Former Labor Secretary Found What Work Is Like Now (2022)
jasonstanford.substack.com
jasonstanford.substack.com
He should have perhaps spent more time on the topic of corporate profits.
Don't want to tip, even though it's baked into the wage calculation? That's fine. The author is just pointing out that market forces means that folks aren't going to stay in those jobs.
Then it should be next to the price on the menu:
$x + minimum $y tip.
Whether payroll tax applies to tips depends on the municipality, but income tax always does.
Using tips as a substitute for paying a living wage needs to be eliminated everywhere, but I especially don't blame people for not realizing that a movie theater of all places is playing that game.
As a consumer, I make specific choices. If I am marketed a price, that should be inclusive. The change starts with my choices, since managers clearly are against setting high enough wages.
It's like hospital owners openly saying they know nurses won't strike even if they don't get treated fairly because their patients will die and the nurses, as caregivers, won't let that happen.
The apathy toward a system that not just supports that kind of thing but very actively encourages and rewards it is brutal to watch.
Just advertise the prices with the fees included.
That’s the rub, restaurant owners want to advertise one price and then actually charge a bunch more once they know people are committed. And that’s something that the US is really bad about in general - sales tax is handled similarly poorly.
And a former state labor official of all people should be blaming the employers for not paying a proper wage (and proposing regulation to solve that) rather than the customers for not making uncustomarily large tips to make up for them.
(Also, in most of the world it isn't customary to tip bartenders)
The situation here is it’s a restaurant and bar that shows movies.
I wouldn’t expect to tip on the ticket prices, but it is surprising to expect to not tip full service waiters and bartenders.
I will be willing to wager $2 that the same people at a bar would tip their bartender as is customary in the US. The context mixture of theatre with bar is likely the cause of the anomalous behavior. And the authors point is: if you don’t want to tip your bartender at the theatre, then expect there won’t be a bartender at your theatre as they will work at a bar, where you would tip them.
That seems pretty fair?
Or maybe, just maybe, the venue selling the drinks at substantial markup could pay them properly rather than trying to extend the custom of staff wages being dependent upon the charity of customers to a venue where customers generally don't feel like tipping. You'd think a government official in a labor department of all people would get the idea that employers paying living wages should be the rule rather than the exception.
Tipping customs often vary according to venue, range of products served and how they're served (sometimes in nuanced ways that are baffling to outsiders). Honestly, I have no idea whether it's considered customary to tip at that sort of bar at that sort of venue in that state, but a complaint about making less than a dollar per hour at a supposedly busy event is a data point against.
Which I think you’re agreeing with their point. The employer could fix the situation but instead just barrel ahead oblivious to the reasons their people are quitting. It wasn’t the managers, it wasn’t even the customers even though the customers weren’t awesome. It was the owners.
So instead of losing all of their staff, they should simply pay to retain them and post a "no tipping" policy upon entry.
It really is easy, but too people on HN will contort themselves into knots to avoid having any company have any accountability at all in any decision making.
> On Christmas Day a family bought over $100 worth of tickets and food two days after Christmas.
I don't know how this family received their food, but it almost certainly wasn't at the bar from the bartender. Maybe it was delivered to them inside the theater as another commenter suggests, but it's just as possible that they got the food at the counter.
Further, the photo doesn't give any indication of how much money was spent on tickets vs food, which would be entirely expected to impact the tip calculation. If they bought $95 in tickets and one kid got some popcorn, a $2 tip is downright generous!
My point was if you imagine yourself ordering $100 in food at a full service restaurant with reasonable service, do you imagine yourself not tipping? I think most Americans can’t imagine that. It’s customary.
That said, I still think this movie theater is particularly shady on the tipping spectrum. The article calls out a family's food purchase and a kids' movie night as examples of bad tipping and implicitly criticizes the non-tippers, but it seems likely to me that the people involved had no clue that there was someone in the building relying on their tips that day.
The theater is guilty for blurring the line between tipping- and non-tipping locations, the patrons are just reacting as expected to the lack of clarity.
Overall, I think the business model they have doesn’t work for labor, and they suffer the consequences by being unable to hire. To their point, it’s not about workers being lazy, it’s about the business owner making a work environment that’s untenable but expecting people to be grateful for the opportunity. The tipping was only one issue, amongst a lot of others, but it’s also the one that would have cost the owners nothing to resolve by simply clearing the ambiguity.
