Giving Them A Voice: Waitstaff Workers

This podcast episode discusses the working conditions of wait staff in the restaurant industry in the United States and the relationship between tipping and mistreatment. It covers the history of tipping and the origins of the modern restaurant, as well as the impact of class, race, and gender on wages. The statistics show that the food service industry is massive and employs a large number of tipped workers, with many earning the federal minimum wage or less. The profile of wait staff workers is predominantly female, and there is a racial disparity within the industry. The podcast also highlights the low pay, inconsistent scheduling, lack of benefits, and wage theft that wait staff often face. The risks and challenges of working in the restaurant industry are also discussed. Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Naomi Olson, and welcome to the one and only episode of Giving Them a Voice, a podcast made to give insights on the working conditions of wait staff in the restaurant industry of the United States and the intersectionality between tipping natures and mistreatment in the workplace. I aim to be the voice for millions of people across the country who have or are currently facing the realities of waiting tables for income. I am going to work through six different areas of focus in this episode. I will discuss the history of restaurant serving industry and origins of tipping with a statistical profile. Then I will shift into working conditions, a governance policy analysis, and insights to what people are fighting to change in the system and what I think should be done. I'm very excited because I got the opportunity to interview one of my peers who is currently working in the wait staff industry. I wanted a chance to give her a voice to share her own experience and make this opportunity to help you learn what real people are experiencing today. So the first area of focus that I'm going to hit is the history of what we see as the modern restaurant and tipping natures. So the first instance on the record of tipping dates back all the way to the Middle Ages where masters would give small amounts of gratitude to their servants. We saw this first idea of a modern restaurant in the 18th century in France. They had a very similar structure to what we see today such as seating groups and providing the menus and giving them table service. And they had the same structure of front of the house and back of the house which was introduced also around this time as seen in early hotels and restaurants where you would have back of the house meaning dishwashers and cooks and front of the house could entail wait staff as well as bartenders and managers. In fact, I thought this is super interesting. The word restaurant comes from the French verb restaureur. I do not want to botch that but this means to restore oneself and the first true French restaurant opened decades before 1789 during the revolution. And I found a really interesting detail in a book by Cary Seagrave titled Tipping in American Social History of Gratitudes that during the first decade of the 20th century Americans abroad were blamed for tipping too much in Europe. This is ironic because it is evident that the U.S. took the European ideal to a whole new level while anti-tipping ideals actually spread throughout the West but the United States took this as a whole new business model. But we first see this idea of tipping in the U.S. in the early 1900s. The practice increased as industries that involved tipping such as domestic servants, coachmen, barbers, waiters, railroad porters and so on grew. But class, race and gender all impacted the wages people received from tipping and we tragically still see that today. During the reconstruction era tipping was used as a means of shutting black people out of federal protections for wage labor. In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt signed the nation's first minimum wage into law but it did exclude restaurant workers, a category that included a disproportionate amount of black people and was primarily women. So the statistics are staggering for the food service industry in general as well as the waitstaff industry in the United States. The food service industry is a massive industry, right? It accounts for most of tipped workers in the United States. There are 5.5 million tipped workers in the U.S. Of that 5.5 million approximately 2,122,210 currently work as a waiter or a waitress according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ROC United, also standing for the Restaurant Opportunity Center United, a national organization working towards equity in the restaurant business, which I will highlight later on, tells us that one of three Americans enter the workforce through the restaurant industry and one of two workers in the industry at some point, work in the industry at some point in their lifetime. Sixteen states adhere to the federal minimum wage for tipped workers. