I’m sometimes surprised about what people find controversial around here. Our articles about abortion and reproductive rights are met with pretty universal agreement. While one of the most controversial things we’ve ever written was about the American tipping system:
If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford To Dine Out
You should read it. But if you don’t want to bother, here are the highlights:
- Our tipping system is whack by design. Employers are allowed to pay servers below minimum wage with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. This means tipping is not, as the word would suggest, a reward for good service. Rather, it is pretty fucking mandatory if you want to qualify as a Decent Human Being.
- So if you don’t tip at all, your server is being criminally underpaid. This isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility. Which means diners should factor the cost of tipping into their budget when dining out since employers are passing off the cost of their payroll to the customer.
- The solution is to automatically fold service charges into the bill, which more and more restaurants and bars are doing. But it’s by no means universal quite yet. So in the meantime your options are to cook at home or tip your server at least 20%.
The number of comments on that article that don’t simply complain about the necessity of tipping, but completely disregard the humanity of servers is staggering. The contempt and disrespect from these trolls is, uh… super gross! Here’s a sample:
Damn. I did not order a side of ableism with this comment. Please take it back.
It’s the day after Labor Day. So I’m spending this article on the dignity of labor: what it is, why it’s deserving of respect and fair compensation, and why disrespecting labor is a massive dick move.
A brief and Bitchified history of labor and compensation
It’s time for History Lessons with the Bitches!
Specialized labor
Bazillions of years ago when we lived in caves as hunter-gatherers and focused on the essential work of domesticating dogs, everyone labored together to feed the community. Labor was straightforward: you hunt or you gather and everybody eats. Including the dogs.
But then someone named Oog realized if she spent all her time practicing how to make the best fucking atlatls this side of the Fertile Crescent, hunters would have a better chance of murdering saber-toothed tigers for dinner. So Oog invented specialized labor (trust me on this, I talked to an archaeologist). In return for her work, the hunters compensated her with that sweet, sweet saber-toothed tiger meat.
Fast forward a few millennia and Oog’s model of specialized labor had become the standard. It was simply more efficient to perfect one skill than many and rely on someone else to fill the gaps in your labor. We had carpenters, weavers, smiths, farmers, and dog groomers. And they all traded the fruits of their labor for the fruits of their pals’ labor. A barter economy!
Labor Tokens and Survival Bucks
Eventually it got unwieldy for Godfrey the Weaver of Eastdowninghamshire to carry a full bolt of linen down to the market every time he wanted to trade with Bartholomew the Butcher of Fartsley Upon Thames (I met a historian once too, so you know this is all accurate). What if, thought Godfrey, we had some kind of physical symbol of our labor? One that we could trade for what other people make? Something small that fits in one’s pocket?
And so currency was invented (also pockets). It was the perfect middleman between our daily work and the means of survival in an economy powered by specialized labor.
For that is all money is: a symbolic representation of our labor. You feed your work into the vending machine of the collective economy and money pops out. You can then use that money to pay for goods and services and dog treats and everybody is happy (especially the dogs).
We have a word for uncompensated labor
Now that I’ve painstakingly laid out the inventions of specialized labor and currency, let’s imagine a world in which labor goes uncompensated.
Oh wait! We don’t have to imagine that! Because it’s happened throughout history, of course. The word for this sort of appalling exploitation is “slavery.”
Time is a finite resource
What Oog and Godfrey and Bartholomew and their dogs discovered is that their time on this planet was limited. They spent most of their time trying to survive. We’ve refined things a bit over the centuries, but the same is still true today. We exchange our finite time for the means of survival—money.
Right now, that looks like modern jobs. We go to work, do some tasks, and all of that labor is converted into money, which we then trade for the means of survival. Whether your job is waiting tables, managing a Fortune 500 company, or walking dogs, the goal is essentially the same: to trade your finite hours for money.
Giving away your limited number of hours without compensation would be a massive waste. Or rather, it would be theft—theft of your most precious and limited resource.
Baseline compensation for work isn’t about how difficult that work is to perform. It’s about the time that work takes to perform. Our time is valuable because it is limited. Therefore, in an ethical system that time must be fairly compensated.
Where the system breaks down
If we don’t guarantee even the most menial of workers a living wage, we’re not a free society, we’ve just changed the mechanics of slavery.”
– David Gerrold
If someone is trading their time for money and they still can’t make ends meet, something has gone horribly wrong.
This goes against the entire principle of currency as Labor Tokens. Oog and her dog did not labor away over aerodynamically superior atlatls so that your waiter could be evicted while working 58 hours a week at three jobs!
