NYT, Feb. 5, 2021
Tipping Is a Legacy of Slavery
By Michelle Alexander
Ms. Alexander is a civil rights advocate, the author of “The New Jim
Crow,” and a contributing Opinion writer.
Once upon a time, I thought that it was perfectly appropriate for
restaurant workers to earn less than minimum wage. Tipping, in my view,
was a means for customers to show gratitude and to reward a job well
done. If I wanted to earn more as a restaurant worker, then I needed to
hustle more, put more effort into my demeanor, and be a bit more charming.
I thought this even when I was a waitress, working at a burger and
burrito joint called Munchies during the summers when I was a college
student. Collecting tips gave me a certain satisfaction. I liked
sweeping dollar bills and coins off tables into the front pocket of my
blue apron. Each time someone left me a big tip, anything more than I
expected, a tiny jolt of dopamine flooded my brain as though I had just
hit a mini jackpot. I got upset when people stiffed me, walking out and
leaving nothing or just pennies — a true insult — but whenever that
happened I reminded myself that I might get lucky next time. Or I would
do better somehow.
Never did it occur to me that it was fundamentally unjust for me to earn
less than the minimum wage and to depend on the good will of strangers
in order to earn what was guaranteed by law to most workers. I had no
idea that tipping was a legacy of slavery or that racism and sexism had
operated to keep women, especially Black women like me, shut out of
federal protections for wage labor. I did not question tipping as a
practice, though looking back I see that I should have.
The first week on the job, one of my white co-workers, a middle-aged
woman from rural Oregon, pulled me aside after she watched a group of
rowdy white men, who had been rude and condescending to me throughout
their meal, walk out the door without leaving a tip. “From now on,
dear,” she said, “I’ll take the rednecks. Just pass ’em on to me.” This
became a kind of joke between us — a wink and a nod before we switched
tables — except it wasn’t funny. The risk that my race, not the quality
of my work, would determine how much I was paid for my services was
ever-present.
So was the risk that I would be punished for not flirting with the men I
served. Men of all ages commented on my looks, asked me if I had a
boyfriend, slipped me their phone numbers, and expected me to laugh
along with their sexist jokes. I often played along, after learning from
experience that the price of resistance would be the loss of tips that I
had rightfully earned.
The truth was, though, that I was shielded from the biggest risk that
tipped workers face: not being able to make ends meet. During the
summers I spent waitressing, I was living at home with my parents and
had my basic needs taken care of. On days when business was slow, and
only a few customers trickled in, I was reminded that my situation was
not the norm. I remember a co-worker crying at the end of her shift,
because she hadn’t earned enough in tips to pay the babysitter. I
remember a few of us pooling our tips so another co-worker could buy
groceries on her way home and feed her kids.
After I graduated from law school, I became a civil rights lawyer and
began representing victims of race and gender discrimination in
employment, as well as victims of racial profiling and police violence.
But it wasn’t until I read Saru Jayaraman’s book, “Forked: A New
Standard for American Dining,” that I learned the history of tipping in
the United States. After the Civil War, white business owners, still
eager to find ways to steal Black labor, created the idea that tips
would replace wages. Tipping had originated in Europe as “noblesse
oblige,” a practice among aristocrats to show favor to servants. But
when the idea came to the United States, restaurant corporations mutated
the idea of tips from being bonuses provided by aristocrats to their
inferiors to becoming the only source of income for Black workers they
did not want to pay. The Pullman Company tried to get away with it too,
but the Black porters, under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph,
formed the nation’s first Black union to be affiliated with the American
Federation of Labor and fought and won higher wages with tips on top.
Restaurant workers, however — who were mostly women — were not so
fortunate. The unjust concept of tips as wages remained in place for
them. And in 1938, when Franklin Roosevelt signed the nation’s first
minimum wage into law, it excluded restaurant workers, a category that
included a disproportionate number of Black people.
