# New Perspective on Tipping... TAG you're it.



## MrsUberJax (Sep 2, 2014)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...about-tipping-in-the-united-states/?tid=sm_fb

Here is some of the article, click on the link above to read the whole thing..

Three years ago, Jay Porter, a former restaurant owner who abolished tipping at his restaurant, made a powerful case against the practice, an industry standard in the United States. Everything at his establishment, he wrote in a 2013 Op-Ed for Slate, improved after he enforced a mandatory 18 percent service charge-the food, the service, the pay, the customer satisfaction. Reflecting on what tipping has done to the restaurant industry as a whole, he penned what I believe is one of the most succinct and yet irrefutable paragraphs about why tipping is wrong:

Studies have shown that tipping is not an effective incentive for performance in servers. It also creates an environment in which people of color, young people, old people, women, and foreigners tend to get worse service than white males. In a tip-based system, nonwhite servers make less than their white peers for equal work. Consider also the power imbalance between tippers, who are typically male, and servers, 70 percent of whom are female, and consider that the restaurant industry generates five times the average number of sexual harassment claims per worker. And that in many instances employers have allegedly misused tip credits, which let owners pay servers less than minimum wage if tipping makes up the difference.

The problems are vast, as Porter points out. They tend to afflict a very specific and unfortunate swath of the American populace: the poor and disadvantaged. And the evidence isn't merely anecdotal.

Few people are better versed in the ways in which tipping marginalizes those who depend on it than Saru Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Jayaraman has been working to end the modern tipping system for years, collecting the sort of data the National Restaurant Association (NRA), which has long defended the practice, hardly appreciates.

But tipping, Jayaraman says, isn't merely problematic in its current, contemporary context. The practice is abhorrent from a historical perspective, too.

While researching her new book 'Forked: A New Standard for American Dining," Jayaraman dug into the history of tipping, which complicates-or really darkens-the way in which we pay restaurant workers even further. Among the many things she uncovered is that the federal tipped-minimum wage, which allows restaurants to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 per hour in the United States, is rooted in a regrettable period in this country's past: slavery.

I spoke with Jayaraman to learn more about the racist origins of tipping, the lingering racism and sexism the system has allowed to persist, and all the other reasons why she believes we should be ashamed about the way we pay restaurant workers in the United States. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

*You're not exactly a fan of how we tip in America. I'm understating that, aren't I?*

I've definitely been a longtime advocate of ending the tipped minimum wage, which is currently $2.13 an hour nationally. It creates a two-tiered system that allows for an employee, a worker, to not be paid at all by their employer. That to me is what's nefarious about tipping. It's based in this idea that an employer shouldn't have to pay workers, essentially because they're valueless, and that's very wrong to me.

What I have been advocating for is what already exists in seven states, including California, which is that every employer be required to pay the full minimum wage to all workers, and people get tipped on top of that. And actually those seven states, despite the change, enjoy higher rates of tipping than the forty three states with lower wages for tipped workers. We're fine with that-we're not trying to get rid of tipping entirely. We just want the remaining forty three states to follow in California and the other six states' footsteps, eliminating the two-tiered system and requiring employers to pay the full wage to all workers, with tips on top of that.

*But we hear all the time about how waiters in big cities make lots of money. Is there any truth to that?*

It's much, much more than that.

The restaurant industry is the second largest and fastest growing industry, and yet the Department of Labor reports every year that seven of the 10 lowest paying jobs are restaurant jobs. And, in fact, of those seven lowest paying jobs in America, four are tipped occupations. So even including tips, restaurant workers make up four of the ten lowest paying jobs in America.

There's this myth, especially if you live in a place like New York or Washington D.C., that what tipped workers make is largely even, that everyone makes what white guys working at fancy steakhouses make.

But even in places like New York and D.C., seventy percent of tipped workers are actually women, largely working at casual restaurants, like Applebees, IHOP , and Olive Garden, earning a median wage of $9 an hour when you include tips. These people suffer three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce, use food stamps at double the rate, and, the worst part, suffer from the absolute worst sexual harassment of any industry in the United States. When you're a woman living on tips-even if you're making a lot of money on tips, which most women aren't-you're subject to the whims of the customer, and really encouraged by management to objectify yourself or subject yourself to objectification to make money in tips.
But yes, fundamentally, the problem with the way we tip is that employers, not customers, should have to pay their own workers.

*I've thought about how bizarre it is, sociologically, that when you work at a restaurant, especially as a waiter, you're essentially working for a different boss not just every day, but throughout the day.*

Exactly. That's exactly right. You don't actually work for the person you work for. And you know what? It's bad for the employer, too. When you have a workforce that doesn't work for you, and is firstly responsive to the consumer, that's problematic. We hear from our partners all the time about how it leads to workers engaging in all kinds of non-malicious but less than ideal practices, like giving free drinks to people, and basically doing things that hurt the bottom line, because at the end of the day they don't really work for the employer, they work for the customer.

The idea that the restaurant industry was the only industry that didn't have to pay its workers was actually codified into the very first minimum wage law that passed in 1938 as part of the New Deal under FDR. It said that you have the right to the minimum wage either through wages or through tips, which essentially gave tipped workers the right to a zero dollar minimum wage.

We've gone from a zero dollar minimum wage in 1938 to a whopping $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage, which is the current federal mandate for tipped workers. Right now, it's between $2.13 and $7 in forty three states. Seven states, however, have rejected this system, saying that no, employers should have to pay their employers a full wage, even in the restaurant system.

*Employers are supposed to make up the difference if the tips don't suffice though, right?*

Well, the law has always said from the very beginning that the employer has to make up the difference between the lower tipped-minimum wage and the regular tipped minimum wage, but the U.S. Department of Labor reports an 84 percent violation rate in regards to employers actually ensuring that they make up that difference. Even if employers did ensure that tips made up that difference, there are serious problems that still remain, like the issue of sexual harassment, which is very real and plagues what is a vastly female restaurant workforce.


----------



## Greguzzi (Jan 9, 2016)

More SJW bolshevik from the execrable WaPo. Tipping is racist!


----------



## Santa (Jan 3, 2016)

The TAG sh*t doesn't work. Tried it way too many times in a proper manner since I read the article a month ago.

The pax are just cheap. But do go ahead and try it. What you gotta lose!!


----------

