Anybody else find this pretty deplorable?
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. service sector employees who receive tips have been excluded from the latest hike in the federal minimum wage that kicked in on Friday, leaving the public to cover the cost of their healthcare, according to economists and advocates.
The federal minimum wage on Friday rose to $7.25 from $6.55. But only seven states guarantee tipped workers the minimum wage, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based advocacy group for low-income workers.The minimum wage for so-called "tipped" workers has been frozen at $2.13 an hour since 1991, the report found. [Emphasis added--E.M.]
Waitresses and waiters, who comprise the majority of tip-receiving workers, have nearly three times the poverty rate of the nation's workforce, it said.
Wait staff are twice as likely to go without health insurance, partly because few employers help them pay for a health plan.
I know that real-life wages for wait staff may be higher than that minimum number in many markets, but the idea that wait staff are left out of the minimum wage is the one that gets me. Workers in high-end restaurants may be fine, but there are a lot of workers in casual dining places who probably aren't making enough in tips to make up for the difference between their wages and a decent living; and though in some areas wait staff may command more than minimum wage, in other, smaller towns and areas this likely isn't the case.
And in an economic downturn, when people cut back on eating out, order conservatively from a selection of middle or lower-priced menu items, skip appetizers or desserts, and otherwise restrain their spending, people who are dependent on tips as part of their livelihood are going to hurt even more.
I've personally never worked waiting tables at a restaurant; while I did work at a couple of mall-counter places in my college days, these weren't tip-based enterprises and I always earned minimum wage, or just slightly better. So I don't know what it's like to be dependent on tips as part of my pay.
But I do know that people gripe, all the time, about tipping wait staff and how much ought to be left. My husband is of the "figure 20% and then round up to the nearest dollar or two" sort, but both he and I have been surprised, on occasion, to be out eating and to see people put down a dollar or so per person after consuming a ten or fifteen dollar meal each. And I've seen attitudes expressed on the Internet to the effect that a ten-percent tip is perfectly fine for ordinary service, and that going "up" to fifteen or twenty percent should be reserved for extraordinary service.
Frankly, I think wait staff ought to be guaranteed minimum wage in the first place, and that tips should then help them make up the difference between minimum wage and a decent living.
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This post arouses my curiosity. Erin posted before about how sad it would be if the lower echelon of health care workers had to take pay cuts under a new schema of health care provision. Most conservatives could not care less about the fate of the working class. If their wages are low, it is because the market won't support higher wages. Therefore, it would be morally wrong to agitate for higher wages because this can only be accomplished by taking money away from those who are more productive--i.e., the capitalists and property owners. Current conservative theories of why many people can barely support themselves on the wage they are paid (if I may simplify a bit): 1) Low-paid workers are too stupid to be worth more pay. They are genetically inferior and therefore can't expect to be valued. 2) Low-paid workers are immoral. This makes them bad employees, so they don't deserve more. 3) Low-paid workers have an inferior, bad culture that makes them unworthy to earn more. (I.e., they're black, or they're single mothers, or non-churchgoers, or fill in blank of today's disfavored group.) 4) At one end of the crazy spectrum, you can also add the thought that it's feminists who are to blame for low wages. Everything was fine till women started expecting to have jobs as well.
So, Erin, have you shifted away from these ideas, such that you now actually believe that people who work should be able to support themselves on their wages? Does this mean you're in favor of minimum wage laws and other programs to put some of the profits back into the hands of workers? And, if so, does that apply to working women, too?
Sig, all due respect, but I am a Catholic, you know. Rerum novarum, rights of the worker, Dorothy Day, all that sort of thing.
I always try to balance concerns about reasonable profit (and yes, someone who pours his heart and soul as well as money and time into a thriving business deserves a reasonable profit--ask me about huge multinational corporations, Wall Street speculators, and greedy CEOs another time) with concerns about the worker and his right to earn a decent living. Sometimes these two rights will be in conflict, and that's where there should be good-faith efforts on both sides to be realistic (e.g., business owner doesn't get to treat workers like serfs, part-time counter help doesn't get to demand the same wages and benefits as full-time skilled employees, and so on). But I'm not the knee-jerk capitalist you might think. I dislike many of the Republican party's ideas when they imply a sort of veneration of the free market which is not honest about the impact some of our business practices have on real people. And even though few of us are entirely free from Wall Street, I hate the whole system. The idea that businesses exist to increase their value to stockholders first, and only to deal in goods and services second, seems almost as wrong to me as much of the inherent dishonesty we call "marketing."