To me, I don't think there is any way to change the custom beyond regulation. The incentives just feel too misaligned. The crowd of customers leans towards going to the place with the lower list prices, intentional or not. The restaurants will never collectively decide on their own accord to go against that flow themselves. The servers are never going to collectively force the restaurants to make that decision. Each option requires "everyone just decide to forever on operate this new way which forces no-tipping alignment all together" and that's just never going to realistically happen. Customers aren't going to form a long lasting collective which convinces the servers to press the business nor are they going to form a long lasting collective to boycott businesses directly. Businesses aren't going to care about anything but never optionally baking in higher prices on the menu since it's giving customers away to competition. What each group actually wants as a majority is irrelevant for something as minor as this. The only way it happens is if the majority are for it being regulated as such, which can happen with representatives deciding how the collective of restaurants need to behave.
tl;dr: I tip because not tipping isn't going to result in change, not because the only way to enact change is to make sure a worker is in no way ever affected during the change.
Huh, I wonder how this works in restaurants attended by lots of foreigners. I knew America had a "tipping culture" and that 10-20% was customary, but I didn't know how bad not tipping was until this comment. Many clueless tourists probably know even less than I did.
Likewise I’ve noticed when I travel internationally Americans get a great deal of service and attention because unlike the local population because it’s likely they will tip.
How does that work? For table service you usually tip at the end after you’ve already eaten your food.
This is where state should enforce capitalism by killing those badly behaving businesses.
Spitting in food or adulterating it in any manner is a criminal offence. Losing your job should be the least of your worries.
This attacks the custom of tipping directly: It prevents the management from being able to use tips in their scheme to pay workers less, and absolves the customer of the requirement to hurt the worker if they want to fight against tipping culture.
I find the assumption that everyone uses such apps interesting. For my part, I just tip with cash. No need to bring a third party into any of this.
They pick based on the advertised price because hidden fees and culturally-mandated tips exploit weaknesses in our psychology, not because customers actually like to spend more than they'd planned on.
But my favourite thing: it gives weight back to tips. They mean something again.
HN has posting limitations.
Meanwhile the employees blame the customers, the customers blame the corporation, and the corporation blames the employees.
The corporation is the only one that is laughing all the way to the bank.
That's not what this conversation is about.
This is precisely why junk fees must die.
If you are about to run someone over in your car, you dont just say "well, the speed limit shouldn't be this high anyway.."
I don't think so, no. I don't think there is any ethical obligation to tip at all, and there never has been.
I am under no ethical obligation to be abused by companies using their employees as human shields.
If you don’t like this, don’t go.
Then there's the whole spectrum of space in between. What about order-at-counter but the food is brought to you when it's ready, but you then clean up after yourself? What about a buffet, where you pay at a counter, serve yourself, but someone comes and cleans up your plates?
An alternative heuristic that I've heard is that if you pay in advance than tipping is optional, while if you pay at the end it's required, but that doesn't cover Doordash.
There are clear cut cases where tipping is required, and a whole fuzzy mess in between. And that fuzzy mess gets fuzzier and messier each year as companies intentionally blur the line.
If the tipping is actually mandatory, then build it into the price to begin with. That way, perhaps tipping can go back to being an actual expression of thanks.
Isn't the whole thing about human shields that we don't want to hurt the humans in question?
But the situation here isn't a clear-cut case like a sit-down restaurant where tipping is expected. If I were handed a receipt like the one in the article for my family's tickets and food, it wouldn't occur to me for a second that the barkeep in the room next door was relying on me tipping on this popcorn purchase in order to make a decent wage on this kids movie night.
But, in general, this shouldn't even be the point. You should always assume that leaving a tip for someone in a position to receive it is a worthwhile gesture that means a significant amount!
I don't even know how this is so contentious to people honestly. Why make such a point about not doing something nice and relatively small? Your gonna spend $15 bucks on an IPA anyway, why not just help someone out too? Are you worried the bartender is going to get paid too much?
Tipping has become contentious lately because it's been asserting itself as an opt-out part of every Square checkout flow, even in situations where we never used to tip like fast casual order-at-the-counter. In the era of Uber we're also frequently asked to pick a tip before we even receive the service, which feels more like extortion than "something nice". Tipping is becoming more and more contentious because tipping is changing, and the version you describe is quickly becoming the minority case.
Many bartenders and servers, especially in high end restaurants would actively be against this policy. Mostly because these folks can earn $300-500 a night, and moving to some low wage salary would never compete with this.
top 10% of restaurants are making TONS of cash and the servers are raking it in, sure, but even working in Loudoun Co. VA -- the overall richest county in America, btw -- my salary was easily less than half of what I pulled as a network engineer.
the single mother of 2 working in Applebee's in shit-tier Indiana is struggling because of tips -- they need to go. restaurants in Europe, or Asia, or the Middle East didn't stop existing without tips.
That's reality in large swaths of the US. One less work opportunity available now...
