I’m sometimes surprised about what people find controversial around here. Our articles about abortion and reproductive rights are met with pretty universal agreement. While one of the most controversial things we’ve ever written was about the American tipping system:
If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford To Dine Out
You should read it. But if you don’t want to bother, here are the highlights:
- Our tipping system is whack by design. Employers are allowed to pay servers below minimum wage with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. This means tipping is not, as the word would suggest, a reward for good service. Rather, it is pretty fucking mandatory if you want to qualify as a Decent Human Being.
- So if you don’t tip at all, your server is being criminally underpaid. This isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility. Which means diners should factor the cost of tipping into their budget when dining out since employers are passing off the cost of their payroll to the customer.
- The solution is to automatically fold service charges into the bill, which more and more restaurants and bars are doing. But it’s by no means universal quite yet. So in the meantime your options are to cook at home or tip your server at least 20%.
The number of comments on that article that don’t simply complain about the necessity of tipping, but completely disregard the humanity of servers is staggering. The contempt and disrespect from these trolls is, uh… super gross! Here’s a sample:
Damn. I did not order a side of ableism with this comment. Please take it back.
It’s the day after Labor Day. So I’m spending this article on the dignity of labor: what it is, why it’s deserving of respect and fair compensation, and why disrespecting labor is a massive dick move.
A brief and Bitchified history of labor and compensation
It’s time for History Lessons with the Bitches!
Specialized labor
Bazillions of years ago when we lived in caves as hunter-gatherers and focused on the essential work of domesticating dogs, everyone labored together to feed the community. Labor was straightforward: you hunt or you gather and everybody eats. Including the dogs.
But then someone named Oog realized if she spent all her time practicing how to make the best fucking atlatls this side of the Fertile Crescent, hunters would have a better chance of murdering saber-toothed tigers for dinner. So Oog invented specialized labor (trust me on this, I talked to an archaeologist). In return for her work, the hunters compensated her with that sweet, sweet saber-toothed tiger meat.
Fast forward a few millennia and Oog’s model of specialized labor had become the standard. It was simply more efficient to perfect one skill than many and rely on someone else to fill the gaps in your labor. We had carpenters, weavers, smiths, farmers, and dog groomers. And they all traded the fruits of their labor for the fruits of their pals’ labor. A barter economy!
Labor Tokens and Survival Bucks
Eventually it got unwieldy for Godfrey the Weaver of Eastdowninghamshire to carry a full bolt of linen down to the market every time he wanted to trade with Bartholomew the Butcher of Fartsley Upon Thames (I met a historian once too, so you know this is all accurate). What if, thought Godfrey, we had some kind of physical symbol of our labor? One that we could trade for what other people make? Something small that fits in one’s pocket?
And so currency was invented (also pockets). It was the perfect middleman between our daily work and the means of survival in an economy powered by specialized labor.
For that is all money is: a symbolic representation of our labor. You feed your work into the vending machine of the collective economy and money pops out. You can then use that money to pay for goods and services and dog treats and everybody is happy (especially the dogs).
We have a word for uncompensated labor
Now that I’ve painstakingly laid out the inventions of specialized labor and currency, let’s imagine a world in which labor goes uncompensated.
Oh wait! We don’t have to imagine that! Because it’s happened throughout history, of course. The word for this sort of appalling exploitation is “slavery.”
Time is a finite resource
What Oog and Godfrey and Bartholomew and their dogs discovered is that their time on this planet was limited. They spent most of their time trying to survive. We’ve refined things a bit over the centuries, but the same is still true today. We exchange our finite time for the means of survival—money.
Right now, that looks like modern jobs. We go to work, do some tasks, and all of that labor is converted into money, which we then trade for the means of survival. Whether your job is waiting tables, managing a Fortune 500 company, or walking dogs, the goal is essentially the same: to trade your finite hours for money.
Giving away your limited number of hours without compensation would be a massive waste. Or rather, it would be theft—theft of your most precious and limited resource.
Baseline compensation for work isn’t about how difficult that work is to perform. It’s about the time that work takes to perform. Our time is valuable because it is limited. Therefore, in an ethical system that time must be fairly compensated.
Where the system breaks down
If we don’t guarantee even the most menial of workers a living wage, we’re not a free society, we’ve just changed the mechanics of slavery.”
– David Gerrold
If someone is trading their time for money and they still can’t make ends meet, something has gone horribly wrong.