In 1966, when our nation’s minimum wage was overhauled, restaurant
workers were even more formally cut out with the creation of a
subminimum wage for tipped workers. Today, 43 states and the federal
government still persist with this legacy of slavery, allowing a tipped
work force that is close to 70 percent female and disproportionately
Black and brown women to be paid a subminimum wage. A nation that once
enslaved Black people and declared them legally three-fifths of a person
now pays many of their descendants less than a third of the minimum wage
to which everyone else is entitled.
The subminimum wage for tipped workers isn’t simply born of racial
injustice; it continues to perpetuate both race and gender inequity today.
In the mid-1960s, the guaranteed wage for tipped workers was $0 an hour.
Today, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is just $2.13 an hour
— a just over $2 increase — and a mostly female, disproportionately
women of color work force of tipped workers still faces the highest
levels of harassment of any industry. Women restaurant workers in states
with subminimum wage report twice the rate of sexual harassment as women
working in restaurants in the seven states that have enacted One Fair
Wage — a full minimum wage with tips on top. The women in these seven
states — California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Montana, Minnesota and
Alaska — can rely on a wage from their employer and are not as dependent
on tips and thus feel empowered to reject the harassment from customers.
The unfair power dynamic between women tipped workers and male customers
in most states has only worsened during the pandemic. Women restaurant
workers report being regularly subjected to ‘Maskual harassment’, in
which male customers are demanding that women servers take off their
masks so that they can judge their looks and their tips on that basis.
With tips now down 50 to 75 percent, male customers know women workers
are more desperate than ever.
For Black women, the situation is especially dire. Before the pandemic,
Black women who are tipped restaurant workers earned on average nearly
$5 an hour less than their white male counterparts nationwide — largely
because they are segregated into more casual restaurants in which they
earn far less in tips than white men who more often work in fine dining,
but also because of customer bias in tipping.
With the pandemic, these inequities were exacerbated; nearly nine in 10
Black tipped workers reported that their tips decreased by half or more,
compared to 78 percent of workers overall. All workers were asked to do
more for less — enforcing social distancing and mask rules on top of
serving customers, for far less in tips. Black workers were more likely
to be punished by hostile customers for attempting to serve as public
health marshals than other workers. Seventy-three percent of Black
workers reported that their tips decreased due to enforcing Covid-19
safety measures, compared to 62 percent of all workers.
Technically, federal law requires that employers must cover the
difference when the hourly wage, subsidized by tips, does not amount to
$7.25 an hour. But in practice, that mandate is frequently ignored. A
federal review of employment records from 2010-2012 revealed that nearly
84 percent of full-service restaurants had committed wage and hour
violations.
Fortunately, the subminimum wage for tipped workers might finally come
to an end if Congress enacts the minimum wage policy in President
Biden’s new $1.9 trillion relief package in its entirety. The Raise the
Wage Act, if passed, would not only raise the minimum wage to $15
minimum wage but also fully phase out the subminimum wage for tipped
workers. This would be good news for women and people of color who’ve
been denied a living wage and forced to endure harassment on the job,
but it would ultimately benefit all tipped workers — and restaurants
too. Workers in the seven states that have One Fair Wage receive similar
or even higher tips as the workers in 43 states with a subminimum wage,
and restaurants in those seven states have higher sales.
The National Restaurant Association has wasted no time launching a
campaign to convince Congress to maintain the subminimum wage for tipped
workers and the low minimum wage. This move hardly comes as a surprise.
For more than 150 years since Emancipation, the restaurant industry has
poured millions of dollars into lobbying elected officials to maintain
their exemption from having to pay their workers a fair wage, causing
tens of millions of women and men to experience poverty, food
insecurity, home insecurity, and inequality over generations.
As the Raise the Wage Act moves through Congress this month, the choice
is clear: our representatives can choose to roll over to the trade lobby
yet again and perpetuate a legacy of slavery, or they can choose to
listen to the millions of workers — disproportionately women and people
of color who increasingly represent this nation’s future voters — and
make history during Black History Month by ending the subminimum wage
for tipped workers once and for all.
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