Former lawprof and author of The New Jim Crowe, Michelle Alexander, opens with the mandatory anecdote.
The first week on the job, one of my white co-workers, a middle-aged woman from rural Oregon, pulled me aside after she watched a group of rowdy white men, who had been rude and condescending to me throughout their meal, walk out the door without leaving a tip. “From now on, dear,” she said, “I’ll take the rednecks. Just pass ’em on to me.” This became a kind of joke between us — a wink and a nod before we switched tables — except it wasn’t funny. The risk that my race, not the quality of my work, would determine how much I was paid for my services was ever-present.
Alexander succinctly makes her point, that these “rowdy white men” stiffed her because of her race, not the quality of her service. She also misses the irony of her tale, that she, a collegian black woman, was working the same job as a middle-aged woman (she doesn’t mention the woman’s race, oddly, but presumably the racist white men would be just as racist toward the middle-aged woman if she was black, so there would be no reason for the elder waitress to take the table rather than the younger Alexander).
Not only does Alexander enjoy the courtesy and comfort of this middle-aged woman, who likely has children to feed and yet is working the same job as this collegian who is working for beer or book money, but she’s got a job “working at a burger and burrito joint called Munchies during the summers when I was a college student.” It’s possible that the owners of Munchies were making millions and billions off their burritos, but it doesn’t seem likely.
Yet, they hired this college student as a waitress. And this college student chose to work at Munchies, making tips from all the other diners, the non-rowdy white men and other diners, or she wouldn’t have been working there. And that meant some other middle-aged woman, who maybe had mouths to feed at home, didn’t get the job that Michelle Alexander chose to take and complains about now.
Alexander explains that tipping, which means paying wait staff below minimum wage salary and relying upon the social norm and largesse of diners, to make the job worthwhile, was born of racism and sexism.
Never did it occur to me that it was fundamentally unjust for me to earn less than the minimum wage and to depend on the good will of strangers in order to earn what was guaranteed by law to most workers. I had no idea that tipping was a legacy of slavery or that racism and sexism had operated to keep women, especially Black women like me, shut out of federal protections for wage labor. I did not question tipping as a practice, though looking back I see that I should have.
The basis for this belief was a book by Saru Jayaraman, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining.
After the Civil War, white business owners, still eager to find ways to steal Black labor, created the idea that tips would replace wages. Tipping had originated in Europe as “noblesse oblige,” a practice among aristocrats to show favor to servants. But when the idea came to the United States, restaurant corporations mutated the idea of tips from being bonuses provided by aristocrats to their inferiors to becoming the only source of income for Black workers they did not want to pay.
Whether, and to what extent, this is accurate, I can’t say. I didn’t read the book and don’t know whether this is why tipping in America came about or this is another 1619 Project version of history, a theoretical tenuous connection like a thousand others, elevated to a primary claim despite the overwhelming weight of historical fact to the contrary. But since I didn’t read the book, and can’t refute the claim, and won’t presume Michelle Alexander to be making a disingenuous argument, I will accept her premise the tipping was nothing more than a way for white business owners to steal black labor.
So what?
The subminimum wage for tipped workers isn’t simply born of racial injustice; it continues to perpetuate both race and gender inequity today.
Today, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is just $2.13 an hour — a just over $2 increase — and a mostly female, disproportionately women of color work force of tipped workers still faces the highest levels of harassment of any industry. Women restaurant workers in states with subminimum wage report twice the rate of sexual harassment as women working in restaurants in the seven states that have enacted One Fair Wage — a full minimum wage with tips on top. The women in these seven states — California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Montana, Minnesota and Alaska — can rely on a wage from their employer and are not as dependent on tips and thus feel empowered to reject the harassment from customers.
There’s a bit of game playing here, as “disproportionately” doesn’t mean majority, but Alexander goes on to proffer a litany of racist and sexist allegations nonetheless.
For Black women, the situation is especially dire. Before the pandemic, Black women who are tipped restaurant workers earned on average nearly $5 an hour less than their white male counterparts nationwide — largely because they are segregated into more casual restaurants in which they earn far less in tips than white men who more often work in fine dining, but also because of customer bias in tipping.
Sounds horrible to be a black woman working as a waitress. If restaurants were required by law to pay wait staff the full freight minimum wage, and increase prices to do so, it might have an effect on eating out, on who gets hired to be a waitress and be the end of tipping for good service. For those of us who tip well, it frankly sounds as if we would save money by paying wait staff $15 per hour. But would collegian Michelle Alexander have been working at Munchies over the summer if that was required? Does she think black women will get paid the full minimum wage and 20% tips on top, at least by the non-racist diners if any such beast exists?
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