Want to end tipping? Change the law

[Robin Garr]

A good opinion piece from the New York Times, emphasizing that we can't effectively change the tipping culture unless we change the laws that allow employers to pay sub-minimum wages in tipped professions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opini ... id=5381100

Change the law to raise the minimum wages for tipped employees won't help and may even hurt the overall situation for those workers. I'm sure many restaurants will feel that with the raised minimum wage for these employees they should stop allowing or promoting tipping of their employees. While that sounds good, is it really in the long term? These employees will now have a fixed and quite probably lower average hourly income than they do now. That article cited a number of $9.38/hr as the average wage of tipped employees. This seems excessively low except for tipped employees in some of the smallest and cheapest restaurants. Most employees in better restaurants make a large much higher hourly wage than this when they are working. The problem is they don't work 40 hour weeks in most cases, or at least 40 hour weeks of time in high tipping hours. I higher minimum wage will obviously pay them more in the off hours but they weren't considerably less in the busy hours. Will it equal out in the long run? Only time will tell but I'm betting it won't and in most cases the only person who will come out ahead will be the restaurant owners except for those that really care about the employees and those are already doing something about the problems that exist

The bill will be funded by Ziosk.

Here's a take from the Guardian UK that probably sums up the view of most of the planet:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/15/american-tipping-debate-head-to-head

Here's a take from the Guardian UK that probably sums up the view of most of the planet:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/15/american-tipping-debate-head-to-head

That's a good article, thanks for posting it.