In TV, I've worked with a lot of restauranteurs/chefs/line service folx. Not doing their jobs, but watching them doing their jobs, listening talk about how they do their jobs, hearing their stories about how they do their jobs.

A stunning number of them suck at doing their jobs.

Most small businesses fail. This is due to the fact that most people who start a business never have before and you don't get a do-over. Generally, people who start small businesses do so in no small part because they don't want anyone telling them what to do. A policy and procedure on sexual harassment is basically letting someone tell you what to do... except it's a faceless bureaucrat who is doing so via canned memos that you're required to post in the breakroom (by the way, you're required to have a breakroom). The businesses that succeed do so by being good at their core mission: ribs, or martinis, or tax prep. They don't succeed by being good at HR.

Restaurants are worse than most because there's a lot of unskilled labor involved. Or, more poignantly, there's a lot of labor where the skill can be cajoling more money out of customers through unctuousness and supplication. Your star chef may have no people skills whatsoever and your manager may be much better at scheduling than they are at conflict resolution and at the scale independent restaurants operate at the likelihood of any blowback from simply shining the problem on is effectively zero.

I do think that moving to an hourly paradigm, rather than a tip paradigm, would improve the situation. For one thing it would improve the stability of employees' lives. For another it would disincentivize putting up with sleazebags because they give you more money. For still another it would reduce the shadiness many restaurant owners employ in hiding tips from employees and make the relationship less adversarial.

But then, I fukk'n hate tipping. How long has Canada had a viable wage for servers? Because if I could say one negative thing about Vancouver, it would be "holy hell East Hastings sure turned into a shithole when heroin came in." If I could say two, the second would be "and restaurant servers there suck an amazing amount." The worst service I've ever experienced has been in Canada.