Crosspost
The ballot effort to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers faces a new challenge as opponents seek to disqualify signatures collected by organizers.
The Massachusetts Restaurant Association filed an objection to several signatures and petition sheets submitted to the secretary of state by the ballot campaign group, One Fair Wage. The signatures were the final hurdle for ballot organizers to get the issue in front of voters in November.
I’m not sure it would be possible to change the culture any other way, since it’s so entrenched.
The only restaurants I know of that were able to successfully transition to a less toxic business model for servers did so through a combination of paying servers a fair base wage ($20+ an hour) and banning tips.
Culture is tricky in that it’s ‘sticky’ and often takes a lot of effort to change. Having a policy like ‘tipping not required’ would still lead to the vast majority of customers feeling obligated to tip because not tipping carries with it such a strong implication of being greedy/stingy.
I should mention that this all mostly applies to the US and that there are plenty of countries with flourishing hospitality industries where tipping is virtually nonexistent (or even seen as insulting).
I just don’t see the harm with leaving it not banned. At least for me personally the problem with the culture comes from the fact that servers rely on it to make a living so if you don’t do it you’re denying them that. So if you fix that problem and pay a liveable wage and just allow tips as an extra then sure they might still see someone not tipping as stingy but atleast now it’s not impacting their ability to make a living directly so they can’t be as justifiably angry.
Cause atleast personally I haven’t worked in the service industry but I have worked minimum wage at a grocery store and I remember they told us we couldn’t accept extra money from customers which I always thought was dumb. I wasn’t expecting people to give me extra money and it was pretty rare that it happened but occasionally a nice person would come through and offer me some extra money for helping them and I thought it was dumb I had to turn that down. It didn’t make me think less of the people who didn’t do that, just would have been a nice extra bonus to help me out.