On a recent episode of the No Dumb Questions podcast¹, there is a very long discussion on the concept of tipping for service in the United States, which eventually gets on to the subject of how to marginally improve the system in the light if the fact that it isn't going away.
If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else, then the whole concept of tipping for service as it exists in the United States, would be eliminated off of the face of the earth. What isn't immediately obvious to those of us in those parts of the world which actually have proper labour laws, is that tipping exists and appears to be a culturally acceptable method, whereby employers can pay people working in the front of house, as little as possible. Tipping exists therefore, not for the purposes of gratitude but almost expressly for the purposes of making the public pay the wages of front line staff because employers are too scabby to do so. It should be one of those things which is obvious but if you expect someone to make a living by doing something for you, then you should pay them to do so. It should be self-evident that workers deserve their wages.
As someone who lives in "Not America", where the minimum wage is sensible, I find it absolutely horrifying that tipping is not only a thing in the United States but that it has been retained in spite and maybe in celebration of its very very racist origins. I suppose that I should not be surprised that tipping came to exist in the form that it does, in a nation which was founded on the basis of a tax dodge and to uphold the right to retain slavery at Common Law. It would then snap in half over that same issue of whether people should own other people as chattel goods.
I have no idea when tipping started as a thing but in the aftermath of the United States' Civil War which was fought because the Confederate States demanded the right to keep slavery as a thing (this was never a states' rights issue - go read the Confederate Constitution²), many formerly enslaved people after being emancipated, were only able to find employment in servile jobs such as food service, domestic help, or in carting jobs such as railway station porters.
The normalisation of tipping grew up in a still very racist culture, where employers still wanted to hire formerly enslaved people, on a very low wage or as close to zero wage as possible. Tipping appears to become popular in the 1870s and then really takes off over the next two decades as the gilded age returns rewards to a small select privileged few (who were almost exclusively white).
Economics has a habit of never solving any problems ever but rather, transforming the problems into new and different versions of the same problem. In undoing slavery, what was also undone was the direct ownership of people as chattel goods but that did not undo the power that people with money had.
For about the next half century, efforts were made to also get legislatures in America to ban tipping as well and eventually there were six states which outlawed the practice. All six of the bans were ruled unconstitutional in 1926. The real irony is that tipping bans were mainly enforced in southern states, who still wanted to impoverish black people even further.
Tipping again raised its head when as part of The New Deal when the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) made the concession that the federally mandated minimum wage could be earned through either through wages or through tips. Employers liked this because it meant that they might not be on the hook at all for somebody's wage, if they happened to have made more than the minimum standards.
The current "tip credit" provisions mean that the current minimum wage for tipped employees, as opposed to wage employees, is an utterly evil and shameful $2.13 and has not been changed since 1966.
There is also the implicit unfairness of tipping as a method of paying people. I would like to imagine that all consumers are fair people but we all know that that simply isn't true. By means of a experiment it can be demonstrated time and time again that the size of the tips that the customers give, correlates with the pulchritude of the employees (mostly female).
The most radical idea that I have ever heard when it comes to tipping, is that the amount being paid should equal 110% of the stated amount on the invoice. Then because the total amount of the bill is legally allowed to be negotiated, deductions should be made to the bill; so that the service person is still paid properly but the business is hurt. The problem is that it is really hard to send negative feedback signals to a system and to employers when increasingly people aren't carrying cash.
I know that this might be that this might the result of an entirely different cultural upbringing but I find the idea of not stating the final end price of a thing annoying and the idea that I might then have to pay someone a tip, evil. If tipping is a cultural expectation, then that says to me that the culture has normalised and accepted that workers in principle are not worth their wages.
It says to me as the person who buys things, that the person who is standing in front of me, is thought so little of by their employer, that their employer can't even be bothered to pay them a decent wage. Now I have no idea what the contract between an employee and an employer actually is but by putting the responsibility of paying workers for their service on the customers, I will naturally assume that the proprietor of the business is a total knave. It also sends the signal to me as a consumer of goods and services, that the employment conditions are so precarious that this person can be terminated at an instant. That's awful.
¹https://www.nodumbquestions.fm/listen/2022/8/19/139-is-tipping-getting-weird - 139 - Is Tipping Getting Weird?
²https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp
Art IV, Sec. 2. (I)
"The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired."
No really:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
- Alexander H. Stephens, 21st Mar 1861
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