This goes against the entire principle of currency as Labor Tokens. Oog and her dog did not labor away over aerodynamically superior atlatls so that your waiter could be evicted while working 58 hours a week at three jobs!
And yet this is where we are. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2020, the working poor are those who “spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force (that is, working or looking for work) but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level.” These are people who, despite their labor hours, cannot consistently pay for their own survival.
“Working poor” should be a contradiction in terms. No one who trades their limited time for money should struggle to pay their bills. No matter what form that labor takes.
Contempt for unskilled labor
Let’s go back to the comments on our tipping article.
The general vibe of the trolls is “I could’ve done that myself!”
But here’s the thing: you didn’t.
You didn’t walk into the kitchen and place your order with the chef. Neither did you carry the finished food to your table. And you sure as hell didn’t clean the table off and enter your payment details into the POS. You did not stare at Jeremy Allen White’s limpid blue eyes and murmur “Yes Chef” while struggling to plate a perfectly seared filet mignon. You didn’t do any of this.
But servers do. And they do it all while attending to the needs of five other tables of diners. They use their limited time on this planet to do this work instead of farming their own food and weaving their own clothes and building their own home and all of the other labor involved in survival.
Work is not theoretical
A wealthy acquaintance of mine once told me he never tipped for things that he could do himself. So that means restaurant waitstaff, rideshare drivers, the people who clean his home—none of them receive tips from this guy. This is so cartoonishly bad-mannered that it’s literally a Dwight Shrutism.
What gets me about this attitude is not the entitlement, but the contempt with which bad tippers view service industry workers. They act as if unskilled labor is being performed by subhumans, undeserving of respect and consideration.
Meanwhile, service industry workers are gifting you time back in your schedule—time you did not have to spend laboring at the tasks they perform. It doesn’t matter if you can or even would perform these tasks. You didn’t.
Labor is not theoretical! The reality is that this work is getting done. By a person. For the sole purpose of accruing Survival Bucks.
These unskilled workers often get treated like utter dogshit by their customers. See the recent case of the Chipotle customer who threw a burrito bowl in an employee’s face and was subsequently charged with assault. The judge clearly believed in capital-J Justice, because she sentenced the asshole to two months… of working in fast food service. Want to be a dick to an “unskilled” worker? Here, experience that shit for yourself and see if it fixes your attitude.
Time is the great leveler
Contempt for “unskilled” workers should be replaced by respect for their time.
Time is a wonderfully democratized resource. Because while we all have the same amount of it, the rich are willing to pay a premium to take more of theirs back from survival tasks. This means that they understand just how valuable everyone’s time is.
The hours I spend on work are not hours I want to spend on work. I’d obviously much rather spend those hours on leisure. I’m certain that the same is true for most of my fellow humans.
But we exist within a global society seven billion people strong. And the whole labor-for-compensation-for-survival model is pretty well entrenched in that society. Barring obscene levels of inherited wealth, opting out is not really an option for most of us.
So here we all are, with the same basic resource (time) and working for the same goal (survival). Given what we have in common, it should be much, much easier to empathize with the service industry worker taking your dinner order than the heir to the restaurant chain who has never set foot inside it.
All labor deserves compensation
This article could have been about Universal Basic Income. Or it could’ve been about the unchecked rampaging of late-stage capitalism.
But yesterday was literally Labor Day—the day when we “celebrate the dignity of America’s workers and the labor unions they have built,” according to President Biden. So for once in her life your humble Bitch is choosing not to throw the proverbial molotov cocktail of labor reform. Instead I’m coming with a simple proposal: don’t be a dick about fairly compensating labor.
Yes, the minimum wage needs to be raised. And yes, the system of tipping in America is wildly unethical and impractical. By all means, agitate for change in these areas! In fact, we strongly encourage you to do so! Advocate for your local unions and learn how to support a labor strike!
But right now, today, in our current system, you accomplish nothing by punishing those laboring under an imperfect system. Tip service industry professionals. Pay your employees according to the cost of living in their area, not the minimum wage. Treat supposedly “unskilled” laborers with compassion and respect, not just because their jobs are harder than you think—but because it’s the right thing to do.
All labor deserves compensation. No matter how technical, no matter how difficult, no matter how rote or boring or simple. If the work is done, the worker should be fairly paid.
So don’t be a massive, throbbing, smelly dick about it, ok?
Compensate my labor, baby!
I labored over this article when I could have been trading my finite time for Survival Bucks in another way. So to keep things on theme, you can tip me for this labor with the button below!