Shortly before opening, Casa Bonita’s new owners Matt Stone and Trey Parker decided to eliminate tipping and instead pay workers a flat wage of $30 per hour.
Now I could be wrong, but getting a an hourly wage as a restaurant worker is FAR better than relying on tips. I feel like either workers in this situation are too obsessed with tips or there’s huge context missing.
This is cunsoomer propoganda. The tipped wage allows unskilled workers to acheive the heights of middle income without getting college degrees and gives them a career path in retail, plus it makes excel spreadsheet workers and boomers pay extra.
You can make the arguement that “well actually that 20% should me baked into the price and that should go to the worker”. Which is possibly the most delusional arguement a person could possible make. How many times have companies raised prices on their goods 20% due to increasing labor costs and how many of those companies actually have given that full amount to workers? Approximately 0.
If you abolished tipped wages tommorow and told bosses to raise prices to compensate they’d turn their workers into fast food workers and pocket the extra 20%. That’s the fate of all non-tipped work.
If abolishing tipped labor for resturants was so good for workers then ask yourselves why all the fast food resturants with much higher profit margins and much leaner workforces get paid way, waaaaaay less than waiters.
The real communist politic is to keep the tip and abolish the tipped wage. If that makes restaurants more expensive than good, if a service can’t be provided without poverty wages than it shouldn’t exist.
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Countries that don’t have tipping tend to have sectoral collective bargaining, which (at least ideally) ensures a relatively good wage for all workers in a sector. If there are levels of unionisation/worker organisation that can make this a reality in the US, then go for it. However, in the absence of that Janny’s post makes a lot of useful points about the potential effects of a capital-led transition to tip-free work. It strikes me like almost no one in this thread has even read the article that we’re all notionally discussing. I admit I don’t know what the positions of the presumably numerous US restaurant workers’ unions are on these questions, but the article states that these workers were being advised by one and wanted to retain a pooled-tip structure
the specifics of the situation are both unique and dated. we aren’t really talking about a restaurant, it’s a low-rent dinner theater/mexploitation gallery that serves food. purchased, refurbished, & re-organized by celebrities with an infinite money tap. so trying to plug it into a general debate around tipping is pretty awkward at best, nevermind these workers are making above-average wages on unusual schedules (the latter of which was my by impression, the actual issue)
but let’s not let that distract us–yes, you’re correct, collective bargaining is what makes and keeps wages higher than capitalists like. but while the US doesn’t have that, we must recognize that tipping is a tool of the bourgeoisie to offload (and make optional) the compensation of labor. it also helps police labor through the divisions it causes between workers (i.e. this entire thread). the reality is that if Janny’s half-measure proposal went through, customers would stop tipping anyway, and eventually this group of workers would have the exact same imperatives and options as anybody else. and like, it’s not like tipping is illegal places its not customary, you can give a french waiter extra money if you want.
Yeah, that’s fair, I don’t have much of a grasp of the specifics of the case beyond the article. And I agree that tipping is worse than non-tipped waged work under sectoral collective bargaining and that we should have the latter as our goal as long as we remain within a capitalist framework. Indeed, from my experience, in a lot of places where tipping isn’t customary and they do have sectoral bargaining waiters take it as something of an affront to be tipped. French waiters are often somewhat offended by attempts to tip them - precisely because it is perceived as an attack on their dignity as workers.
But I still think that we should be careful in uncritically supporting the abolition of tipping outside of circumstances in which a sector is sufficiently well-organised. We’ve seen so many examples in the last few decades in which often positive reforms, which were initially demanded by workers, have been co-opted by capital to undermine conditions and wages precisely because those reforms took place in a general context where workers haven’t been well-organised enough to defend themselves against the attacks of capital. The demand for flexible working practices/hours in the 1970s and 80s is a good example of this process, where what should have been positive reforms have had extremely mixed results in that they’ve played a large role in creating conditions of casualisation and mass under-employment. In many sectors, ‘flexible working’ has meant flexibility to work sporadic hours whenever your boss decides with the knowledge that if you’re not sufficiently flexible to their demands you’ll stop being given work.
