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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Put a little asterisk after that number, a lot of employees who earn tips can be paid even less.
That's truly inhumane. Even when I was a server - not America - I was paid the same wage as a line cook of similar experience.
And Republicans are arguing to pay disabled people and children less.
I think diisabled people can already get paid less, if they are receivingstate assistance. I don't know how it works, but I had a retarded family member who lived in PA and he made like 1.25 an hour, which is still below minimum wage since this was nearly 2 decades ago. I know he received assistance in various ways, but it just seemed wrong.
You could have phrased it better but this is still true. There are employers who get money from the government who essentially give handicap people busy work and filed trips for a couple bucks per week. There's even "assembly" roles they can get for like $1/assembly (roles like putting screws in bags).
K first part is bad but why are CHILDREN even part of the conversation
Because Republicans are evil.
They don't make less just because they're paid less by their employer. The minimum wage of how much they actually make is the same.
And as a result, servers in the US make a lot more than line cooks of similar experience. That wage gap is a source of frustration for cooks.
That's heavily variable on where you work. High end restaurants with more expensive menu items and generous tippers pay better than the Sunday Service Waffle House crowd.
And different restaurants tip out differently. More egalitarian venues tend to pool tips, so line cooks get a slice of the tip out at the end of the day.
Federal minimum wage law requires that if front of house tips are pooled to be distributed to kitchen staff (who aren't traditionally tipped), then front of house must first be paid at least minimum wage pre-tip. So that kind of restaurant, while becoming more popular, isn't exactly the type of restaurant in the discussion when we talk about servers being paid less than minimum wage before tips.
Sure. All staff must be paid a minimum wage under the federal guidelines. The catch is that tipped income goes to meet that wage obligation, which means they have to get paid to the minimum first under law.
But (a) wage theft in the US is rampant, with tipped workers routinely being underpaid or shorted by non-compliant management. And (b) even under the guidelines, min wage is a pittance. You can't survive on $7.25/hr in a normal 40 hr work week.
So even if employers are compliant (which they're often not), you're talking about people trying to live on $14k/year in a country where apartments rents bottom out at the $6-8k/year range in the slums and even the meagerest grocery bills easily run into $4-5k/year range in the wake of inflation. Nevermind utilities, transport, health care, clothing, etc.
Utterly unsustainable.
I worked in damn near every type of kitchen, from restaurant to banquet hall to school to what have you. None of them tipped out the kitchen because of the laws and guidelines around all of it. And the one that DID tip out the kitchen, they would only schedule up to 32 hours/week or whatever to avoid paying health insurance benefits, and your pay was $3+ dollars less than competing restaurants in the area an hour because "you'll make it up in tips."
And the tips would've been split between all staff, so your share is a lot less than what the servers would get individually. And the entire time you're going to hear or fight with servers who don't think its fair they have to split their tips with the kitchen. I've heard it: "Why should I? They were my tables and I did all the work?!"
I even watched a cook one night welcome a server to come back in the kitchen and do his job while he went out and did hers. When she said she didn't know how to cook, he responded, "Huh... All of us on the line could do your job, right now, but none of you could do ours... And you deserve all the tip money because......." 😂
maybe. maybe not.
I see this mentioned a lot - and it's not technically true I don't think. If tips do not push their pay above the minimum wage per time worked, then they do in fact get paid out at minimum wage. Not that I'm here to defend a ~~$7.75~~ $7.25 minimum wage - that's an obvious problem. But AFAIK, a server who did terrible in tips is still taking ~~$7.75~~ $7.25/hr home at the end of the pay period.
But their employer isn't paying them minimum wage, regardless.
It's kind of a semantics argument I guess. Their employer is ensuring that they are taking home no less than minimum wage - because they are paying them up to minimum wage as necessary.
To properly address this would require fully overhauling our tipping culture and laws around pay for tipped workers, which sounds great to me as a consumer. But if you ask a waiter or bartender, many would MUCH rather leave things the way they are, because they make an absolute killing and taking 100% of pay from their employer would result in a substantial pay cut.
Retirement homes constantly have this issue regarding their wait staff. The servers you want to hire won't work there because they don't get tips. We started our servers at like $16/hr and could still only ever get high school and college kids, or people who were retired or needed a second job part-time.
I was a cook at a restaurant chain at Christmas one year. Waiter and I worked identical shifts, and were walking to our cars at the same time. He mentioned how excited he was that he'd made $300 in just cash tips that day. I told him I worked the same amount of hours and only got about $90 after taxes. I asked if he felt he worked over $200 harder than I did that day, and he dropped the subject.
My point being: wait staff and bartenders make too much from their tips that they don't want them to go away. As someone who was always working on the line and only got 2 tips over the course of a decade-long cooking career... I can't say I blame them.
Alternative fix: make the minimum wage an actual minimum wage regardless of tips. Let the market sort itself out from there.
I don't disagree. But for the sake of playing devils advocate a bit - restaurants already take YEARS to achieve profitability because costs are so high. If you suddenly triple all of your wait staff's salaries, small, local restaurants making good faith efforts to operate ethically would probably be the ones to suffer.
And yet - I've heard that if McDonald's were to pay employees $15/hr, because of economies of scale, it would raise the cost of a burger by mere pennies.
So if your local mom and pop's can't afford to operate now, and all you're left with is Chili's and Olive Garden and McDonald's who priced them out of business with capital investment and economies of scale, mom and pop go away and all we're left with is the corporate garbage. And when the competition is dead, prices will steady climb. Meanwhile, those m&p restaurants all have waiters now making $0/ hour.
I'm not an economist. Obviously. And maybe it wouldn't be so dire. It just feels like "let the market sort itself out" would work great for the CEOs and not anybody else. I haven't seen the market self correct for my benefit in years. But in our failing capitalist society, I think there are about a thousand ways the worker and the consumer end up fucked either way.
Very few small mom and pop shops might need to raise prices, many of them already pay decent wages far above the minimum actually, but corporate restaurants and chains like McDonalds can absolutely afford $15 an hour without raising prices because they already pay above that amount in other places. There is already the assumption that if McDonalds could raise their prices then they would. What they pay their staff isn't a factor in the equation unless they were close to net zero or below, but unlikely because McDonalds makes Billions in Net Revenue annually in the USA alone. If the corporation decided it would be more profitable to close lower traffic operations in small towns then that would be a good thing for local restaurants.
If this sort of idea really hurt the small times more than the corpos wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to stop it from happening using lobbying groups.
So how do restaurants outside the US that do not rely on the patrons paying their staff survive?
They didn't fuck their system in the first place. I'm not sure how we unfuck ours with so much wrong at every step.
You are assuming their employer is on the up and up. If they are not willing to pay them AT LEAST minimum wage, what makes you think they are going to make up the difference?
Yes, I'm assuming they're obeying labor laws of the United States. Businesses operating illegally are kind of outside of the scope of the conversation, don't you think?