Everyone in this panel is underpaid. No change happens blaming one worker against the other. We're all under the boot
Yes, but in the US servers get paid much less than minimum wage with the presumption that tips will make up the difference.
Businesses are supposed to make up any difference between what servers fail to earn as tips up to minimum wage, but:
Remember to tip your landlord
There's these new payday loan scam apps they call earned income advances or some bullshit like that where they take the loan amount and fees out of your next paycheck directly.
These asswipes charging what amounts to like 500% APR have the fucking audacity to ask for tips.
And say thank you.
I dislike this cartoon because of the way that the server is pointing angrily at the tip box. In reality, the servers are also victims of tipping culture. They deserve consistent and fair wages.
It also depicts servers as doing some decadent super easy job when those people work their asses off. I dislike tipping culture, but I factor it into the cost of a night out and make sure someone gets paid fairly from my side if they’re doing a great job and making sure I have everything I need while I sit and enjoy my meal and conversation.
The whole system needs an overhaul, but until that happens, I’m on the side of the working people that make my night out easy and pleasant.
This comic was not made by someone experienced what its like to work at Applebee's in Oklahoma before, that is for sure.
That will only happen when we stop tipping
No. It will happen when you stop going to restaurants that underpay their workers. Patronizing those establishments and not tipping is just punishing the worker while rewarding the business. Business owners will not change unless you hit them in the wallet.
In everywhere but USA, yes.
In the USA - No, that will just make servers go hungry.
The fix is to change tax law. The reason tipping is so big a deal there is that tax law is FUCKED, servers are taxed as if they were tipped, regardless of whether or not they were. Literally no other country does this.
It won't make the server go hungry. It will force them to look for a different job.
So then nobody wants to serve anymore and restaurants will be forced to fix the broken system.
No tipping anywhere, especially in the US.
Tipped workers represent 5 million+ workers in the US. While yes, ending tipping is important, probably better ways like raising minimum wages and getting rid of 'tipped wages' would work to end tipping rather than just telling 5 million people they need to find different work.
But if you talk to the majority of tipped workers, they don't want to change the system, which is likely a far larger hurdle compared to diner preferences.
No, if you stop tipping the servers just get paid less and the owners feel nothing for not paying them a fair wage. If you really want to make a change, don't eat out any place that makes you tip, if you have ever seen a tip jar or a tip screen, don't go there. That is how you vote with your wallet, you don't make the workers subsidize your food and not tip.
I can choose to not eat somewhere and make a statement, or i can choose to eat someone and make a statement and get subsidies for doing so.
Which do you think I'll choose?
That will only happen when we stop tipping
Don't tip, but also don't think your not tipping is going to change anything except that the people who work as servers who might have liked now think you are an a-hole. I am sure you don't care about this either, also fine, you don't have to care about any other person, place or thing, the world will go on.
Sure, but there are already news reports of servers complaining that all the people visiting aren't tipping for the World Cup. Trying to call it "our culture". Sure they should be paid normally, but, that's also something that's been said for at least the last 2 decades (and probably far longer). If they (servers) are going to keep pushing for tips, businesses keep pushing for tips, and people keep tipping...
Every time Americans call them servers I think of a computer lol
Yes, but waiter are underpaid and should have a salary too.
... Apparently. This is too american for me to understand
As wish many things American, it goes back to slavery. Tipped workers were a way for employers to avoid paying (mostly black) workers, effectively providing slavery-lite even after slavery had ended (Happy Juneteenth).
In any case, current U.S. labor law has specific carve-outs for certain tipped jobs that allow the minimal wage to be not the already unlivable $7.25/hr but the unsustainable $2.15/hr. Technically, employers are required to bring a tipped workers pay up to $7.25/hr if they do not report enough tips, but in practice employers encourage reporting incorrect tips and find reasons (if needed) to dismiss employees that do not report enough tips.
Fisherman, Sailor, Teamster, and Chef are not tipped positions. Waitstaff is a tipped position.
Tipped workers were a way for employers to avoid paying (mostly black) workers, effectively providing slavery-lite even after slavery had ended
It's not just about being cheap though. It reinforces the idea that the worker is of a lower social status than the customer. The customer may, at their own discretion, choose whether or not to pay the worker a fair wage for the work they have done. That's a very clear power imbalance.
Waiter is the only one who gets their wage subsidized by their bosses customers.
Love that Lemmy is pro worker everywhere except if they get tips. Then it suddenly becomes the workers fault that they have to beg for a living wage while also working full time.
That's not the point. Point is two fold; first, we shouldn't normalize closing the wage gap that shitty business owners choose to create, their vacation home is built from wage theft. Second, the other laborers in the first photo also get paid shit wages relatively, especially the chefs who do infinitely harder work and don't get a split of those tips in most situations. And to be frank, wait staff is often traditionally filled with more attractive people than the bridge trolls in back of house, and that's a big part of why they clear so much in tips. I've known many servers who clear more than double the average cooks pay at the end of the year. That's not equitable.
So the tension is well founded and much more nuanced than you know or want to acknowledge.
All of these things you name are not the servers fault, yet the server is the who gets all the hate and the reduced pay due to the problem people have with tipping. No-one says - wow fishermen get paid terrible but also they don't deserve money for work. I am going to stop buying fish. Every one gets paid like shit, shit on the system not the worker. Fix the system, don't punish the worker for working within the system.
