Tracy Brasseur works as a waitress at Leo’s Coney Island restaurant in Royal Oak, Michigan, from 6 a.m. to 2. p.m., five days a week.Although she only makes $3.52 an hour – the minimum wage for “tipped” workers in the state – she was bringing home around $500 each week, thanks to those gratuities.But lately, things have been tighter for the 46-year-old mother of two.A construction project near her restaurant has resulted in fewer customers coming through the door. Her wages for full-time work have shriveled to around $250 a week.”My landlord doesn’t care that we have construction behind the restaurant,” Brasseur said. “They want their rent money.”Advocates and workers recently celebrated the Department of Labor’s decision to back off its proposal to allow employers to use certain workers’ tips.The updated law now allows that tips get shared among non-tipped workers, like cooks and dishwashers. But it doesn’t cover managers or employers, and it applies only if all workers are paid the regular minimum wage of that region — not the lower hourly compensation paid to some tipped workers. Now labor advocates are focused on a more familiar fight: Abolishing the tipped wage altogether. While the federal minimum wage has been inching up over the last few decades, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers has been frozen at $2.13 since 1996.Some states have raised the tipped wage beyond that, but only seven states guarantee the same minimum wage to all workers. All over the country, people are working on the One Fair Wage campaign.New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced this year that he’s holding hearings on eliminating the lower hourly wage for tipped workers. Michigan and Washington D.C. are also considering establishing one minimum wage for all workers. “We haven’t had this happening before,” said Sylvia A. Allegretto, an economist and chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. Cicely Simpson, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association, said the tipped wage is a fair practice. “Servers frequently make much more than the minimum wage based upon their level of service,” Simpson said. However, critics of the so-called two-tiered wage system argue that it exposes tipped workers to disproportionate levels of poverty and financial uncertainty.While many people might think of a tipped worker in a high-end establishment, frequently picking up $20 bills at the end of a meal, the vast majority of restaurant workers are employed at larger chains, like Denny’s and Applebee’s, across the country.Almost 13 percent of tipped workers are in poverty, compared with around 6 percent of non-tipped employees, according to a 2014 joint report by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley.These problems are likely to be exacerbated by the fact that more workers will be making their living in restaurants. While employment in the private sector grew by 33 percent from 1990 to 2016, the number of full service restaurant workers doubled, according to Allegretto.The Department…