https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1800900337953648993
How is $3 an hour legal? I thought American minimum wage was $7 or something.
What the hell is wrong with your country?
The minimum wage is lower if you have a job where you can get tips. Your employer is supposed to pay the difference up to regular minimum wage if you don't make it, but that often just opens a conversation of "well, why aren't you working hard enough to get the right tips"
IIRC tipping specifically stems from prohibition, where restaurants lost one of their biggest revenue sources and made up for it by slashing wages to the pits and encouraging customers to make up the difference with tips.
Wasn't tipping primarily exempt from the minimum wage because FDR had to get the support of the entire democratic party to get his reforms passed, and the southern Dems refused to vote for anything that would make them have to pay black people. So tipping and agricultural labour was exempt from minimum wage laws, because otherwise the new deal would have gotten blocked by the presidents own party. And FDR figured that there wasn't enough of those labourers to kickstart a revolution by themselves, so he agreed to it.
Trotskyists have the right idea about focusing so much on publishing and distributing their own newspapers. Unfortunately those papers are filled with unapproachable Trotskyist rants, usually about big global issues, and contain basically zero real journalism. A free leftist local newspaper with a website and a print copy handed out at a few busy transit stations every morning could, for example, actually send a reporter to report on local goings-on in the town hall and so on. Given how so many local news outlets have closed over the past couple of decades and left many towns and cities without any local news, the average person might actually want to read such a paper.
I can excuse labor exploitation but I draw the line when my chicken tendies get more expensive.And invariably these increases end up being “the $2.75 hash browns are now $3.15” and the reactionaries act like that’s the straw that will break the customer’s back.
My Large Sons and I used to be able to take a $20 to Waffle House and we would each be able to eat enough greasy fried potatoes to have diarrhea all day.
Now only 3 of us can and my youngest large adult son, Durk, hasn't clogged a toilet since all this started.
this is not the america I have been fighting for.
Tipping sucks if you aren’t attractive. Knew pretty girls who made good tips on their looks alone while less attractive girls barely made half of what they did.
I remember being a cook for a while and making less than basically every single FOH person except the host, who quit and then never got replaced because none of the waitstaff wanted to take a pay cut to be "promoted".
Federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.25.
Some states have a higher minimum, but even in a state like New York it's only just over $5
Think of how devastating that extra .75 cents an hour is for the poor small business known as Waffle House, they 'only' make about 2 mill per year per franchise location in profit
If you have 10 tipped servers, you're looking at almost 15k a year in extra costs! Too burdensome
Value, Price, and Profit (1865)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/
For those not in the US, tipping culture is a plague on the proletariat. Front of house workers in most places get paid $2.25(was 2.13 when I worked in the food industry 15 years ago)an hour and are expected to make the rest up in tips.
Some restaurants have opted to pay an actual wage(tho not exactly a living wage) with a no-tip policy and have proven that it can work(because duh) but most resturaunts are franchises where one rich fuck owns like 12-15 ir whatever resturaunts in a region and makes six figures for essentially doing nothing.
But hey at least we get free soda refills, right? Except for resturaunts that are opting for cans instead of fountain soda but I guess that's a complaint for another day.