One of the real world problem that gets run into is, even for a large portion of people that want this, when one restaurant list $50 prices and expects $10 in tip and the other charges $60 and expects no tip people still go to the one listing $50 more often.
The same is true for stores listing prices including taxes. It simply won't be the most common method in the US unless it's a regulated requirement for every store to do. There is no way every store is just going to opt into it all at once when they know not opting into it will get them more customers than the ones that do. This doesn't mean people prefer needing to calculate tax every time they look at a price it just means it's not a naturally correcting set of incentives.
The company socialising their wages out to their customers via tips is fucking absurd.
I dont know so many people make those assumptions. If there is a more profitable buisness, why isnt it there already?
We're not discussing minimum wage here. If we were I'd point out that minimum wage should at a minimum be the amount where letting the store remain vacant is equally preferable. However to ensure alignment I consider it better to put it higher to the point where people earning minimum wage aren't a burden on society (I mean a store with as much value to society as a vacant one doesn't really deserve to exist, you're just shifting the problem there, don't ever let industry do that for you).
It was more of an addendum on the types of business that shouldnt exist, and business turnover in general. I agree that if a business cant make enough to attract talent, it makes sense that that it should fail (all other factors neglected).
I for one, do not see paying someone close to minimum wage in return for 40hr/wk of their time as 'supporting' workers. You want to really support workers? Pay them appropriately and provide them a good workplace.
The accounting sleight of hand where they seem to pay less for the food and drink but actually don't because they must add a tip doesn't change how much income is going into the establishment.
We also have no shortage of bars, tipping is entirely optional and often viewed as an unwelcome American import.
I reckon there is a reason carnivals no longer thrive with the advent of public parks. Perhaps similar capitalistic creative destruction would occur for dive bars if the incentives were changed.
If customers are willing to pay the price + tip to have a equivalent $15/hr salary, they should be willing to do so with just the price, e.g. $5 beers vs $4 beers +$1 tip.
Im sure there are some cultural issues around changing the norm in the US, but it works out mathematically, and there is evidence from all around the world where tipping is not the norm.
Note: this doesn’t change the fact that minimum wage is a pittance.
There is no government involvement in tipping, it is a social custom. And I don’t think the government can or should do anything about it.
As long as there are separate laws for tipped vs non tipped employees, the government is involved in tipping.
Also, note
> Since tipping is expected even in the states with no separate tipped minimum wages,
And if you believe that actually happens I’ve got a bridge in London to sell you.
Every person I’ve ever met who has ever lived on tips has been hosed on this. Employers will just adjust your hours to make the math work out rather than paying you more money. There’s a reason wage theft is a $50 billion dollar a year grift (though that’s not limited to just tipped employees).
Not tipping is effectively using those same market forces to fix the disaster that tipping has become. If folks aren't going to stay in jobs because they don't make enough money from tips, then that will pressure employers to pay people better.
When taken to the logical end, this is true… but who ends up getting hurt the most during the transition? The workers you ultimately want to help. I can’t see that as a good alternative.
Fun fact: that's the *business'* problem. As a customer, if you don't pay your staff, which means your business has shitty service, I'm just not going to come back.
Pay your staff a living fucking wage.
(That doesn't make your point about corporate profits wrong.)
The 1000 people whose $20 he's handling, many of which he likely won't see again for months, or the 1 boss whose $20,000 he's handling daily and sees daily.
I think it would be easier to reason with one consistent boss than 1000 new strangers daily... but the boss punts it up to "corporate" and they say no.
Instead of pleading with the public to tip more, everyone should just leave. See how "corporate" enjoys paying rent and movie screening fees on a theatre that brings in $0 due to having no staff. Either they shut it down, which is fine, none of the workers were happy there anyway, or they start paying a decent wage, allowing breaks, allowing meal breaks, and allowing vacation like any reasonably humane job.
The point you're making is essentially correct (in terms of where the actual wealth and power is), but he still has no recourse against that power.
Put another way: we don't have any reason to believe that the author is abstractly "pro" tipping, only that he (shrewdly, like most people) recognizes tipping as a local optima that he has no real control over as a service worker.
Tipping is pernicious precisely because it doesn't have a real disincentive in a culture that's already normalized it. The only real solution is unilateral legislation, without waiting for the culture to change.
The day unilateral legislation gets enacted will be the day restaurants replace most of the wait staff with ordering kiosks and automated drink dispensers.
Waiting on government to fix your problems is a fool's errand.
Tipping is a price discrimination scheme that directly benefits the workers. That's a lot of value that can be captured, and any other system that a restaurant could use to extract that value would end up benefiting the owners far more.
In that context, I like tipping. I tip well, which gets me better service at places I go often.
