It’s dystopian in a way, to use “gratuity” on your little slip of paper and your LCD screen with its convenient calculations while this practice is even legal anymore let alone publicly acceptable. Which it still seems to be - record screech - just kidding it’s guilt.
You call free market I call subsidy. False profitability in the name of jobs paid for by passing the majority of the wage onto the consumer.
Thanks for reading
Did I miss it or did the article just not address the scenario where the worker gets not enough tips to meet the federal minimum wage? Then what happens? Is the employer liable to pay the difference?
A tipped employee engages in an occupation in which he or she customarily and regularly receives more than $30 per month in tips. An employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 per hour in direct wages if that amount combined with the tips received at least equals the federal minimum wage. If the employee’s tips combined with the employer’s direct wages of at least $2.13 per hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference. Many states, however, require higher direct wage amounts for tipped employees. dol
So basically if people stopped tipping they’d be forced to pay whatever the minimum wage is for that area. But you get a non-zero number of tipped workers who bitch that they’ll lose their extra money and it ends up impacting everyone. It’s a living example of the prisoners dilemma.
Not to mention that servers who don’t make enough in tips will just get fired. Or for the few places where you can’t fire an employee without cause, they’ll be given fewer and fewer hours, to the point where the wages becomes completely unlivable and they have no choice but to quit.
The employer has to make up the difference in wages for the employee, but now you’ve added a financial incentive to get rid of said employee because they end up costing you more than ones who earn more tips.
This situation is often completely outside of the server’s control.
I guess my point was if we collectively stopped tipping everyone the business couldn’t weed out servers that way, because the business would have to ensure all of them are covered.
That is the frustrating part. The employers want to continue to pay their servers unlivable wages and force the customer to pay the rest. But a lot of the employees don’t want tipping to go away because they make more than federal minimum wage or even popular proposed livable wages like $15/hr or $20/hr.
So now customers are the only ones who want tipping to go away.