I also do think that the ‘it divides the working class’ argument is the weakest one, because what it really ends up expressing is a consoomer mindset that as communists/anarchists we should challenge rather than accept. While I’m sure that our comrades on here are arguing in good faith and have decent reasons for wanting to abolish tipping, this isn’t representative of the debate overall. Most of the discourse I’ve encountered on the topic has been on reddit and is predictably treat-brained. The framing is almost always primarily ‘tipping is too expensive!’ with questions about the conditions/rights of workers relegated to a secondary position that often feels tacked on to cover that the primary demand is ‘I want things to be cheaper even if that means workers are paid less’. You can say this is unfair, but the last 40 years of economic reform have shown us that people who identify more strongly with being a consumer than a worker will buy the cheaper commodity made by workers labouring under worse conditions and less pay 99 times out of 100
thats not what anyone in this thread was talking about. competition between workers in the same joint for tips and inequities of which employees receive them is how tipping disciplines labor. nothing to do with the customers. the enmity between foh and boh staff repeatedly brought up itt is instructive
but your concern about ‘capitalist managed’ transition away from tips is a fantasy. they don’t want to get rid of them! they discipline labor and reduce its compensation, we’re living capital’s dream arrangement. actually operating businesses that dont do tips are isolated ideological/niche cases, not a front for some big project to crush labor power. this south park place’s stance is either from the owners being libertarians or some specific peculiarity of the business
Ah okay, yeah, I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying
Spreadsheet workers make like $40k a year, less than $30 an hour. Many boomers are poor, working class and have been exploited their whole lives viciously (not the majority obviously, but you’re being callous). Why are you trying to pit workers against each other and destroy solidarity by saying some deserve more consideration than others? Really not digging the condescending arrogance of your tone and anti-worker solidarity position
also it’s a pain in the ass being nickle and dimed all the time.
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“spreadsheet workers” are working class. Working class is not a cultural affect, it’s merely being proletarian which all wage workers who don’t own the means of production or make passive income are.
If you think working class only means a guy with a hard hat or restaurant worker, I have to sadly break the news you have internalized chud propaganda. Many of these types are petty bourgies and not working class as well, as they own their own contracting business or own part of the restaurant or whatever.
“Middle class” insofar as it exists meaningfully in a Marxist sense, is a mixed prol-petty bourgie class with interests in both increasing wages and increasing housing prices, stock market prices, company profits, etc. It, again, is not a cultural affect describing people who sit down while they work.
My bad. I meant people who make a comfortable living but don’t own the means of production or make passive income. Nothing to do with chud propaganda, just a didn’t use the right term.
workers who aren’t working class
Sorry, just used the wrong terminology. I thought professional managerial class was different from working class.
“spreadsheet workers” aren’t PMC to begin with - the PMC refers to the stratum that manage flows of capital. people who write spreadsheets are paid bottom-barrel wages to track capital (in various forms) but they generally have no control over it.
Lol I didn’t know these terms were so stringent. I thought somebody just made up spreadsheet workers, which could definitely include most pmc people I know based on the description alone.
Ehhhh, I’ve worked back of house forever, where I currently am we get a cut of sales thst more or less equals out to the same as server’s tips, $30 would math out to a higher wage, so I’d tske that deal. Also most places back of house gets like 10 percent of the tips and it’s like $40 a week and just above minimum wage pay, so I have found it pretty hard as someone who actually makes the food to be pro tip cause higher server wages can be leveraged for higher cook wages.
When I worked delivery before the app era (think Uber eats but before it existed) I knew the people (almost exclusively women) that packed the to-go orders. At some places, ones that didn’t get a lot of to-go orders, the MOD did the packing and that was fine. At others, it was a heavily politicked position. No one wanted to be the person that did these, as it was untipped, so everyone was against each other. At Texas Roadhouse specifically, it was the newest people and the subtext of more than one overheard conversation implied that those with a smaller chest had little-to-no chance of getting “on the floor” without “being cool and hanging out with (one of) the managers outside work”. I don’t want to read overmuch into that, but it made my skin crawl. I know there was no solidarity there though, the only people that got tipped out were the host and bartender, and those were essentially bribes.
America delenda est.
At least where I am things have gotten better regarding tipping BOH and pooling tips. Last place I worked BOH got equal share in the tips and this one we get a percentage of the sales that averages out to around what servers get for tips.
source: vibes
It allows conventionally attractive young white unskilled workers in dense enough areas to do that.