• admiralteal
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    fedilink
    -11 year ago

    Half the food service workers are paid in tips. Which is a giant and very effective bandaid to the issue.

    The reality is, the income is pretty good for most tipped food service work. Better than in most comparable jobs. The bosses taking themselves out of the equation makes the effective wages pretty decent, even if it feels pretty ugly for everyone else. There’s a huge anti-tip movement growing… maybe that’s the 4D chess. Get rid of all the tips to ensure food service workers get paid absolute crap just like everyone else so that they show a bit more solidarity with other jobs. But really, it’s probably just people who want to pay less and haven’t 100% thought through the counterfactual of how the world without tips will look for the workers, absent fixing the fundamental issues of wage society as they currently exist first. Tips work out in practice to revenue sharing. Until wage laws include some amount of mandatory revenue sharing to workers (which they absolutely should for so many reasons), getting rid of tips will hurt the workers.

    I’d like to see some regional cookery unions, though. Even in places where the line cook wages aren’t that terrible, those are still the worst-treated people in a restaurant. They’re treated as totally disposable and interchangeable. They need a union that represents not just the members of any particular store, but disparate stores in a geographic area.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      71 year ago

      Not everywhere, that’s for sure.

      The waitresses said they make the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is $2.13 per hour. The intention is that the bulk of their income will primarily come from tips. Schoolmeester-Cochran estimated she works anywhere from 21 to 35 hours each week and, with tips, brings in a salary ranging from $70 some weeks to $170 others. <-- Waffle House employee

      • admiralteal
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        fedilink
        21 year ago

        But the rare places they don’t are also places where the alternative is fed min wage – also unlivable poverty – , under table submin wage, or no job at all / mlm psychosis.

        I get it’s unpopular to speak in support of tips. People hate tipping so much. But until we seriously talk about what will replace it, all the demands to ban it are just part of false consciousness. We need to be more honest that most of the antitip culture is not coming from people who want the working class supported. It comes from people who think these workers are being paid too much.