Guest Post by John Stossel
Union protestors and celebrity advocates have decided that waiters’ tips aren’t big enough.
They are upset that in 43 states, tipped workers can be paid a lower minimum wage, as low as $2.13 an hour.
Not fair! say celebrities like Jane Fonda, who recorded commercials saying, “That’s barely enough to buy a large cup of coffee!”
As usual, those who want the government to decide that workers must be paid more insist that “women and minorities” are hurt by the market.
But waitress Alcieli Felipe is a minority and a woman. She says the celebrities and politicians should butt out.
Thanks to tips, Felipe says in my new internet video, she makes “$25 an hour. By the end of the year, $48,000 to $50,000.”
She understands that if government raises the minimum, “It’ll be harder for restaurants to keep the same amount of employees … (T)he busboy will be cut.”
She’s right.
Minimum wage laws don’t just raise salaries without cost. If they did, why not set the minimum at $100 an hour?
Every time a minimum is raised, somebody loses something. “In the (San Francisco) Bay Area, you’ve got a 14 percent increase in restaurant closures for each dollar increase in the minimum wage,” says Michael Saltsman of the Employment Policy Institute.
Activists are unmoved. “The problem with tips is that they’re very inconsistent,” University of Buffalo law professor Nicole Hallett told me. Hallett is one of those activist professors who gets students to join her in “social justice” protests.
“I simply don’t believe that increasing the minimum wage for tipped workers will lead to a reduction in the restaurant workforce,” she said. “Studies have shown that restaurants have been able to bear those costs.”
I pointed out that last time New York raised its minimum, the city lost 270 restaurants.
“Restaurants always close,” she replied.
“Restaurants don’t always close,” responds Saltsman. “Yeah, there’s turnover in the industry, but what we’re doing now to an industry where there’s low profit margins, jacking up restaurant closures … Something’s not right.”
The media rarely focus on those closings. We can’t interview people who are never hired; we don’t know who they are. Instead, activists lead reporters to workers who talk about struggling to pay rent.
“Forty-six percent of tipped workers nationwide rely on public benefits” like food stamps, Hallett told me.
I pointed out that many tipped workers are eligible for benefits because they don’t report tip income to the government.
She didn’t dispute that. “Many restaurants and restaurant workers don’t report 100 percent of their income,” she acknowledged.
Hallett and other higher-minimum activists also claim that tipping should be discouraged because it causes sexual harassment. Sarah Jessica Parker, Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman, Jane Fonda and 12 other actresses wrote a letter urging New York’s governor to increase the minimum wage, claiming that “relying on tips creates a more permissive work environment where customers feel entitled to abuse women in exchange for ‘service.'”
Tipping causes customers to abuse women?
Saltsman says research using federal data doesn’t support that. “Data shows some of the states that have gone down this path that the activists want, changing their tipping system, actually have a higher rate of sexual harassment.”
When I pointed that out to Hallett, she replied, “Sexual harassment is complicated; no single policy is going to eliminate that problem.”
So raising the minimum won’t reduce sexual harassment but will raise prices, will force some restaurants to either fire workers or close and will reduce tip income.
This is supposed to help restaurant workers?
Many object to being “helped.” When Maine voters increased the minimum, so many restaurant workers protested that the politicians reversed the decision.
Alcieli Felipe doesn’t want the government “helping” her either: “We are fine. Who are those people? Have they worked in the restaurant industry?”
Most haven’t.
I’m a free market guy. I wonder, “Why should there be any minimum? Why can’t the employer and employee make whatever deal they want?”
“That policy has been rejected,” Hallett told me, “rejected for the last hundred years. We’re not in that world.”
Unfortunately, we aren’t. We live in a world where activists and government “protect” workers right out of their jobs.
“Working For Tips” ……… is this another circumcision article?
Raising minimum wages may help a few people but they hurt a lot of them.
But none of the promoters of higher minimums seem to care at all about those they hurt, they just don’t count.
In any event, minimum wage jobs are generally meant to be an entry to the work force that leads to climbing the ladder to better ones, and part time work or for people that don’t do much that is worth more than the minimum because they just don’t have the ability to do much more than that or just don’t want to.
In any event, the better solution to low minimum wage jobs for those willing to work for something better is to create a business atmosphere that allows better jobs to flourish in numbers so there is something for the minimum wage worker to work himself into to improve his position.
Yes, the people pushing this stuff probably WANT to destroy the low end restaurant industry….in any event, a female law professor is the last person anyone should listen to about anything.
“Every time a minimum is raised, somebody loses something. ”
Oh how true. It’s also the other way around. If you don’t raise it the taxpayers lose. How many Walmart employees get taxpayer funded welfare? Welfaremart.
I assume you are familiar with Walmart pay schedules?
If not, maybe you should familiarize yourself with them.
When my son was little I worked in the restaurant biz on both sides, both as a server/bartender and in the kitchen and management. When I worked on the service side, I worked Thursday through Sunday and brought home about $500 and that was in the early 90’s. During the holiday season (Thanksgiving to Mother’s day) that would jump to $700. I could pick up an extra party and make another 100-150. So all told you’re talking $26,000 up to $32,000 for less than 40 hours a week in the 90’s. The average wage for women during this time was $22,000 (some college). The law said we only had to report the tips that brought us up to MINIMUM WAGE, which I think at that time was $4.50 an hour. Much less than I was actually making.
