Posted on 08/01/2018 1:11:21 PM PDT by Kaslin
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.
“Well, you didn’t want that job anyway. The pay was crap!”
I made so much in tips as a bartender in a busy steakhouse that I wouldn’t cash my regular checks for weeks at a time. And I was making $6 an hour back in the 90’s. Also, I received 25% of all the waitresses tips since I was making drinks for their customers. The steakhouse was across the street from the largest airport in a smaller state.
The “Professor” is too stupid to realize or even know that people generally have merely a given amount to spend on that Saturday Night out.
Go ahead, raise the minimum wage, raise taxes on the restaurant, raise the cost of the served meal and good luck. The customer cannot do a thing about the cost of the meal, or the business taxes or the light bill, but amount for the TIP is relentlessly LOWERED.
The customer(s) do, though, have one alternative. Stay at home, eat there, and have a heavier wallet. Thus, a great number of busineses close, and people with HIGHER minimum wages are likewise, sitting at home watching TV.
Washington DC is raising tipped worker minimum wage to $15 an hour. I don’t need to tip there then right?
Well, if you only work one hour.....and do a crappy job taking care of your customers.
I am usually a generous tipper. I frequent the same restaurants and know the staff. Also, I have several friends who worked as waiters and waitresses, and appreciate not only the job they do but also that they work hard at what they do (if they are good at it).
But if they start paying them minimum wage, I probably won’t tip again.
Oh, and yes, I will change restaurants too.
What it’s really about is complete government control over all salaries. That would be communism.
I agree. The $15 an how is an automatic tip imho. On the other hand you might want to make an exception if the waitress is especially good.
During my Navy career I shopped the base commissary. Baggers were paid in tips only and the service was great. Baggers made upwards of 25 an hour Some genius mandated they be paid a wage. Service quality plunged as did the number of baggers...
“The customer(s) do, though, have one alternative. Stay at home, eat there, and have a heavier wallet.”
We’ll be having scallops, prawns, and cod with Newburg sauce, twice-baked potatoes, zucchini sauteed with Italian spices, and cherries jubilee.
The rest of the month we’ll be eating ramen.
That’s how tipping should be anyway. A reward for over and above. I once broke a spoke 80 miles into a 160 mile two day bike ride.
I found a bike shop and got there ten minutes before close. When the tech realized how far I had ridden that day, he jumped right on the repair.
He got a 100% tip
“That’s barely enough to buy a large cup of coffee!”
Is coffee now a right?
Buy a container of ground coffee and brew it at home for crying out loud!
If you long for the social status that expensive coffee seems to bring, carry the home-brew to work in a thermos, and secretly pour it into a specialty coffee-house mug.
While I don’t have a problem with the minimum wage concept, I think it should have a clause in which teenagers, for whom a job is their first, work for less. If they remain at their job, doing well, after a period of time, say, 6 months, THEN they can be paid minimum wage. Of course, there will always be employers who would take advantage of that, and never keep a kid longer than 6 months, but that kid would still, at that point, have job experience, which would make him more valuable to the next employer. And the employer, who DID treat kids like that, would soon get a reputation, and find it hard to get help of any kind, and his business would suffer. People today are pretty spoiled. They don’t realize how low minimum wage used to be. I’m 66; when I got my first regular job, minimum wage was $1.15/hr. I was 15 years old. It paid for gas, entertainment, and clothes, even at that. When I was 25, REGISTERED NURSES, with people’s lives in their hands, were making a measly $6.25/ hr! Of course, nurse’s wages took a pretty big jump by the time I was 35, when I became a nurse, all the way to $15/hr. But, hospitals, like all businesses, had found out by then, that they could get away with cutting staff, and getting the work of 1 1/2 -2 nurses, out of just one nurse, all the while bemoaning the nursing “shortage”. (Hint there was no nurse shortage; there was a shortage of nurses willing to risk patient’s lives by working in understaffed conditions. But hospitals did, and still do, ignore that).
Some places now have a minimum tip percentage, even for a party of 1. We don’t eat at those places. My husband always overtips. I don’t mind, if the service is good; we both enjoy blessing people when we can. But, I know there are still people out there, who leave a dollar bill on the table, and think they’ve done their good deed for the day. I don’t know if our state is one that only pays servers $2.15/hr., but I think those restaurants that do that, should be required to have a sign up, telling customers how little they pay.
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