for tipped workers at businesses with 11 or more employees is $8.65, compared with $13 an hour for other workers. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has directed his labor commissioner, Roberta Reardon, to hold hearings starting next month on whether the state should eliminate that discrepancy.

The restaurant industry asserts that raising the tipped wage would hurt small businesses, forcing some to close. Cuomo and Reardon should not be swayed by this scare tactic. While there is no doubt that bringing tipped workers up to the minimum wage could reduce profits for some businesses, it would not devastate the industry. Consider California. It has for decades required businesses to pay tipped employees the same minimum wage other workers get, yet the state has a thriving restaurant scene that includes everything from mom-and-pop taquerias to fine dining establishments — look no further than the heated debates in foodie circles about the relative merits of eating out in New York versus Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Restaurants open and close all the time, so it isn’t hard to find stories of businesses that went under after a minimum-wage increase, but a 2015 report by two Cornell professors found little evidence that raising the minimum wage hurt the industry. Even the National Restaurant Association projects that, over the next decade, employment will grow 10.6 percent in California and 6.1 percent in New York.

Another common industry argument is that raising the tipped minimum wage is ultimately bad for workers. Customers will tip less, that thinking goes, if they know restaurants must pay waiters and bartenders at least the regular minimum wage. There’s no evidence to back up that claim. Waiters and other tipped workers in California and the six other states without a subminimum tipped wage earn more money and are less likely to live in poverty, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a research organization. (An eighth state, Hawaii, has effectively eliminated the subminimum wage by letting businesses pay tipped workers 75 cents an hour less than the state’s minimum wage of $10.10, but only if those workers earn at least $7 an hour in tips.)

Other industry executives protest that giving tipped workers a raise will exacerbate inequalities between waiters and workers who do not receive tips, like line cooks and dishwashers. This is one of the disingenuous arguments that the Trump administration has used to justify its proposal to give restaurant management complete control over tips. Don’t fall for it. Restaurants that are concerned about the welfare of their back-of-the-house employees could pay them more and improve the grueling conditions under which they work. They could also follow the example of restaurateurs like Danny Meyer who eliminated tipping, folding the cost of service into prices, with mixed results.

It would be best for most restaurant employees if the industry moved away from a tipping model. But, realistically speaking, tips are not going away anytime soon — so it is important that state and federal lawmakers make sure waiters and other staffers who rely on gratuities are guaranteed the same minimum wage as other workers.

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain declared an end to a mystery that was really no mystery. It was “highly likely,” May said Monday, that a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, England, by Russian agents in an “indiscriminate and reckless” attack.

The attack on the former spy, Sergei Skripal, who worked for British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia, in which a police officer who responded was also poisoned, was no simple hit job. Like the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, another British informant, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium 210, the attack on Skripal was intended to be as horrific, frightening and public as possible. It clearly had the blessing of President Vladimir Putin, who had faced little pushback from Britain in the Litvinenko case.

The blame has been made clearer this time and this attack on a NATO ally needs a powerful response both from that organization and, perhaps more important, by the United States.

Putin has faced little backlash for actions even bolder than the gruesome intrigues in Britain, like the attacks by Russian forces in Ukraine and Syria. With growing support from autocratic forces in Europe, he must not be emboldened to think he will be unchecked. While President Donald Trump has allowed Putin a free hand to meddle in American politics, he cannot ignore yet another attempted murder of a Putin foe on allied soil. The administration needs to enforce sanctions Congress has passed and press NATO to do more, perhaps banning travel by Putin cronies and enacting other restrictions on business activities.

But while Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said the administration was “standing with our U.K. ally,” she would not say whether it thought Russia was responsible for the attack.

The Russians knew that the British would identify the nerve agent, leaving no doubt who was behind the killing. That makes Putin’s typically cynical treatment of the killing doubly outrageous. When the British “sort out” the killing, he said nonchalantly, then he will comment on it. At the same time his top propagandist on state television, Dmitry Kiselyov, was feeding the outlandish story that Britain poisoned Skripal to create a pretext for boycotting the 2018 World Cup tournament in Russia. Why would Russia bother to go after a double agent of no use to either side, Kiselyov sarcastically wondered?

Not to silence him, presumably, because the Russians themselves had released him to Britain in 2010 in a swap for a network of sleeper agents rounded up in the United States. The likely answer was provided by Putin himself a few months after Skripal was traded to the West. Asked during his annual give-and-take with reporters in 2010 how he would treat treason, Putin, a former KGB agent, replied: “Traitors will kick the bucket, trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”

May demanded that Russia immediately provide complete disclosure of the Novichok gas program to the Organization on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Then she said the government was drawing up a full range of retaliatory options.

These could range from expelling some Russian diplomats, as Britain did after Litvinenko’s poisoning in 2006, to stronger sanctions. The trouble is that Russia probably doesn’t much worry about diplomatic expulsions, and British sanctions would add little to the broad range of Western sanctions already in place over the annexation of Crimea.

Yet if Russia’s message is that no “traitor” is safe anywhere, it should be in the interest of every nation to send an indelible message to Putin that he cannot deploy his weapons of war anywhere he wants.