I can see why the doordash tipping fiasco was so dire.
I do agree a movie theater is an unusual place to complain about tips, and even though distributing them via prepaid card is complete scumfuckery, it's not the central problem.
Actually, this kind of relates to the example in the article -- spending $100+ on tickets and food/drinks and only tipping $2. If the drinks only made up, say $20 of that, then a $2 tip is not unreasonable. That works out to 10% tip, which I think is acceptable for the amount of service provided.
The point of the article is to engender empathy for the worker's situation, not necessarily to diagnose or solve the problem. But you might as well go back to "Why do we have this stupid system in the US?" and the answer is Emancipation. https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...
Just raise your prices 18%. If you're terribly concerned that people are going to balk at the raised prices, you can put a little explanation in your menu: "You may have noticed our higher prices since the last time you visited. We have raised our prices and eliminated our service fee. Now the price you see on the menu is the price you pay, no tips or additional fees!"
>Meh I hate tipping culture as much as the next person but you really can’t run, for instance a dive bar, and pay the bartender $15 an hour. The foot traffic doesn’t bring in nearly enough most of the time.
So I'm reading this as essentially observing that certain work roles are vastly more dynamic then others. If someone is, as the article describes, working flat out on their feet for weeks straight 8+ hours, maybe that should be $40/hour or more, many multiples of minimum wage. Conversely if it's an absolute dead period where mostly people are just sitting around (and free, and perhaps even should be encouraged, to do other enjoyable/productive stuff on their phones/tablets/computers), and the business is effectively paying for warm bodies to be there just in case, minimum wage would be fine. Tipping kind of, in a hacky way, could sort of capture this, where ideally if business is booming people get paid more (potentially lots more) and if not the wage automatically decreases. However, for all the excellent reasons everyone has pointed out in this thread and others, tipping is a pretty poor way to do it prone to abuse and failures. But a completely flat wage might not reflect the work well enough either in practice.
However I think we have a better model for this: sales commissions (be it direct, real estate or the like). There pay is also tied directly to the flow of money, but while not perfect it's much more empowering. The workers are agents. What if instead of tips the law mandated that businesses could opt into a model where yes they can pay a somewhat lower basic wage, but then 25% of all sales themselves went to the workers. Nothing for customers to think about, it's built into the price, but pay also then gets tied very closely to output and revenue. Business employment costs would naturally rise and fall with the revenue flow.
There'd still be lots of work for this, America's very broken health model ties in, other complaints as well. But I think that "certain industries would benefit from formalized protected dynamic pay while others are best with static pay" might have something to it, if more fair and empowering methods can be found. Though I'm no expert so there may be holes here!
The last movie where theatres made a profit from the ticket sales was The Full Monty.
https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/new-mexico/2021/...
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/former-new...
It sounds to me like he got fired due to scandal but they agreed to make it a "no comment" sort of thing instead. It looks like he is out of politics now, which explains why he is cryptically starting over his career as a bartender. Well, anyway, I hope he finds a better job.
At the very least, knowing how politicians are and how this man writes, there surely must have been a disconnect between him and many of his peers.
I would leave that job too.
I did appreciate the author mentioning how tired they are after moving for 6.5 hours straight. I worked 3 years in the service industry as a food runner, I still remember my busiest shift being a 5 hour lunch on Memorial Day when we had 3/5 runners not show up. Easily the most chaotic (and profitable) shift I've ever worked. I did ~35k steps in the 6 hours I was working, while carrying comically large food trays around half the time. But, I almost made more money/hr than I currently do as a senior software engineer in the Bay Area, lol.
Society by and large does not believe this. If you dig into it a little bit, asking why fast-food workers and the people that serve them their starbucks shouldn't make more money, the answer always boils down to "I need people that serve me to be socioeconomically inferior to me"
Do you actually think people think this way? I’ve never met anyone who thinks like that.
If you ask them why they shouldn't make more, they'll typically say something like "it's not meant to be a career" or some nonsense about inflation. Yet, society still needs people to pour coffee or serve fast food, so by arguing against a living wage in this manner you are actually arguing that people with menial service jobs should be poor by merit of the type of work they do. Granted that isn't a perfect 1:1 with what I said, but the attitude is definitely there. Why else would someone be so vehemently against a person making a living wage?
In reality, (I assume that) the people who disagree with you don't have malice for poor people, but are seeing different levels of the economic stack. I would bet (I'll put money down) that they'd argue a mix of labor supply/demand and regulatory arguments, and that they're NOT just hoping to put down those who are economically less well-off.
It's important to actually understand your counterparties if you actually want to improve things.