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food service accounts for approximately 36.7% of the food dollar or the percentage per dollar consumers spend annually on food, which I think is a super good term to use in this sense. So you can only imagine how much labor is involved in this business. Of all that labor, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics also states that one million workers meet the federal minimum wage or less. To get more in depth, the mean hourly wage right now for waiters and waitresses is $15.87. This is well above the federal minimum wage being $7.25, but this mean hourly wage really doesn't speak for everyone in the industry. It doesn't speak for a lot of people. The mean annual wage is $33,020 a year, and by percentile, the hourly wage for 10% is $8.77, which is not nearly enough, knowing that we are having a national push for everyone to make the federal minimum wage $15 an hour, abolishing the tipped minimum wage altogether, which I want to get more in depth to. So shifting into the profile of wait staff workers in the U.S., currently the industry is predominantly female, accounting for more than 70% of the industry. They're also mostly young females, around 40%. However, the working age is trending upwards with 40% of workers above the age of 24 and a median age of 31.6 years old. Now, the most recent data I could find from the U.S. Census Bureau on the percentage of race in the industry comes from 2019. So we've obviously took a clear shift since the post-Civil War era, with 58.2% of wait staff being white, 22.1% being Hispanic, 8.7% being black or African American. Now, I know I'm mainly focusing on the profile of wait staff workers in this podcast, but I do think it's super critical to note the context of the hierarchical structure that I slightly touched on before within the restaurant industry and how more powerful and higher paid positions are predominantly white. In that same data from the U.S. Census Bureau, managers and supervisors make up for about 58% to 56% white. Like I said, front of the house positions can include managers and supervisors, as well as bartenders and servers, and then the back of the house is dishwashers and food prep. On average, waiters and waitresses make just $26,600 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while dishwashers make $24,400. So, shifting away from all the numbers and statistics of the job, I want to jump into the working conditions and put you in the shoes of a wait staff worker and what the daily risks may be. So, shifting into the meat of my argument, if you will, I want to talk about the pay. So, employers must pay only $2.13 per hour for indirect wages, which is called the federal tipped minimum wage, while the federal minimum wage is $7.25. Today, this relationship is truly a result of the tipped wage structure that places the consumer in the position of controlling and subsidizing wages. Interestingly enough, originally the tipped wage was calculated at 50% of the minimum wage, but increases have seemingly lagged behind. The tipped wage was last updated in 1991, which is crazy to me. There's really no good reason for it. The minimum wage has increased by 90% since then, and the tipped wage has not. Today, 43 states have a lower minimum wage for tipped workers than non-tipped workers. Some states' minimum wage is higher than the federal requirement, but it is still definitely not a living wage. So, now that you have this baseline understanding of the pay structure in the industry, it allows for you to understand how so many other factors can play into the way that a worker behaves, how a worker is treated, and how they get their hours and how important that is. So, scheduling is a huge deal, and hours can vary between part-time and full-time, depending on the employee and employer, but often bias is a huge player. Worker schedules can be inconsistent and super heavy per week, and vulnerable workers can be mistreated by schedulers and employers by adhering to requests of favored or long-standing employees. Only U.S. states have legislated pay laws and policies to monitor pay in instances of necessary compensation, which I don't want to jump too deep into right now, but staffing is generally really tricky in restaurants. When I interviewed my peer, Lina, she has firsthand experience with this. Lina is 19. She works at an Italian restaurant called Baba Louie's in Harrington, Massachusetts. This is a highly touristy area for East Coast folks in the Berkshires, and she explains to me a lot of how the scheduling can vary at her restaurant. They would really sort of either understaff or overstaff, or understaff to try to get people to make more money, or overstaffing would really affect how people were paid, and it would piss a lot of the workers off. Being so wishy-washy about staffing and giving hours in establishments can cause a lot of problems. These are waiters and waitresses who need tables, and need these opportunities to make a living wage, and make the wage that they deserve, which they're often being robbed of. And on top of that, they really aren't making any benefits, such as employer-based health insurance and paid time off. Food service workers are often not paid the overtime rate and experience wage theft. This produces a substantial wage disparity. And there is something to be said for the differences in types of restaurants. There's corporate, slash franchise, and independent restaurants. Independent restaurants are not associated by any corporate chain, are solely run by the owner, whereas franchise restaurants are owned by one parent company. This can cause a significant difference in ownership, operation, and decision-making. Now I want to shift into the risks that can occur as waitstaff in the restaurant industry. With the hectic and fast-paced nature of restaurants, and hot equipment, sharp knives, slippery floors, and more, injuries happen commonly. Injuries include slipping, muscle strains and sprains, cuts, and burns. In 2019, the National Bureau of Labor Statistics published that 93,980 non-fatal injuries occurred in full-service restaurants. One-third of these injuries required at least one day off from work. Aside from injuries, harassment and