Sunday blog: Kids these days
Commentary by Devin McCue, Sumner Newscow — The United States of America is the richest country in the world.
It’s worth nearly $150 trillion, the GDP is $25 trillion, and it’s home to more billionaires than any place on Earth. So why does it act so broke?
Over the past few years, I’ve supplemented my income by working service jobs. I was a barista, a waiter, then finally a bartender who makes the most money in the service industry aside from management. And I never rose above the poverty line.
Before getting into how America treats service workers, let’s take a look at its minimum wage.
The federal minimum wage was started back in the 1930s to help people recover from the depression. President Roosevelt established it at a quarter ($5.20 in today’s money), and it became an immediate boon to the hourly worker.
Within 20 years, the minimum wage had tripled and by 1968 it reached its high-water mark of $13.46. The wage would only fall in value as inflation and the cost of living grew while American workers were left with smaller paychecks for half a century.
While many states (other than Kansas) have created their own minimum wages, the federal wage has been marooned at $7.25 since 2009. And despite the fact that 55% of Americans work on an hourly payment schedule, a full-time employee can only make $15,000 a year on the minimum wage. The poverty line is over $3,000 higher.
Every time Congress takes up the issue of raising the wage, however, politicians, lobbyists, special interest groups, and bootlickers climb out of the woodwork to cry wolf against the “harmful” effects of ensuring American citizens don’t starve.
They complain that raising the wage will only cause panic among investors. Or, even worse, some businesses will have to shut down now that they can’t pay employees with the change beneath their couch cushions.
I’d respond to them that I thought we were capitalists around here. If you can’t afford to pay your employees, then the invisible hand of the market says you can’t run a business properly. Maybe try making your coffee at home and pulling up a little harder on those bootstraps.
With America’s deplorable and embarrassing minimum wage in mind, imagine now that there was a loophole to pay people even less than that. Introducing: the tipped minimum.
As a service worker, it’s understood that most of your paycheck will come from tips. One of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country, the National Restaurant Association (NRA), convinced Congress to allow restaurants to pay well under the minimum wage since tipping was customary.
That means a restaurant need only pay its employees $2.13 as long as it ensures the pay equals $7.25 per hour at the end of the day. I can tell you from personal experience that no restaurant has ever ensured this to be true and forcing them into compliance is next to impossible.
That means if you pick up a bartending job in Wichita but only have a few customers that night, your paycheck won’t even cover your gas money to get home.
Abolishing the tipped minimum and raising the minimum wage to a reasonable figure are the obvious solutions to remedy this situation. And for those who think this will result in restaurant closures and a lack of tips, I’ll point you to a country similar to ours: Australia.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that America is one of the few places left on Earth where tipping is required rather than appreciated. Australia is one place where tipping is far less common, but still regularly practiced as a reward for doing a good job.
The reason tipping is rare down under is because people who live there know that service workers are taken care of.
The national minimum wage is $21.38, no matter what industry you’re in. But there’s more to the Australian system to accommodate people in different circumstances. If you’re 20 years old or older, that rate improves to $26.73, and that’s improved even more to $32.07 on the weekend.
You’ll even take home $53.45 an hour if you’re scheduled on a public holiday.
The idea behind the system is pretty simple; older employees have different needs than younger ones and forcing people to give up their weekends and holidays should have a monetary incentive.
Employers are also required by law to pay into the Australian equivalent of a 401K to ensure people have a retirement plan. And if any of these rules are broken, the government will investigate any grievances an employee brings to their attention.
While I was living there, restaurant jobs were plentiful, and the cost of the food wasn’t any higher than it was in the States. The only difference was I took home less in tips. But that never mattered to me because I was raking in more cash than I ever saw in America. I could afford rent every week without taking a second (or third) job, and people still tipped to reward good service, which is what tipping was meant for in the first place.
I personally don’t care if a waiter forgets my order or a bartender has the worst customer service on Earth; I tip a minimum of 20 percent. And if you don’t, that means you think another human being doesn’t deserve to eat that week. Until we get rid of our shameful minimum wage system in this country, it’s up to us, the consumers, to have each other’s back.
Service workers aren’t there to be your whipping posts, you’re there to pay their rent. And the customer is almost never right.