EDIT give this a go https://depolarizinggpt.org/
People not in the luxury class respond to prices, full stop. This is a policy (tipping allowed to be performed) that has gained pseudomoral status.
The reason fast food workers don't earn more money is because there is a pool of workers who are willing to accept the current wages, because they don't have a better alternative. It has nothing to do with "deserve", in either direction.
The absolute floor for wages should at least meet a person's non-discretionary expenses plus a bit of discretionary spending if they're working close to full time. If it doesn't meet that minimum level, then the employee is unable to work that job. They simply can't.
By moving some of their non-discretionary spending to welfare, that means the employer can offer a lower wage.
We are effectively subsidizing all the businesses that utilize entry-level/"unskilled" labor. Walmart employs people whose sole job is to help walmart workers apply for welfare benefits, and as a result, can pay those people less.
Realize that state and federal agencies spend time developing pamphlets advising welfare recipients how to make the absolute most out of the maximum of roughly eight dollars a day SNAP provides in benefits per person. It's crazy that we're telling welfare recipients how to make the most of eight dollars a day for food, while giving tax writeoffs for business jets.
You are over-simplifying. That isn’t how it plays out in reality. People will accept a non-livable wage under many circumstances.
Here’s a few:
* working extra hours at two different minimum wage jobs
* living costs subsidized in some way, e.g. living with friends or family
* college student or high-school student who doesn’t yet have to pay for all of their expenses
* homeless or partially homeless
* relying on savings to cover the gap
* retired person who doesn’t need to earn enough to cover all of their expenses
And so on…
If the cheapest housing in your area requires you to work more than 40 hours a week at a given wage to cover rent, cheapest-possible food, least-possible utilities, and whatever the lowest cost option to commute to/from work is, the wage is too low. Period.
It doesn't matter that people manage to not die making less than whatever the livable wage is, because the point is that paying someone less than that wage is unethical. If someone punches me in the face, the things I do to mitigate the damage don't somehow also mitigate the wrongness of punching me in the first place.
For what it's worth, I wasn't arguing against livable wages. I simply wanted to point out the error in the parent comment's argument.
I think most people actually believe in supply and demand, and that it has nothing to do with effort.
Most people intuitively understand that if someone is not easily replaceable, they have more leverage. If there is a line of replacements out the door, they have little leverage.
There often is not a line of replacements out the door, yet, despite this, wages are still too low. Entire industries have started to die because of this - like for instance certain north eastern crab fisheries relied on cheap migrant labor that dried up, couldn't find anyone to do it, even though technically "anyone" could do the job. Why haven't workers capitalized on this "leverage" you speak of to get higher wages? Are they just too dumb/lazy?
Thats an example of workers having leverage. The workers did get a higher wage, just not on a crab boat.
If you want to stereotype workers, they are smart and lazy. nobody wants to work longer and harder to make less, when they could work less and make more.
To counter your question, why do you think the boat owners went out of business? Were the owners just to stupid or stubborn to pay more? That they would rather lose their investment, and often their own livelihood, rather than pay workers more?
It’s a complete farce at best for people to assume this is pure capitalism working as intended for these labor markets to exist at all. it’s either backed by the state or by really nasty external forces that give segments of people very few other options. You can employ people and pay them enough to survive and still make a profit, yet there are weird segments of the internet that insist some types of work must be done on the backs of essentially slave labor. if that’s truly the case it should change.
North eastern crab fisheries are likely not profitable enough (due to market rate for their products, or whatever it is), so they will likely fold/go out of business instead (unless automation can save/increase the productivity per worker, and then they can stay in business but with fewer workers - who will be better remunerated).
By generalizing the counter-argument and making a mockery of it, you have made a disservice to your own argument, because now I can reply with another generalized absurdity like "Oh, you just believe everyone should be paid the same, regardless of how intellectually or physically challenging the job is".
Thus, no progress is made to resolve the actual problem.
Don't do this if you are arguing in good faith.
Most low paying jobs have the highest amount of effort. Currently, working in fast food is a much more demanding job that requires more effort than being a mechanical engineer, surveyor, or project manager. And yet those three will make four times what the fast food worker makes because their jobs are perceived as having more value to society, their education much more complex and thus more costly, and the positions they fill being very few and far between. People of all economic ranks think that those three perform more effort in their positions than the fast food worker and thus they are more worthy of the increased wages, when in reality they did more preparation beforehand (college, apprenticeships, working shit jobs like fast food) so that their positions require less effort now. Note that this has nothing to do with the real or perceived impact of their actual jobs. In contrast the fast food worker cannot frontload the effort in preparation of a better position later, because the demanding but menial work is the better position compared to being homeless or on social welfare programs. This is one of the reasons why rates of burnout, depression, and anxiety are so high in those that work services and retail compared to other industries.
