Stop Tipping Right Now (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news: we need to stop tipping right now - no I don’t mean don’t leave tips, I mean, we need to end one of the most antiquated, racist, sexist, exploitative, and stupid systems of wage theft and wage discrimination that solely exists because it benefits a very small proportion of privileged workers, while allowing businessowners to pay most of their employees next to nothing. Now, that might not seem like the case, a lot of people who work for tips say that they make a lot more money than they would from standard minimum wage, AND that it gives workers an incentive to be good at their jobs - but the reality is that the people that it doesn’t benefit are totally ignored in the conversation even though they make up a much larger proportion of those affected.

Before I dive into this, a lot of this research comes from former restaurant owner Jay Porter, who implemented one of the most notably successful no-tipping restaurants in the United States. Let’s start with the fact that tipping doesn’t really improve performance, studies on this question say that the quality of service is mostly irrelevant, and what generates larger tips from customers is things like drawing a picture on their check, or predicting good weather, or giving customers candy. These are psychological tricks, not better service. And in fact, tipping culture actually just leads to worse service towards people who are stereotypically not excepted to be good tippers - quote from a 2008 paper, “ethnic minorities, foreigners, women, teenagers, the elderly, and coupon users”. And while tipping doesn’t generate better service, it does generate an enormous amount of harassment and wage theft - keep watching for part 2.

Hey, so the problem with tipping is that it creates a power dynamic between mostly female servers and mostly male tipping customers, and it’s not unrelated that female restaurant workers suffer 500% higher rates of harassment than the average worker. In fact, when Jay Porter established a no-tipping rule in his restaurant, the most vocal opponents weren’t servers, they were male tippers - who complained about the lack of control they now had over the staff.

But it’s not just the power dynamic, there are actual financial wage exploitation problems here. As a group, people who work for tips are among the most economically disadvantaged - they have a poverty rate 300% higher than the average worker, and yet their employer is only legally responsible for $2.13 of their income if they make minimum wage through tips. But according to the Department of Labor, among tipped workers there is an 84% violation rate, the problem being that most economically disadvantaged workers would rather be exploited by their employer than make nothing at all because they simply can’t survive being fired and don’t have the resources to fight it - so a lot of this wage theft goes unreported and uncompensated. And guess what, as is the case with nearly all wage exploitation, the most exploited workers are people of color, keep watching for part 3

Here’s the thing, servers who defend tipping because they make a lot more than minimum wage tend to be white - on average, workers of color make $4 less per hour than their white counterparts, and generally within the restaurant industry they are relegated to jobs like bussing and running instead of serving and bartending. They’re also more likely to work at restaurants where tips are lower because the clientele isn’t as wealthy, so causal restaurants versus fine dining. And frankly, the racial and economic disparity here is BUILT-INTO the history of tipping, which really took hold in the United States right after the Civil War, because formerly enslaved people were most commonly able to find jobs as waiters, or railroad porters, or hotel bellhops - in other words, jobs serving wealthy white people who could afford to eat out or stay at hotels - and restaurant and hotel owners didn’t want to pay formerly enslaved people the same as their white employees, and typing tips to legal wages was how they did it. Since then, hotel and railroad workers unionized and were able to get paid appropriately, but restaurant workers weren’t able to form the same kind of labor movement, which is why today we still use this antiquated, racist, sexist, exploitative, and stupid wage system that doesn’t make any sense.