Granted, that's extremely un-real-worldly and idealistic. The modern world is what it is. Small, "crunchy" changes may be a way to free ourselves from some of this, but few of us, like I said, aren't dependent in some way on this system we didn't create, but only inherited, so few of us can live independently of it.
In the mean time, there are sensible ways we can help real workers in the real world. I generally like minimum wage laws except for two things: one, I think they might possibly be regional rather than national because a rural business might be paying pretty close to the county's *maximum* wage to hire people to make hamburgers, which is why so many of the little businesses can't hire extra help--and that would improve local economies, etc. And two, I support some thoughtful exceptions crafted for small businesses *only* (because most big corporations will *always* exploit the worker given the slightest loophole to do so) so that, say, a mom & pop bookstore in a tiny town in the Midwest can hire a teenager for part-time work without having to pay him, in effect, more than mom & pop make in an hour once their "salary" is calculated and costs subtracted.
The second, I think, we have already in some senses; at least, there are some exceptions to minimum wage laws for those kinds of situations, though I admit to not being well-versed in their limits. The first would be harder to achieve, perhaps, but if a small business could hire *more* employees by paying them a true "local" minimum wage (bearing in mind local food and housing costs and other benchmarks) it might be worth exploring.
My dad was management, but I married into a union family. My father-in-law was a Teamster, back in the day. This was a man who wouldn't cross a picket line even to buy food if he was starving. He'd starve first.
I'm not well enough informed to opine on the role labor unions have played in the last century, let alone what role might work for them in this one. (I know quite a lot about the American labor movement in the nineteenth century, but that's a long time ago now.)
But I like the idea of being informed as a consumer. I like knowing, as by law I must be told, where the goods I purchase were manufactured. I like knowing whether the vegetables I eat were sprayed with chemicals or not. I like knowing something about the conditions under which animal food is produced. ("Grass fed" "cage free" and all that.)
Back in the day there were "union shops." I think there was even a sticker for the window, and old-time union guys like my father-in-law set great store by shopping there in preference to anywhere else, even if the goods were more expensive. (That family never had money to spare, but their principles were even more important to them than the cost.)
This whole discussion here has about turned me off of eating in restaurants unless there absolutely is no other way to get a meal. I'd gladly patronize a restaurant which paid at least minimum wage to all the staff, before tips. If that means the food is more expensive, so be it, maybe I'll just eat there less frequently. But not as less frequently as I'd go to places I knew weren't paying the wait staff minimum wage, because you can't go less frequently than never.
I live in a big, very expensive urban area, so $7.25 an hour is not in any sense excessive; if anything, the contrary.
Yes, I had noticed that you're a Catholic, Erin. ; ) But there are all kinds of Catholics, and many of them are staunch boosters of laissez-faire capitalism, so I had to ask. Remember "Mater si, Magistra no?" Plenty of Catholics regard the social welfare encyclicals as non-authoritative, or as mere guidelines that can be applied in a very general, non-directive sense.
It's very interesting that you favor minimum wage laws. I applaud that and agree with you--but you do realize that it's anathema to any "conservative" outside the narrow lines drawn on the sand by the late Brent Bozell? You do realize that "the idea that businesses exist to increase their value to stockholders first" is one of the core tenets of capitalism, and that to deny it is to apostasize into some form of socialism? When you say that there should be minimum wages, but they should be adjusted by region and type of business, you're assuming some authority who can make those decisions, other than the free market. Same for talking about a "reasonable profit." Who decides what is reasonable? That assumes there's an authority who will make those decisions. Again, you're impeding the action of the market, and that is the height of immorality, to a true capitalist. I suggest to you that you are not in a position to complain, ever again, that Barack Obama has socialistic tendencies!
Oh, Sig. I'm not a socialist. I'm a Crunchy Conservative! :)
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