CLARENCE PAGE: Low-wage food workers need better wages more than tips

As our pre-pandemic way of life struggles to make a comeback — which I, for one, am rooting for it to do — one tradition that I greet with mixed emotions is my personal subsidy to low-wage workers.

I’m talking about tipping.

First, it’s important to note, I try to be a good tipper, especially as a reward for excellent service, which I learned long ago, toiling in my parent’s restaurant as a preteen.

Parents can be notoriously skimpy in paying for such family labors. I was just “paying tuition,” they wisely advised me, “in the school of life.” Decades later, I appreciate how that school of life helps me to appreciate the value of a fair wage.

I still want to help our low-wage workers make up the difference between what they’re paid and the minimum wage, a gap the government allows in some places as a break to restaurants and other service industries.

But even as I go through the annoyance of calculating a fair and appropriate tip at the end of a meal, a car-sharing ride or bellman’s services, I also am aware increasingly that I have a lot of company in questioning our tipping etiquette and its execution.

After seemingly endless scenes of tip jars and outstretched palms, I wonder, how about workers who we don’t have to tip?

As a concession to lobbyists for the restaurant industry, federal minimum wage laws allow a subminimum for food servers and other select tipped workers that they are calculated to work off in tips. That’s fair, proponents say, because the worker is likely to make up the difference in tips. Indeed. But what if they don’t?

And how about the workers who we don’t have to tip?

Who writes these rules anyway? Well, that brings up an unhappy aspect to the history of tipping, according to various accounts. After legal slavery and the Civil War ended in 1865, many freed enslaved people who didn’t end up sharecropping took menial jobs such as servants, restaurant servers and railroad porters, often paid in tips instead of regular wages.

“These industries demanded the right to basically continue slavery with a $0 wage and tip,” Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United told Time magazine. He also directs the Food Labor Research Center at University of California at Berkeley, which advocates for the equalization of wages for tipped and non-tipped workers.

Jim Crow racial segregation may be behind us, but studies unfortunately find racial discrimination endures in low-wage service jobs. Black servers, for example, have been found to receive less in tips than white servers even when customers rate the service the same, according to some studies.

But, by early 2020, many experts and activists say, tipping may have reached a tipping point. For decades, California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Montana, Arkansas and Minnesota have required full minimum wage in addition to tips, according to One Fair Wage, an advocacy group pushing to end the subminimum wage.

Other states are following suit, although slowly.

In Illinois, for example, One Fair Wage has supported House Bill 5139, introduced by Rep. Camille Lilly, a Chicago Democrat, to do away with the subminimum wage paid to servers, bartenders and other tipped service workers and extend the minimum wage to them instead. Unfortunately, the bill has not received a full committee assignment and has no co-sponsors.

Yet, as Nataki Rhodes, a Chicago-based national organizer for One Fair Wage, told me in a telephone interview, the group has been encouraged by an apparently growing number of restaurant owners who are raising their staff’s wages on their own, even when it means higher menu prices or service charges.

Whatever the market will bear, as an old saying goes. Unfortunately, the consumer market is operating in a political atmosphere currently heated by some of the worst inflation we’ve seen in years.

Which only worsens the burden of low-wage workers trying to keep up with their bills and feed their families. At the height of the pandemic, direct aid helped low-wage workers — and the rest of us — keep our economic heads above water until more Americans could get back to work.

Here’s a tip: Raising the minimum wage can offer help to them again, so they can help themselves.

Contact Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.