So, there’s all this hoo-ha about US restaurants gearing up to change their policy of leaning on customers’ tipping generosity to pay the lion’s share of the salaries of their servers.  The proposed change would add a “hospitality” charge to each patron’s bill, (similar to that 6-or-more thing that happens in most places already), and the restaurant owners would use some or all of that dough to pay their employees. How is this a new idea?

The bigger story is really about business structure as it’s evolved, primarily in the US, into an ‘us’, (business owners), versus ‘them’, (employees), organizational chart wherein the projected and real profits for ‘us’, trump, (can’t help it), responsibility for the fair treatment of ‘them’ with regard to wages, health care, safety and security.  The fact that government has assumed a token responsibility of mandating a ‘minimum wage’, is merely a tacit admission of this out-of-control, (maybe irreversible), situation.  Now, I’m no economist, (Nobel committee), but it seems to me that business, as a concept, is not that complex.  Somebody has an entrepreneurial idea.  Let’s use restaurant, shall we?  They make a list of all of the real costs of bringing Chez Joelie to a location in downtown Detroit.  I’m guessing those would include a bought or rented location, building or remodeling to suit the purpose, sustainable equipment costs, recurring supplies, utilities and maintenance, insurance, advertising, permits, taxes and employees, (this is probably an abbreviated list, but again…not an economist).  Anyway, the success or failure of Chez Joelie is ultimately dependent on the running total of all of the items on the list being less than the total of monies received from future patrons who will have waited weeks for a decent table.  Somewhere, early on in this process, American restaurant owners determined that, except for their key employees, (chef, wine guy, accountant), all others, aside from being expendable, could be held responsible for their own pay by requiring them to cajole tips from diners with jaunty bravado and meal-long feigned friendship.  The tipping-instead-of-paying model has since oozed its way into many other service industries, but the corporate mindset, that employee pay, kept to its barest minimum, is a profit enhancer, has led to an unfathomable divide.  In response to unfairness and inconsideration, workers organized and unionized and the ensuing decades of push-pull and abuse from both sides led to government, (Reagan), buckling to the pressure of corporate lobbying to deregulate and de-unionize, sending America on a trickle down speeding path back to our feudal, middle class-less past.

Employers are not going to decide on their own that fair wages and more humane treatment, (although the occasionally free uniforms…I always loved the Long John Silver pirate hat…can be dope), are worth the lessening of their bottom lines, and any time spent on debate about a $9 or $11 or $15 minimum wage is a frivolous exercise.  I can see no way back from the resultant economical inequality.  Only revolution has helped in the past, (even ours), but there used to be castles to storm or Bastilles to topple, tea to toss or a singular place with moneychangers to drive out…even if I had a pitchfork, I wouldn’t know who to poke with it.

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