mistreatment in the workplace for waiters and waitresses is a huge deal. As I mentioned before, the relationship between the server and the customer is extremely dependent on tipping nature and how you want to treat the customer so that you can get the best tip in return. Lena describes a few instances of general harassment from her customers at Baba Louie's. I dealt with a lot of people who were tourists or had second homes in my hometown and were predominantly from like the metropolitan, like New York area. So there were definitely a lot of people who were more used to sort of treating their servers like they would in New York, which still is not the right way to treat them. And sort of expect a lot of things that aren't natural and it kind of comes off in like a dehumanizing way. Following this, Lena describes how her establishment expects her to give service with a smile and remain complacent in these situations. In 2021, one study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology where they examined the pervasive nature of harassment in the restaurant industry. Kundra, the main author, and his co-authors put it into terms perfectly. Service employee dependence on tips and requirements for friendly displays led customers to experience a heightened sense of power, which can lead them to engage in sexual harassment. I enjoyed this phrasing because it hones in on the requirement to give, quote unquote, service with a smile, which is expected etiquette in almost every restaurant in the United States. Given this expectation, the public data on sexual harassment patterns towards servers, mostly women, is shocking. The Restaurant Opportunity Center United looks at a survey of 233 former restaurant servers and combined that data with many more interviews of current workers in the industry. In the end, most women do not even recognize their experiences as sexual harassment. This goes to show how there is hardly any fluency in the industry about sexual harassment and how most of this ignorance stems from ingrained modern nature of tipping in our culture. Their research also reveals that 34% of women who were formerly tipped workers quit their jobs as a result of encountering unwanted sexual harassment in the workplace. Interestingly, COVID-19 has also played an influence in instances of harassment in the workplace. Now, COVID-19 has completely changed the restaurant industry in a plethora of ways, but in terms of working conditions, it has made a significant impact on harassment and tipping attitudes. One Fair Wage, a non-governmental organization fighting to increase minimum wages, published a study in 2020 that reveals over 40% of their interviewees say they're facing an increase in sexual harassment from customers. Racist attitudes are especially pervasive today in the restaurant context. There are common attitudes that black customers routinely tip their servers below the tipping norm. Servers may feel justified in giving inferior service to their black customers. In my personal experience working in the restaurant industry as a waitress, I've had countless counterparts who have passed off tables to me because they claim that their black customers do not tip properly. This is important to note because it shows how tipping attitudes apply to not only the customer, but the server as well. Being reliant on tips brings out very poor ideals. These attitudes are completely unacceptable. Now I want to transition into the policy analysis and the type of governance that is involved in the waitstep industry. I discussed the difference between independent versus franchised restaurants and how they may operate differently. The employer in an independent restaurant is typically the owner who may also be a manager alongside other employed managers. These players employ the servers. The same structure of managers are involved in franchised restaurants, but there is a corporate scale, where there are powerful executives and CEOs. Corporate oversees all locations, which could be hundreds all across the country. Sure, franchised businesses may hold different standards and operations across all locations, but the methods of pay and dependence are the same for each state legislation. As of this year, only seven states have eliminated the sub-minimum wage. The Fair Labor Standards Act law, also known as FLSA, establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, record keeping, and youth employment standards. The FLSA states that a tipped employee is an employee engaged in an occupation in which they customarily and regularly receive more than $30 a month in tips. The FLSA beholds tip regulations. One critical regulation states that if a worker does not receive $5.12 an hour in tips, the employer is responsible for paying that difference back. This is known as the tip credit. Tip credits are applied very regularly. This can occur in an instance, for example, where the employer does not have enough work for the employee, or in an instance, for example, where the employer does not have enough work for the employee, so they may have to send them home or they don't make enough. Lena shared with me a similar experience where she had to be applied the tip credit after being sent home. Sometimes if I'd work like a Monday or a Thursday, it would be super slow. And I honestly haven't done the calculations myself, but I know that I wasn't making definitely not $15 an hour from tips. But yeah, I don't know the exact calculations on that. But when it is slow, they usually will send someone home or make sure that they kind of change the way the restaurant is staffed that night. The federal