Knowing What Waitresses Do Will Change Your Eating Out
Gloria Steinham
When Before It’s News was contacted to publish an article on waitresses, it seemed important. After learning more, it became obvious a scandalous hidden crisis is occurring daily for over 10 million American workers. This is why Gloria Steinhem is involved.
Since 1991, the federal tipped minimum wage for waitresses and waiters has remained $2.31 an hour.
Low-wage workers are robbed far more often than banks, gas stations and convenience stores combined — and the perpetrators are their own employers.
The majority of people earning subminimum wages and living off tips are women. Is it a coincidence that the tipped minimum wage has been frozen at $2.13 since 1991?
“We don’t think so,” says Living Off Tips spokesperson and waitress Jennifer Rexford.
“I cannot provide for my children,” Rexford says. “We cannot provide the healthcare our children need. We cannot provide transportation we need to work. We cannot provide the basic necessities in life.
“If the minimum wage was more than $2.31, I’d be able to feed my son and myself,” says another waitress Garland Dosier.
There are over 10 million servers in the United States.
Wage Theft
“Yes, even though the law requires business owners to pay at least the full minimum wage when tips + the subminimum wage, this is rarely enforced,” Rexford says.
“Low-wage workers are robbed far more often than banks, gas stations and convenience stores combined — and the perpetrators are their own employers.” (See: http://rocunited.org/stolen-wages/)
Gloria Steinham, 79, an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist became nationally recognized as a feminist leader in the 1960′s. She was the media spokeswoman for the women’s liberation movement through the 1970s.
The video below features Steinem, Jennifer Rexford and others shedding light on minimum tip wages.
Join the campaign to raise the tipped minimum wage by visiting:
Sign the Living Off Tips petition to #Raise213:
Sources: Gloria Steinem, Karlyn, Autumn, Jennifer, Chloe, Stephanie, Brandy and all women of the The LIVING OFF TIPS Campaign
Photo Credit – Wikipedia
Video Credit: Sekou Luke of http://www.sekoulukestudio.com
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
i am all for rasing minimum wage and all…but your headline sucks
Thank you. What do you find unacceptable about my title?
We need a new way of calculating tips, based on time rather than percent of meal price.
I think we should think of servers as working for customers, not for the restaurants. That means the price of the meal is almost all other overhead plus cost of preparation plus profit for the restaurant.
Let’s say we should be tipping the server for his/her time at, say, $20/hour ($40,00/year). For an average real restaurant, a decent server probably spends maybe 15 minutes per table of two, which means a tip of $10. If the bill for a two-person meal is, say, $40, that’s a 25% tip, and a total bill (not counting tax) of $50.
And a lot of restaurants charge more than that. A home-cooked meal of the same quality would cost half as much.
Regardless of the price of the food itself, the tip should be about the same: roughly $20/hour. Base it on the actual amount of time the server spends, not just directly with you but also with the kitchen, table prep and cleanup, dead time between customers, etc. Maybe 2 1/2 times the actual time she spends with you, at a rate of $20/hour? That would be more equitable than just a flat percentage of the meal price.
Another way would be to ask the server how many people he/she serves/day, and divide a decent day’s wage ($160 for 8 hours) by that number. If she serves 20 people/day, the tip would be $160/20 = $8.
This is outrageous, especially when one realizes how hard waitresses work. We need an International Waitress (or Waiter) Day.
If you want to know the real reason wages across the board have been stifled, read this column. Regardless of what you think of the author, this column is well written with and points out EXPLICITLY what our problems are. http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-02-26.html
If wait staff want more money, then my advice is, get another job that WILL pay you minimum wage. When enough people do this the restaurant business will take a hit for lack of ability to secure the needed personnel, which will soon force them to reconsider their position.
This of course is a two edge sword; If they cannot keep personnel, service will suffer, if they raise the price of a meal their customers will go elsewhere.
When and if the price of a meal jumps 20% to cover the cost of this new wage hike, restaurants will suffer as will their stake and stock holders. The crux here is that if you expect the stake and stock holders to take a hit, you had better rethink about the reality we live in.
Rethinking about the reality we live in is definitely in order. The rigged market in the US doesn’t work.
I suspect the main culprits are the restaurant chains, since they are large corporations. Small restaurant owners may be less culpable, I don’t know. In Australia and Europe restaurants are required to pay a decent wage, so it is possible.
I certainly isn’t fair for us to have to pay servers’ salaries when the owners are making a killing, but local restaurants go out of business so often they probably don’t have much of a margin.
I don’t know how to find out how much a server is paid at a restaurant. They, or the owners, may not be reliable on this. Maybe one could ask both. Maybe a Web site could be set up to provide this information. That would help us pick restaurants.
Direct action can help: worker strikes, demonstrations by concerned citizens. But most of us are too lazy to help. One person with a sign can make a difference.
When I was a kid, most restaurants were locally owned, servers got decent pay, and most families only ate out for special occasions. There were far fewer restaurants as a consequence.
As for finding other jobs, with the current job market a lot of people are reduced to service work as a last resort. That’s just what the one percent likes. They can force more work and less pay and benefits on employees because the alternative is so grim. The military loves it too. Many people enlist just to get a job, not because they want to.