And yet this is where we are. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2020, the working poor are those who “spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force (that is, working or looking for work) but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level.” These are people who, despite their labor hours, cannot consistently pay for their own survival.
“Working poor” should be a contradiction in terms. No one who trades their limited time for money should struggle to pay their bills. No matter what form that labor takes.
Contempt for unskilled labor
Let’s go back to the comments on our tipping article.
The general vibe of the trolls is “I could’ve done that myself!”
But here’s the thing: you didn’t.
You didn’t walk into the kitchen and place your order with the chef. Neither did you carry the finished food to your table. And you sure as hell didn’t clean the table off and enter your payment details into the POS. You did not stare at Jeremy Allen White’s limpid blue eyes and murmur “Yes Chef” while struggling to plate a perfectly seared filet mignon. You didn’t do any of this.
But servers do. And they do it all while attending to the needs of five other tables of diners. They use their limited time on this planet to do this work instead of farming their own food and weaving their own clothes and building their own home and all of the other labor involved in survival.
Work is not theoretical
A wealthy acquaintance of mine once told me he never tipped for things that he could do himself. So that means restaurant waitstaff, rideshare drivers, the people who clean his home—none of them receive tips from this guy. This is so cartoonishly bad-mannered that it’s literally a Dwight Shrutism.
What gets me about this attitude is not the entitlement, but the contempt with which bad tippers view service industry workers. They act as if unskilled labor is being performed by subhumans, undeserving of respect and consideration.
Meanwhile, service industry workers are gifting you time back in your schedule—time you did not have to spend laboring at the tasks they perform. It doesn’t matter if you can or even would perform these tasks. You didn’t.
Labor is not theoretical! The reality is that this work is getting done. By a person. For the sole purpose of accruing Survival Bucks.
These unskilled workers often get treated like utter dogshit by their customers. See the recent case of the Chipotle customer who threw a burrito bowl in an employee’s face and was subsequently charged with assault. The judge clearly believed in capital-J Justice, because she sentenced the asshole to two months… of working in fast food service. Want to be a dick to an “unskilled” worker? Here, experience that shit for yourself and see if it fixes your attitude.
Time is the great leveler
Contempt for “unskilled” workers should be replaced by respect for their time.
Time is a wonderfully democratized resource. Because while we all have the same amount of it, the rich are willing to pay a premium to take more of theirs back from survival tasks. This means that they understand just how valuable everyone’s time is.
The hours I spend on work are not hours I want to spend on work. I’d obviously much rather spend those hours on leisure. I’m certain that the same is true for most of my fellow humans.
But we exist within a global society seven billion people strong. And the whole labor-for-compensation-for-survival model is pretty well entrenched in that society. Barring obscene levels of inherited wealth, opting out is not really an option for most of us.
So here we all are, with the same basic resource (time) and working for the same goal (survival). Given what we have in common, it should be much, much easier to empathize with the service industry worker taking your dinner order than the heir to the restaurant chain who has never set foot inside it.
All labor deserves compensation
This article could have been about Universal Basic Income. Or it could’ve been about the unchecked rampaging of late-stage capitalism.
But yesterday was literally Labor Day—the day when we “celebrate the dignity of America’s workers and the labor unions they have built,” according to President Biden. So for once in her life your humble Bitch is choosing not to throw the proverbial molotov cocktail of labor reform. Instead I’m coming with a simple proposal: don’t be a dick about fairly compensating labor.
Yes, the minimum wage needs to be raised. And yes, the system of tipping in America is wildly unethical and impractical. By all means, agitate for change in these areas! In fact, we strongly encourage you to do so! Advocate for your local unions and learn how to support a labor strike!
But right now, today, in our current system, you accomplish nothing by punishing those laboring under an imperfect system. Tip service industry professionals. Pay your employees according to the cost of living in their area, not the minimum wage. Treat supposedly “unskilled” laborers with compassion and respect, not just because their jobs are harder than you think—but because it’s the right thing to do.
All labor deserves compensation. No matter how technical, no matter how difficult, no matter how rote or boring or simple. If the work is done, the worker should be fairly paid.
So don’t be a massive, throbbing, smelly dick about it, ok?
Compensate my labor, baby!
I labored over this article when I could have been trading my finite time for Survival Bucks in another way. So to keep things on theme, you can tip me for this labor with the button below!