> Calvin taught that all men must work, even the rich, because to work was the will of God. It was the duty of men to serve as God's instruments here on earth, to reshape the world in the fashion of the Kingdom of God, and to become a part of the continuing process of His creation (Braude, 1975). Men were not to lust after wealth, possessions, or easy living, but were to reinvest the profits of their labor into financing further ventures. Earnings were thus to be reinvested over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time (Lipset, 1990). Using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God's will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor (Lipset, 1990).
> Selection of an occupation and pursuing it to achieve the greatest profit possible was considered by Calvinists to be a religious duty. Not only condoning, but encouraging the pursuit of unlimited profit was a radical departure from the Christian beliefs of the middle ages. In addition, unlike Luther, Calvin considered it appropriate to seek an occupation which would provide the greatest earnings possible. If that meant abandoning the family trade or profession, the change was not only allowed, but it was considered to be one's religious duty (Tilgher, 1930).
> The benefit situation is no better. Workers get to see free movies when theaters aren’t busy, and get half off of meals purchased while at work. But that doesn’t help when you need to see a doctor or get a prescription (Thank you Obama for your Care).
Wasn't the cornerstone of the Obama plan a mandated health insurance by employers, but it was gutted by the next opposition congress?
It's always funny when I'm acutely reminded how disconnected well-to-do people can be.
Blue collar work deserves a living wage. Austin, at least in the area he works in, has an average of 110,000 USD/y, yet the workers can barely survive living with roommates 40 minutes away. That's 80 minutes of your life just driving in addition to menial income - average that out and it's even worse.
Texas is embarrassingly low in its minimum wage laws. Why is it acceptable for a base wage of 2.13 USD/h for waiters when considering the cost of living has increased across the board in every way? Where does the disconnect lie here? Why is it acceptable that minimum wage is stil 7.35 USD/h, which decides how much the "higher" paying blue collar jobs pay in comparison?
You are exhibiting what I would consider an elitist mentality.
It has been a long time since the minimum wage decided anything, even in Texas. And in states that have not updated their minimum wage, it is because the voters are not voting for leaders that will raise the minimum wage. And those same voters are sending Senators and Representatives to the federal Congress, where again, they do not raise the minimum wage.
You are eggregiously conflating thw two.
Employers’ or employees’ arguments are irrelevant, the only thing that matters is how many buyers there are relative to sellers (or a higher minimum wage).
I claimed that the federal minimum wage is too low to have an effect on wages, since the supply and demand curves for labor require employers to pay more than minimum wage to find anyone.
If the market judges a particular level of software engineering to be worth say, $300/hour, and flipping a burger to be worth $20/hour, then that ratio will persist no matter what you do to the minimum wage.
You could pay the burger flipper $1m/hour, and then inflation will kick in mightily, and the engineer ends up at $15m/hour, and the burger flipper is back to feeling poor again.
The best thing is real economic growth - fiddling with the numbers does nothing
This analysis is missing huge path dependence and varying time lags (i.e. the Cantillon effect). If the minimum wage doubles over night, sure engineer salaries will rise, but with a large lag, since wages tend to be sticky. So the ratio would fall from 15:1 to 7.5:1 overnight, and then slowly recover (over the course of years, likely).
And that's assuming that the previous [lower] wage was not artificially suppressed via monopoly / monopsony power or something (which is definitely possible within a single industry)
What I'm trying to get at though is that minimum wages won't help poor people - it only helps them feel supported. The only real help is to improve their power in the market.
“Wages will catch up eventually” isn’t a good argument that it doesn’t help people in the meantime.
The best things that have happened to poor people throughout history have been things that increased their power in the market, and the general improvements brought on by technology.
It sadly a reality that those making 2.13/h have to deal with, whether from s** pay by employers, by s** tippers, or those a**holes who defend the latter.
I desperately want every last poor person on the planet to have access to the virtuous cycle of wealth creation and increasing resources. But the only way to help the poor is to engineer a situation where their market power rises. This takes many forms - encouraging more entrepreneurship (entrepreneurs hire people), better capitalization for companies (more money for hiring), steady & reliable market regulations (hiring is less risky), finding ways to increase output per worker (worker is more valuable), and many other hard things.
More market power for poor people means when there's a shit employer, you go to the next one, or when you need a raise, you can demand one, and so on. Supply and demand always wins. Everything else is a distraction. Minimum wage is the rent control of the labor market.
What's funny is he is reflecting on this _after_ his prior gig was running a state labor department.
This is the kind of thing that you should have _already reflected on_ if you are running a state labor department.