IME, servers generally feel pretty firmly entitled to those high wages collectively at the end of the day, they live pretty well outside of work compared to BOH and it's typically less serious work for them as it's more likely to be a "stop" rather than a career (which is more likely for a kitchen worker).
Nothing stops them from having a personal policy to split tips out the kitchen 20-50% and/or organizing other servers and petitioning management for a formal process. I've seen some that do, but very rare.
It's a hierarchy like anything else - the owners are doing wage theft at scale and collecting way more profit than they should, the servers are collecting tips as the final mile face representing a lot of people in back literally navigating knives, fire and very heavy lifting. On balance, they get more than they should (when I was in kitchens, the servers routinely cleared 3 - 4x more annually than the cooks - talking mid 30s for kitchen versus over 100k for servers all told). And the cooks are just working, sacrificing their bodies and personal relationships until their knees give out at 35 and the weaker ones are addicts to cope with it all.
We just live in a culture in the US where the predominant voices you hear are the public (customers) and servers themselves. The servers have selfish motivations and the public have an inherent guilt for making others "serve" them and for being half educated on the server's "perilous plight". And again, cooks are quieter in the mix by nature and busy working, so you don't really hear their voice.
So yes , the system is fucked, needs major reform, owner class is the driver, but the servers are in the passenger seat silently enjoying the ride. The cooks are in the trunk, with a speaker playing an audiobook about how difficult things are for the servers.
Pro Tip is not Pro Working.
Pro living wage, pro profit sharing, pro median income for CEOs.. These are pro-working views.
Tip economy is part of the very class war problem we find ourselves in.
Cool, but until the bigger problem is fixed (broken tax law) you are fucking over the little guy to try and get back at the big guy, with a gesture that's little more than a bug bite to the big bosses.
Lemmy discovers Commodity Fetishism
Yeah but the waiters don't have a living wage in the us without tips while the fishermen get paid –
Sorry I just got word that the fishermen are actually just permanently trapped on the ships and do forced labour out somewhere in the Pacific
It's because everyone except the wait staff gets paid a living wage. The waiter probably gets paid $2.75/hour because the shady restaurant owner wants YOU to pay the rest of their employees wage for them.
The problem is not overly entitled wait staff, it's tipping culture in general. Any other job would pay at least normal minimum hourly wages.
Correct, except for saying everyone else is getting a living wage. I bet most of them are not. Still higher than the server.
Every step of that chain is nickel and dimed. Only the public facing employees get to ask for tips.
All of the people in that comic get paid for their labor. The server doesn't.
Everywhere in the world the restaurant pays the server for their labor, in the US they make the customer do it and guilt them of they don’t.
People like this artist are why if I were ever elected President I would mandate 2 years of retail service for the entire population. They simply do not understand the stress of dealing with people in a customer-facing role in a service industry.
There was a study on job stress done a number of years ago now (I wanna say in the 2018-2020 range) by psychologists on determining the most stressful jobs, and much of the top of the list is what you would expect: firefighters, EMTs, non-active duty military, EOD technician, active duty military, etc. But the top 3 on the list, above everything else including jobs that have life or death situations, were all customer service related - baristas, customer support techs, wait staff, that sort of thing.
And the reason for this ranking was simple: jobs like bomb defusal, active duty soldiers, and firefighters are incredibly high stress but with long periods of little to no stress in between. A soldier is only on duty a few months out of the year, and in active combat for a small portion of that time. They have tons of low stress time to allow them to destress and heal from the time they spend fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, your average wait staff is in a medium to high stress environment of having to handle the abusive general public every day of the week, day in and day out. They have very little time to recover from a consistently stressful environment that only mounts higher and higher as the years go on.
As somebody who worked a job for 10 years that could basically be described as all 3 of the jobs in this comic rolled into 1 (I worked at a fish market), if there's one group of people that I will bend over backwards to help have an easy time, it's the kid at the grocery store, the cashier at Walmart, and the waitress at the restaurant. They don't get paid anywhere near enough to deal with the shit that they do.
To me the issue seems to be that they are blaming the server for asking tips and not the restaurant for not providing a liveable wage to their employees.
2 year mandated retail service so people respect the job more isn’t the fix, though it might indirectly cause change, provide a real wage if lawmakers and their kids where subjected to it.
Everyone else in that supply chain gets a living wage, except maybe the chef who shares tips with the waiter. It fucking pisses me off when people bitch about the fact that they're asked to tip an underpaid employee instead of getting angry about the fact that the employee doesn't make as much money as anyone else in the first place.
Where the fuck is the restaurant owner who isn't paying their worker a fair wage? Where the fuck are the politicians who put a loophole in labor law the allow this situation to happen?
The waiter is even being villainized in the last frame, jesus h christ. Fuck this comic and fuck you OP for posting it uncritically. I fucking hate this anti-worker propaganda so fucking much.
Nobody gets a fair wage but at least food service workers in my area get paid the same as everyone else (Seattle $21/h minimum). Tipping is rooted in racist class division and we really should be pushing to end wage exemptions rather than perpetuate a ridiculous sales-commission structure.
IDK how common it is but in the sushi restaurant I worked at the server and the chef split the tip but you also had more than one chef, not that it changes the point of the comic much.
Yes, but the author of this comic turns out to be a real moron. Third comic in the row that is just stupid.
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