I live in a state where servers make the same "minimum wage" as everyone else, only servers can tack their tips on to the total. Because servers get as much as everyone else cooks make significantly less than they did in places where servers made $2.15. Basically cooks starve so servers can take home a "minimum wage" of twenty or more dollars an hour. The New York Times knows next to nothing about the industry but they lead the way in pushing reforms. In their "news" pieces which are really just opinion pieces mostly dedicated to the elimination of tipping they almost only interview owners. This is a rare instance of a NYT article about my industry that doesn't only serve the owners of capital, but it's just as ignorant as any of their other work dealing with the industry. I don't include their writing about non-tipped food service workers my analysis of their pandering to capital, I've never worked fast food and have no idea weather their coverage of wages in that industry holds any water.
When our shift would end and we would go to the POS machine to enter in our earnings for the night, NOBODY EVER entered in the proper amount. If you made $80 in tips for the evening you declared $30. This way your taxable income was way lower and you actually received a paycheck. Servers rarely accurately report their earnings, either through willful gaming of the system or ignorance. -The system is a mess.
How did this play out when you were in restaurant management? Was minimum wage ever a factor in hiring? Was it ever a concern that employees could game the system to extract salary from the restaurant that was not legally obligated?NOBODY EVER entered in the proper amount
Probably I would do the same thing, but how awful to have to choose between honesty and salary.
I think I was 26 years old at the time, at least when I was managing the restaurant and I didn't know the first thing about our legal obligations. My job as far as I could tell was to make sure the restaurant and it's guessed were well served. The finer details… That was for the owners. Minimum-wage was never a concern when hiring at our restaurant because it was a sought-after place to work. People could earn more money as servers there than most people their age earned at jobs with hourly wages.
Tipping is a mess and this point has already been made. Yes, of course that is the logical conclusion. Why is it a question? Minimum wage has positive and negative effects. I have argued that the negative effects may outweigh the positive, but they are harder to see. More importantly, the negative effects hurt vulnerable aspiring workers, and the benefits accrue to the slightly-better-off employees who have skills enabling them to earn a higher salary.there are those who would argue that raising this pathetic excuse for payment would increase unemployment, raise the price of restaurant food and hurt the restaurant industry (by logical extension, we should be lowering this wage, perhaps all the way to zero?)
San Francisco’s $10.74 minimum wage does not appear to have slowed restaurant growth there.
Fine, but "restaurant growth" does not equal "improved conditions for restaurant workers." Anyone want to guess where the burger-flipping robots are?
Yeah, I wasn't trying to rip the scab off the wound from that tipping debate. I was just posting as a "happy Valentine's, Hubski" kind of post. Whatever the feeling about minimum wage that anyone has (whether you think it's too high, too low, or just right), I think it's indefensible to have different minimum wages for different classes of worker. It's just another externality built into our food system that I would love to see abolished.