The fact that you can _run a state labor department_, and not yet reflected on the low wages v. amount of worked involved to make those wages shows exactly "how disconnected well-to-do people can be".
It's good that he learned the lesson, but it's a damn shame that he learned it after he was in a position to actually do something useful with that knowledge.
Maybe a $300 wage theft complaint doesn't sound like that big a deal to a labor secretary making $196,000. But it could be an absolutely ruinous for some workers, and represent a huge amount of work to make up.
This place has wait service, which is kind of a desperate way to avoid the aforementioned problem. Movie theaters everywhere are closing because the economics suck; people prefer to watch movies at home, now that viewing quality is excellent and the movies all come to streaming after a couple months, and the audience ruins the experience for everyone else anyway.
A better example would be a regular sit-down restaurant, which is sometimes a decent business (although most of them fail anyway). It's also easier to analyze profit & loss.
The solution to #1 is obvious but expensive. The solution to #2 is to hire more people, which is obviously difficult, but raising wages to solve #1 would probably help here too (I'm guessing they don't even want paid time off, just time off, so there's probably some additional expense involving more people but not strictly wages).
#3 seems a bit trickier. Corporate home office can't do a lot about the public being jerks. The only thing I can think of is empowering staff to kick people out for bad behavior, but that realistically that means hiring security staff or calling the cops a lot.
Of course I'm just speculating, I don't see any of this changing anytime soon. Clearly there are still plenty of customers at this theater, which is what the company cares about most. Until a staff shortage starts hurting profits nothing changes.
The Lords of the land that are large business owners and corporations have had an economic shift, where the laborers have a tiny edge compared to the recent past in the form of less laborers and more wage competition, and they're not even organized in the US! The fact that this alone can disrupt the ecosystem of capital so drastically that a labor secretary became a bartender and the largest unionized workplaces have to give record concessions to the labor unions speaks to this systems glaring flaws.
Most people believe that the cure for this is to require every person in America to have to work a customer-facing retail position by the time they're 20.
Oprah gave us the "talk to the manager" as some sort of hack to get what you want. Instead, those customers should be fired.
I was waiting to cringe at the end when the suggestion was a minimum wage or union solution and pleasantly surprised that was not the conclusion.
If it's just someone selling snacks behind a counter, then I'd say no.
The cashier pours the soda into a cup from the fountain machine.
The bartender pours the beer into a plastic pint from a tap.
Why is the bartender deserving of a tip in this scenario?
Tipping is both economic and customary in nature; you'll find that most people agree that the economics that encourage it are dumb, but that the dumbness of those economics doesn't make changing customs easy.
I don't pay to enter restaurants either.
You can definitely go to this movie theater and not buy any food and not tip anyone. The gimmick is that you can order from your seat and the food you want is brought to you during the movie. After the movie, you get a receipt to sign and add a tip to like at any restaurant. I find it completely normal to tip 20% in this situation. (Your ticket was bought prior to this receipt being made, so you aren't tipping on the ticket price.) As you read the menu, you add 20% to the listed prices, and just pay it. It's a weird convention that makes paying for things complicated (math to do, forms to fill out), but it's simply how paying for things at a restaurant is done in the US.
Basically, this place is no different than any other sit-down restaurant except they happen to arrange the tables in a theater and show a movie. You're expected to tip. When you don't, it's a big "fuck you" to the people making your food and drinks and carrying them to you. The author of this article is mad because many people over the course of his career told him "fuck you". I would be mad too.
The problem is this ends up as a race to the bottom, and even the good employers end up paying poorly because 'market rates'. Good working conditions need to be enforced in law, not by market forces.
a) not payed
b) tips are counted in ??
Edit: @fishtacos, haha.. now I can't delete it because you replied (;
https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...
Until then, it's a revolving door, and vested interests target to make customers and wait staff angry at each other.
However, given the spurious type of work this involves, employers have the advantage, so the employees have no recourse but to blame any one they can, including bad tippers.
The tipping culture in the US is disgusting by modern standards of society, but there is no mechanism to unionize wait staff, or kitchen staff, dishwashers etc. included.
There is, however, a "union" of restaurant owners who lobbies against improving minimum wage and working conditions for restaurant workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Restaurant_Associatio...
Fucking lol.
> Crap like this is so demoralizing
Yes, but not because people don't tip.
> because workers need the money to live
Yet the capitalist who don't want to pay a living level wage is totally not the reason workers need tips.
This is IMO bad for everyone's happiness. Servers get upset with customers for not tipping enough and customers get to feel pressure and anxiety over tipping.
Compare that to a world where the employer has to actually pay their employees their full wage (like literally every other industry), and now you have predictable wages and less friction throughout the dining experience.
