"Tipping culture" has definitely gone too far.
What about the pilot and other members at front? Do the tipped flight attendants kick some bucks over to them?
It definitely feels like an abdication of responsibility (and obligations) of the company that those people work for.
Nurses don't get tips but it's very common for them to get thank-you gifts and treats.
And why should they be getting less indirect pay?
As it stands today, if you're tipped and you work a shift where there are fewer customers, you implicitly get paid less (and have more of your tips soaked up by your employer) for exactly the same amount of effort. If you work a graveyard shift for eight hours and see $40 in tips from eight customers, you effectively worked minimum wage with $0 in tips, not minimum wage plus $40. For the people working those jobs, that's multiple meals or tank of gas.
There's no practical reason for having a lower minimum wage for tipped employees, it's literally just an excuse for employers to pay their tipped employees less. If we as a society actually believed that some professions should be compensated based on effort, there would be a different minimum wage for people compensated by commission. But that doesn't exist.
So to answer your question, you're not necessarily "directly compensating" the employee, because a non-trivial percentage of your tip goes towards subsidizing their employer.
Whatever your job is or was, are you not a professional who already gets paid well for your work? You're at my office as a consultant already getting paid a good salary by your company, and I try to flip you a 50, you just take it? Oh right, that's why you laughed at all my jokes. Well good boy. I like that.
Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute. The only people who are ok with that are people who like the feeling of being on the top side of that power dynamic.
I don't recall mentioning anything else. What your basis for making this claim?
> Tipping reduces the tip receiver to a prostitute.
At the end of the day, a prostitute is also a service provider engaged in a fee-for-service transaction. Scrape away the emotion-laden woo-woo here, and I don't see that there's anything much of a substantive argument -- it seems completely proper for a portion of a service provider's compensation to come directly from the party who the service is being provided to, regardless of whether there's some other middleman in the transaction.
You're trying to project your own prejudices onto others here, but I doubt the people who are happy to make higher income via tips than they otherwise would are going to agree with you.
From a European point of view, this is ludicrous. Why don't workers in the USA receive a salary from their employer instead of resorting to charity from their employer's customers ? How is not paying employees even legal ?
They were entirely right but didn’t win, for whatever reason.
[edit] I mean, I don’t know why, but if I had to guess, based on the timeframe, I’d guess the reason was racism.