Tipped employees make less: "According to a common labor law provision referred to as a “tip credit”, the employee must earn at least the state’s minimum wage when tips and wages are combined or the employer is required to increase the wage to fulfill that threshold."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...

Both in federal law and most state laws, tipped workers have a lower base minimum wage, but have to be “topped up” by the employer to the general minimum wage if their tips are insufficient (but as tips are also frequently used as a performance measure, and many tipped professions are high-labor-supply fields where vacancies are easily filled and thus employers are quick to let people go, tipped employees that would need topped up are under pressure to pad their own tips to protect their job.)

If tipped workers had the general minimum wage as their base minimum wage with no top-up requirement, much of the abuses would go away (and there'd be less employer desire to drive the practice, but the culture would probably endure for some time.)

As others have said, employers have a much lower minimum wage for tipped workers in most states. However, perhaps unintuitively, workers still usually prefer tipped over non-tipped jobs because you can usually bring home more money through tips than through the minimum wage

As the other answers have said, they don't for tipped jobs. This is why tipping service people in restaurants in the states is a big deal because it's the bulk of their paycheck and anecdotally there are plenty of shady employers who don't follow the rule about making up the difference.

Depends on the state. In California, they have to be paid at least minimum wage regardless.

Not tipped workers. In many states, they get a separate minimum wage in the $3/h range.