I collected NO benefits, and I don’t remember anyone else I worked with collecting either. We didn’t need to. My rent was $450 a month for a two bedroom including heat. I didn’t have a car payment, owned a second hand car. Gas was about $100 a month in the winter, electric was about $50 a month. I ate one meal a day at the restaurant for free, and my son was at my mother’s or my ex-husband’s while I worked, so no sitter or day care costs. Gas was I think around a 1.15 a gallon.
Everyone who worked at the place (family run and owned for 50 years) was there for 5, 10, 13, 20 years. I myself worked there for 7.
Nowadays the cost of living is much higher. Rents in my area for a two bedroom are 800-1000 per month, we all know gas is insane, and food is higher, electric, heat, etc. But I don’t think tips have increased all that much, as the menu prices I see are not much higher than when I was working. I would also like to add that the dumb-asses I typically see waiting tables suck so bad that I can see they might want to be paid more hourly rather than actually learn customer service, which is the WHOLE DAMN POINT OF TIPS. When I get good service I always leave 20% or more. If you suck, I still give you 15%. But I do say something to management about it. Not in front of the whole place mind you, I’m not there to humiliate anyone, but just to let the manager know more training is in order.
I was in Maine over the 4th of July holiday, and my friend and I stopped in a fairly nice place near the beach. We sat at the bar, and the bartender turned out to also be the manager, and I could tell right off she was short handed. She did confirm that. We joked about millennials suddenly getting “sunshine flu” and calling out. So if you don’t show up to work at a busy restaurant, during the busiest time of the year, then shame on you. But maybe mom and dad are supplementing the income, who knows.
Working in a nice, upper-tier restaurant was a viable career for people for a long time. But those places could offer benefits too, and keep you on full time. Nowadays it’s all part-time at lower-end places with zero benefits.
I have a friend who has worked at a higher-end place in Worcester MA for over 20 years. He makes 75K a year as the bar tender/night bar manager. He has regular customers who he treats like gold and they tip in kind for that service. He’s home with his kids during the day (his wife is a nurse) and he has Sundays off. I don’t think he wants to increase his on-the-books wage.
I absolutely think the activists need to shut up and stop “helping”.
The Dems don’t tip. The ones I know always say something like , “ by not tipping it tells the boss to increase their wages”
Pure shit.
On an unrelated subject.
I’m going to throw an idea out into the interweebs, it time for leftist bingo.
A card divided up into squares you can check at home or on a vacation.
Fun for all ages, every time “one” person starts to rant, pull out your Trump card. Racist, check, fake news. Check. Your not a ( blank) so you don’t get a say, check… FuckTrump is the (free) center square.
Call it T.R.U.M.P. . (is the song stuck in your head yet?)
I expect to see it floating around within a week.
No fair baiting them into filling out your card..
Don’t let me down internet meemists.
These ignorant hollywood fucks make me sick. Does that traitorous commie cunt fonda who earned her loot by blowing ugly old jews for movie parts think that makes her a labor expert? It actually makes you an expensive blow job and no more.
At dinner last night:
1)greeter and seater-> male
2)bartender-> male
3)waiter-> male
No joke, everyone we dealt with was male at dinner. Service was great. We tipped over 20%. The entire argument is shot right there. The real world is not a sitcom rife with harassment.
Restaurant is desperados in lake placid ny. Been going there since ’93. Mexican food with an irish twist. Try it out if you are ever up there. We vacation in placid just to eat there.
What’s so great about tipping? You do it *after* service is rendered, so how does that encourage good service? It doesn’t. I had fun some years back reading the “Bitter Waitress” blog, and the upshot is that certain people tend to always tip well, others tip ok, and another group tips poorly. Overall, very little to do with the actual service offered. Then there’s the issue that the perceived service isn’t always the waitrons’ fault, so why should they be the ones to suffer poor management or kitchen issues?
In Europe, it was so relaxing to not have to worry about tipping. Waiters get paid a regular salary. There’s none of that uncertainty that (for me) ruins the end of the evening.
Also in Europe, you don’t have waitrons all up in your face, introducing themselves by name and trying to be your BFF (I believe there’s a scientific basis to their doing so.. it increases guilt/tips). I had one waitron in a mid-level restaurant SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE and start chatting with us! WTF! I’m as “democratic” as the next person, but -wow- that crossed a line. Waitron, you are the help. You are not my new best buddy. Ugh.
More and more, especially in high-end “casual” dining (where you’re paying $20-30/entree), I feel like dining out has become the Waitron Show, where the Waitron does its best to make a spectacle out of relaying the specials, offering water, interrupting conversations with canned phrases and ill-timed jokes.. Just Go Away! I do see that some diners really seem to like the Waitron Show, despite how boring it is. It’s like they go out just to interact with the Waitron! Mostly noticed in suburban CT and in LA; less so in Boston and other parts of the NE, although it keeps getting worse. It makes me not want to eat out anymore. Or, I’ll opt for take out.
In Europe, you can have a conversation and not even be aware that your water or wine glass has been filled, because the servers are professional, and attend professional training.
I Hate Tipping.
Pay a Living Wage and don’t expect your customers to pick up the slack.
Lidia – “living wage” is a bullshit concept. Pay a market wage is best thing to do. Pay what is required to get the calibre of employee needed. People need to earn a living. No one is entitled to it.
Just the tip, ma’am.