There are laws in place for service workers related to minimum wage. The employers have to make up the difference if tips don’t meet the rate for hours worked. It seems to me that’s not sufficient for the times.

Hypothetically, if everyone were to stop tipping in the U.S. would things be better or worse for workers? Would employers start paying workers more?

  • @hperrin
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    910 months ago

    That’s a very simplistic view. Assuming that restaurants wouldn’t raise their prices to match the average people were paying before and pay their servers what they were being paid.

    The difference in this scenario is that everyone would be paying the same price for the same meal and servers wouldn’t have to struggle through off days.

    But yeah, definitely all restaurants would go out of business and it would be anarchy. You have a really shit view of minimum wage workers too. Almost every minimum wage worker I’ve worked with has been professional. If they’re not, they get fired. You know who hasn’t though? The millionaires who can afford to treat people like shit cause they won’t get canned.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      -110 months ago

      What do I know, I only worked in the industry for a decade. My views are probably oversimplified because I only based them on personal experience with hundreds of coworkers. All the minimum effort coworkers I had to deal with must have a been crazy flukes, that’s very reassuring.

      You’re probably right, unanimous industry-wide wage increases would happen flawlessly and there would be no consequences whatsoever. Change implementation at that scale is simple and easy, restaurant margins are cushy enough to smoothly handle that kind of transition, and restaurant owners would obviously navigate the voluntary wage increase without a hitch.