baselines that I just described are not the full story for every state. When states differ from the federal FLSA, they must comply with specific standards. Our neighbor, Minnesota, for example, abolished the lower minimum wage for tipped workers in 1948, according to a 2017 report by the National Employment Laws Project. They are one of the seven states that adopt the subminimum wage. They've rejected typical restaurant industry conditions and thrived off the one fair wage system, and in fact, the study claims that their restaurant industry is expected to grow by 8.3% by 2026 since the publication. Regardless, the majority of servers in Minnesota are still not being paid enough, even with the tip credit. Moving forward, another standard underlined by the FLSA is called pooling tips. When a server takes home every shift or when they get their paycheck, it can differ between establishments. The FLSA allows employers to pool tips, which by the U.S. Department of Education's definition traditionally means that an employer that takes the tip credit can require tip employees to contribute tips only. Tip pooling can come in different forms, though. Some employers deduct percentages off the server's total tip credit to distribute to other employees, like food runners, bartenders, and bussers. Other employers pool tips between servers. And on that note, in 2020, the federal government finalized a series of rules to protect tipped workers. This required servers to share their tips with non-tipped employees, like cooks and other dishwashers, aka back-of-the-house staff. And as I mentioned before, the pay difference per year between a server and a dishwasher is pretty different. A server makes almost $2,000 more per year than a dishwasher. These rules also remove the requirement of how much time workers can spend on non-tipped work, like setting up and closing the restaurant, when they are not waiting on any tables. The limit used to be only 20% of the shift or less was allowed to be used for these tasks. Without a limit on how much time a server can, for example, set up the restaurant and close the restaurant every moment that they're not actually waiting on tables, can really change how much they make in a shift. Now, I want you to think back to everything I mentioned in the history of tipping, okay? The tipping concept is a gratuity. It's a small amount of money on top from an appreciation or a form of saying thank you. A tip is not a supportive wage. Why? Well, a tip is a choice at the end of the day. And virtually, for many people, tipping can simply be out of the picture. Is a person binded to a 15% tip or a 20% tip? No. It's called free will. And it is surely not called a living wage. In my experience being a server, I know this feeling all too well after laying down checkbook on a table. All it really is, is hope. Hope that you did all the right things and that your customer forgave you for forgetting about their Diet Coke or forgetting the extra side of ketchup. Because that is what you are taking home at the end of the day. That is your wage. Now, I want to talk a little bit more about how COVID-19 completely changed the restaurant industry. This was hardly a year and a half ago when regulations were phased out. Arguably one of the biggest impacts of the pandemic is that it completely changed the global market. And it changed the employment status of millions of people in one instance. For waitstaff workers, there was no such thing as working from home. There was no way to get around it. It was impossible. And it was really hard to look for employment elsewhere really. Everything was shut down. Important legislative decisions have also been rolling out since the pandemic. I just mentioned a couple of legislative actions that were put into place in 2020. Additionally, players have shifted significantly and these standards are seemingly here to stay. Dining rooms are shrinking with significantly less people in it to this day. Food delivery services are booming. Overtaking the attitudes of just going out to eat. Delivery providers like DoorDash and Uber Eats are hitting a sky-high demand. A delivery service is simply not an option for many restaurants. It's so hard to compete with these industries. And a lot offer curbside pickup, but that's just about it. The pandemic also allowed for a whole new shift in attitudes. Millions walked away from the job on a whim. Millions walked away from the job altogether. The National Restaurant Association reported that as of 2023, eating and drinking places were 64,000 jobs or 0.5% below their February 2020 employment peak. Tipping attitudes also experienced a shift. One fair wage also revealed that more than 80% of workers are seeing a decline in tips as of 2020. In many cases, people may have adopted a lesser obligation to tip. But this wasn't the story everywhere. When I interviewed Lina, she told me otherwise. She told me that given the location of a restaurant and the demographic of people who live there and vacation there, people were actually more generous during COVID-19. And I think a lot of this stems from sympathy for restaurant workers and having a little bit of humility and understanding that they are not getting the same service. And in my personal experience in the restaurant industry, during COVID-19, the most tips came from takeout orders and when we would bring them for curbside pickup. And those were the biggest tips I've ever seen. And sometimes the host would make more money than the server did because they got the takeout tips and we'd get two customers in the restaurant and the servers would walk home with