I waited tables at semi-high-end restaurants. Worked doubles opening and closing from 10a to 12p... averaged 11/h on the busiest nights after carrying trays upon heavy trays for what felt like hours on end. I KNOW what I'm talking about from personal experience. I didn't mind the work, shift-leader, blah blah blah. I had colleagues walking away with 15 bucks TOTAL after a 5 hour shift, but it was averaged out to at least 7.35/h bi-weekly, so you can imagine the end result.
It's not sustainable. It's denigrating.
This world has existed on the west coast of the US for a long time, and tip expectations have still marched upwards.
This is not what we're talking about at all. Tipping is not simply a social phenomenon when other people's living circumstances depend on it. It becomes an economic necessity when (as the RTFA mentioned, if you'd read it) it becomes required to make a living wage.
Its axiomatic: people want to pay as little as possible. But there's a certain kind of consumer, who goes out of their way to flaunt that while they could pay more, they're not going to. And its not because the extra $10 for a reasonable tip would break them. Its not because they fundamentally disagree with the concept of tipping (although that may well be the case in addition). Its because the person "tipping" believes that no adult should be working at a movie theater, and if they wanted to make real money, they'd get a real fucking job, and no, I'm not taking resumes, why would I want to hire somebody who could only get a job pouring beers at a movie theater?!
Its really hard to overstate the antipathy that service sector employees experience on a regular basis, and how far out of their way certain customers will go to make sure that those employees know that those certain customers hold them in utter contempt.
But, as my old minister used to say, we can have all the morals we can afford. Not going to tell anybody else how to do it.
You know the difference between a staff abused by customers and who are paid below the living level wage and a staff abused by customers and who are paid higher than the living level wage?
The latter can actually live on their wage and don't need tips to sustain themselves. Now tell me, do the abusive customers sets the wage or the owner of the business?
Certainly, the lions' share of the blame lands on the business owners who won't pay a livable wage. But some of it falls on the kind of consumer who ship at Walmart because it's cheap, but also nods in agreement when restaurants call out a "cost-of-living surcharge" to the bill.
It's EITHER part of the food price, or it is not. Surcharges like that are still part of the price of food/service and that has never changed. What has changed is making people feel guilty because they are a nuisance to the restaurant or whatever s**hole establishment or imbecilic manager/corporate PR idiot decided it made them look better than paying employees crap wages and making consumers feel guilty into enforced "tipping" to make up for it. It's the same for parties of 8 or more policy in many restaurants that require mandatory tipping fees. It's all terrible, all unacceptable. I'll agree that it's part of how restaurants are trying to survive, but it ought to be illegal. If I want to eat somewhere with a group of people or just myself, a cost of living surcharge is part of the meal, but not included in the menu price. That's illegal, or at least ought to be.
Not sure what point you are making besides mine.
I've been cussed at for charging 5 cents for a bag when the city I worked in mandated such fees ("Well, I'm from the next town over, where bags are still free, you shouldn't charge me for that" "You're shopping here now" "That fee is bullshit, get your manager NOW" "OK")
The point is that if you work in the service sector, you rapidly realize that customers have a choice about whether or not to patronize businesses with transparently shitty policies. That those businesses stay in business tells you something about the ethics of the people who give them their business. And how those customers treat the employees tells you the rest. The point, as I've made a couple of times now, is that the customers of shitty businesses share some of the blame for their shitty, abusive business practices.
And yet the employees' burden lands on their employers?
What a silly argument... it lands wherever it should, whether they feel it's customers not tipping well or employers not paying well. None of it is their care. The care is to put a roof over one's head. The details are irrelevant in any situation.
ZIRP has been disastrous for everyone except leveraged asset owners (i.e., the wealthy). Assets inflated in price, rents rose commensurately, and we all pretended things were OK because of ZIRP and "fixed" it with further leverage to maintain affordability.
The minimum wage should be set based on determining the rate a sound minded well informed advocate could negotiate for the work. That is preventing exploitation. It should not be used to try to set a living wage, because as we have seen, this just leads to the COL increasing for everyone... Leading to a greater concentration of wealth as the average person now has less ability to save.
We truly live in the wildest timeline.
This feels disingenuous. McCamley ran the department responsible for overseeing unemployment claims, and it was death threats related to those unemployment claims that prompted him to leave town. I'd be genuinely curious to see if you have something that ties this to COVID specifically.
>... tries to cash in on that sweet, sweet, substack blogging-money
Kinda hard to do that when you're essentially the guest commentator on someone else's Substack, though, no?
>We truly live in the wildest timeline.
Yeah, timelines where people flippantly throw out factually incorrect hot takes are pretty wild.