The food & labor worlds have been abuzz with the news that acclaimed New York restauranteur Danny Meyer has eliminated tipping in his restaurants in favor of higher hourly wages for workers.
This comes on the heels of a similar trend in other cities: in Seattle, for instance, a rising minimum wage has led many restauranteurs to raise prices. Some restauranteurs have compensated by eliminating tipping from their restaurants; in other cases, patrons are choosing not to tip, sensing, begrudgingly or not, that their servers are finally being well-compensated.
A catastrophic disruption to the food service industry as we know it? Hardly. Labor advocates and consumers alike have been praising the trend — with some even arguing that it doesn’t go far enough.
In a recent New York Times editorial (Why Tipping is Wrong), Saru Jarayaman, Director of the Food Labor Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and co-Director of the advocacy organization Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, tells the ugly, racialized story of the anti-tipping movement in America. She writes:
The so-called subminimum wage has been frozen at $2.13 an hour for nearly a quarter-century. In only seven states do tipped workers enjoy the same minimum wage as others.
In New York State, prolonged campaigning on the issue led to an increase to $5 an hour in 2011, and the minimum wage for tipped workers is finally set to rise again, to $7.50 an hour, at the end of this year. This is a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough.
The racialized element of the practice continues to this day: 53 percent of tipped workers in New York State are minorities, and 21 percent live at or below the poverty line. And most tipped workers are not fancy steakhouse servers; they are women working at places like IHOP, Applebee’s and Olive Garden. Based on American Community Survey data, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United estimates that nearly 70 percent of tipped restaurant workers are women, 40 percent of whom are mothers.
The subminimum wage for tipped workers also enshrines pay inequity for a predominantly female work force, perpetuating the gender pay gap. For African-American female servers, the disparity is even greater: ROC United calculates that they earn only 60 percent of what male servers are paid, costing those women more than $400,000 over a lifetime.
Worse still, this two-tiered system is the reason the restaurant industry is the single largest source of sexual harassment claims in the United States. Women forced to live on tips are compelled to tolerate inappropriate and degrading behavior from customers, co-workers and managers in order to make a living. So while restaurants employ about seven percent of American women, nearly 37 percent of all sexual harassment claims to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission come from restaurants.
She concludes: “…as long as this unfair system that dates from the days of slavery persists, neither progressivism nor women’s equality will be realized.”
For the full editorial, visit NYTimes.com.