nothing. I think it's really important to consider all sides of the story, especially during COVID-19 for waitstaff. I also think that it's super important to make change now more than ever after phasing out of this global pandemic and trying to reboost the restaurant industry. And we need to make a shift where the servers are not reliant on just swallowing the pill of harassment and mistreatment because their customers are depending on their treatment and they ultimately decide what the server makes in the day. So in terms of change that can happen right now, I believe unionization is so important. Restaurants are in fact one of the lowest sectors to unionize. This could be due to having such high turnover rates, but studies have shown that there has been a decline in overall traditional unionization from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.7% in 2016. Increasing unionization is so critical, especially for servers in the restaurant industry where they have a political leverage of labor in the United States. We've seen a decrease in trade union ability to play crucial roles in assisting workers to exercise statutory rights. It will also bring attention to policymakers and create a bigger presence in political debates and it will also increase the regulations and oversee in the general workforce. So today's organizations fighting for wage equality and better practices in the restaurant work industry are non-governmental, nonprofits, or unions, or more like super unions. These are organizations in the restaurant industry that are operating outside of the structural limitations and regulations that have posed significant challenges to unionization in the sector. Super unions are not traditional trade unions. They work towards intersectionality. And one example of this is Restaurant Opportunity Centers, also known as ROC. ROC is a not-for-profit organization. Their mission statement on their website states that we work to improve restaurant workers' lives by building worker power and uniting workers of various backgrounds around shared goals and values. They emphasize respect and dignity in their industry and prioritize racial and gender equalities. Another example is One Fair Wage, a national, non-governmental, nonprofit organization. They consist of 100s of thousands of whom TIFs are considered wage replacements. They conduct a variety of advocacy events and push for voter engagement to fight for all Americans to be paid a full, fair minimum wage, not a TIFs minimum wage of $2.13. And we've already seen a slight success for restaurant employees in states that do not have the subminimum wage. Like as I mentioned before, Minnesota abolished the subminimum wage and they're already seeing a projected spike increase in restaurant business. Secondly, aside from unions, there should be education in the workplace. When it comes down to day-to-day work, it is hard to say whether or not franchise restaurants place a better treatment to their workers. They may implement standardized practices across all operations on how to treat customers and such. But for Lena, working at an independent restaurant, there was limited practices on how to treat workers and none of it touched on how to handle harassment. In fact, her establishment claims that service industry has kind of been lost. They have a meeting with the whole staff every summer. And one thing that actually was the main theme of the one this summer is sort of customer service, which we kind of talked about how that's been lost a little bit in the service industry, because Haven has had such a strong reputation of like providing great service to the community. So but it was definitely emphasis on always being busy and having your hands like always working and not just standing behind the counter and talking and always being super like responsive to customers, walking around and like checking on everyone at table. And her response was super interesting. It kind of seems like this establishment and probably many others are blowing over the whole side of harassment in the restaurant industry. And they're putting it all on the workers. So in that case, if establishments aren't going to see opportunities to educate and understand how service workers are treated, it is most important that the long term goal is raising the minimum wage to one fair wage. It should be a federal requirement in all states, not just seven. It is so incredibly difficult for independent businesses, especially to raise our guaranteed minimum for customers while sustaining the same profits. It requires prices to raise across the board, like increasing menu prices and risking deterring customers altogether. It is rare to see restaurants work around this. The minimum wage is abolished because so many things can just slip under the table. It's the employer's job to keep track of everyone's weekly or biweekly tips and to ensure that they are providing the correct compensation if they did not meet that tip credit threshold. However, this kind of stuff can just flip because there's really no one looking over and investigating the everyday practices of the employer. And this is surely a reality. In her publication, Sylvia Arrigato tells us that 85.3% of investigated full service restaurants and bars had a violation. One in ten violated the FLSA. Thank you so much for listening to my insights on wage staff workers in the restaurant industry in the United States who are dependent on tipped minimum wages. I hope you walk away with a better understanding on the scenario and how change is possible. I'm your host, Naomi Olson, and thank you for listening.