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Comment by sharemywin | Hacker News Reader

a lot of states have a lower minimum wage for tipped employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage

These laws should also force any business using them to visibly post the wage they're paying the employees in question. If the argument is we need to pay charity to these employees then people should see it as such. Guilting customers should cause some shame for the business.

Employers have to make up the difference if tips don't get them there though. No one should be making less than min. The issue is that min wage isn't really enough.

"Employers make up to min wage if you don't get tipped enough" is the biggest joke, because if you don't get enough tips by the end of the night a few times, employers will often slowly push you out by only offering you unfavorable shifts, or outright fire you in states with poor labor protections.

>employers will often slowly push you out by only offering you unfavorable shifts, or outright fire you in states with poor labor protections.

In other words; if you're bad at your job, you probably won't have it for very long. Yeah, well no crap.

This is a weird just world view though, because tips are a lagging indicator of job performance more than anything. If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?

I view the policy which "forces" employers to makeup the differences in pay as the same one that permits them to underpay workers. Perhaps the point in net is the exploitation of the working class in restaurants.

One must question why a subset of the food service industry should be treated so differently than any other. Is the McDonalds restaurant worker (who gets no tip) just doing so well that they don't deserve the same consideration from the public as someone working in a ramen shop? Or does that employee face a different commute and living situation? The delineation is strange.

So, to be clear, I don't actually accept your premise to begin with. I was a waiter for years and never saw this sort of thing. I did see poor waiters get crappy shifts, but... well of course they did. Lacking any actual evidence I don't see where this can go.

>If you accept the notion that you get tipped less because you are a poor job performer, what is the point of laws that force employers to make up your wages to minimum wage?

The point would be to... establish a _minimum_ wage, regardless of performance. What about that is confusing?

When I waited in college this sort of thing happened all the time, but that's kinda beside the point. I guess to me it's weird that tips convey a sense of whether someone "deserves" their wage, whereas there's nothing really dictating why a waiter "deserves" their money more than the cashier at a grocery store. Minimum wage jobs are minimum wage jobs, so is there a particular reason for the custom of tipping (beyond the usual "tipping helps a subset of people make more than minimum wage").

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