I feel like the ppl saying “I don’t tip for xyz bec. I *could* do xyz” never actually have done xyz! Because if they had, they’d be so thrilled at having it done for them, they’d pay specifically for that privilege. At least, that’s the way I feel when someone serves food to me or drives me somewhere or cuts my hair. I don’t have to do it myself, what a treat for me, I’m grateful to pay whoever does it in my stead! But if you never do those things yourself, you have no idea what they’re really worth, so you don’t pay.
Agreed! If they are unwilling to pay someone to cook and serve their food because they *could* do that themselves…maybe they *should* do that themselves. As capitalists love to say: “if you don’t want to pay for the thing, then you don’t get to *have* the thing.”
The article they commented on LITERALLY was titled “If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford To Dine Out.” And these dingoes still didn’t get the memo to stay home and cook for themselves!
Great point. In my experience, people who have worked in the service industry tip the best because they know just how hard the job is.
OMG, that diner’s comment was disgusting. Not everyone can start employment and command top pay. Everyone deserves a start. “You don’t deserve to dine out, you cheap bastard”!
Here here! Can you imagine being that horrible to anyone, let alone someone bringing you food??
For all the folks who do not tip their waitstaff, I sincerely hope karma blesses them with a drink (or anything really) to wear home right in their lap every time they think the person who works hard to ensure them a nice night away from home NOT COOKING AND CLEANING UP AFTER THEMSELVES is not worthy of their respect. I have done that job (to pay for school) and found most customers to be pleasant and reasonable but there are always a few that decide they would rather ruin the night. No wonder Uber Eats drivers steal the food sometimes, they probably can’t afford food because of entitled jerks like the examples you posted.
That would indeed be karmic justice!
I just feel like reducing the job of waitstaff to “just bringing food” is so naive. Sounds like dealing with diners like these deserves HAZARD PAY.
Wow, the comments on that post are horrifying! It is very obvious that anyone calling restaurant work “unskilled” has never worked in a restaurant. If any of those people want to go work a 10-hour August breakfast and lunch shift in a busy cafe in a resort community, where you’re also making cocktails and doing barista work, lemme know how “unskilled” that labor really is.
I wouldn’t wish that shift on anyone! (shudders) It’s such a hard job.
I worked my first and last cater waiter gig last month (it was part of an event I was otherwise volunteering for). Those people deserve ALL the money. And to make it an all-too-real experience, the vendor had troubles with paying in anything remotely resembling a timely manner – no problem for me but a real hardship for the other workers.
I used to fantasize that drivers could use paintball guns to tag terrible drivers. The paint would be color-coded, so you could tell by the color of the splotches if someone is a tailgater, doesn’t signal, runs red lights, etc.
In a similar vein I wish that a neon spotlight would hover over everyone who is a jerk about tipping. Yeah I get annoyed sometimes when tipping for a counter order, but it’s usually a few bucks, tops, and I can afford it.
Man this would be funny.
Blue Man Group used to stop the show and shine a spotlight on people who were late to the performance. I feel like that should happen to people who don’t tip on their way out of the restaurant.
Unskilled, my ass!
Semi-retired attorney here. . .
I was a waitress at a resort many years ago when I was in college. I am of well above average intelligence, and it was DAMN HARD. Remembering all the things people want, who wants what, having your train of thought interrupted by yet another customer’s request, dealing with people who are assholes, drunk, entitled Karens, or all of the above – while putting on one’s pleasant smiling public face – is not something a robot or “monkey” could do. Not to mention the physical stress of being on one’s feet for a long time and balancing/carrying large trays with several people’s orders on them. Anybody who says this is unskilled work is talking out their anal orifice and obviously never attempted to do that work.
I always tip 20 percent; I’m on a budget, so I don’t go out as often as I would if I had more money, but I don’t want to cheat service folks out of their due.
While I would never argue against the moral imperative of tipping, this article is quite extreme in its arguments, and I doubt that many economists would agree with any of it.
Currency is emphatically not a store of labor, it is a store of value. Nobody in our society is compensated for labor, we are compensated for the value we produce.
Imagine you hired a team of movers to move your possessions from your old house to your new house. After 48 hours of churn and effort and ceaseless labor, they proudly tell you that they’re done, but when you investigate, you find that all your possessions are still at your old house. Despite all their labor, they didn’t do the job you hired them for.
Would you pay them for their labor, despite their producing precisely zero value? Most wouldn’t.
I am compensated for the software that I write, not for entertaining my kids, even though both take time.
You can argue that this isn’t a fair economic system, but historically the economies based on theories of labor have had relatively suboptimal results.
I think you’re nitpicking a bit, but to be fair, I was also oversimplifying. Of course things are complicated by time spent not creating value. But in my explanation, it’s assumed that the time spent laboring is creating value.