In 2013 Katrina Trinko told
USA Today readers that, instead of raising the minimum wage to help those moocher fast-food workers make a living, right-thinking consumers should "
pressure fast-food companies to allow tip jars, so that people who wanted to pass on more to the workers had a way to do so." Well, big cities are still
raising the wage, and Trinko has turned around, in a way: At Acculturated she now says she'll even countenance the evil of a minimum wage hike if it's used as a
substitute for tipping in restaurants.
It's neither an obviously terrible
nor an unheard-of idea. Is Trinko attempting conservative outreach to working people in election season? She certainly expects to benefit from a no-tip world herself: "I’m ready for relaxing dinners that don’t end with me having to calculate percentages." And she makes a feint at arguing that the waiters would benefit, too:
Imagine getting a performance review from someone who had worked with you part of one day (a day that might or might not be typical of your experience), and who likely knew little to nothing about your job. Most of us would (rightfully!) protest. We’d point out that the person simply wasn’t qualified to rate how well or poorly we did our job.
But the more she talks about it, the clearer it becomes that she's not worried that this poor performance metric harms waiters; she's mainly concerned that it's inefficient ("the data show that when it comes to judging the excellence of restaurant servers, we are
lousy"). The real object of her concern comes out in a passage I'm surprised they left in:
Businesses have other ways besides tips to hold workers accountable for customer service. When I worked at Borders (R.I.P, non-virtual bookstore), managers constantly observed our interactions with customers, and mystery shoppers and callers made sure we stayed on our best behavior.
See, there's an alternative model! You get the feeling that Trinko is more concerned waiters might be getting away with something than that they might be under-compensated -- like she saw the scene from
The Grapes of Wrath where the truckers leave a large tip for a waitress ("What's it to ya?"), and her face burned at the injustice of it.
Coincidentally, I saw a story in
MIT Technology Review today about workers on a construction project "being monitored by drones and software that can automatically flag slow progress." It includes one of the more depressing gifs I've seen in a while:
Again, getting rid of tipping might be great, and feel free to debate it in comments. But I am very aware that the scene above is what innovation generally means to the people who cut paychecks, and that's why, when people like Trinko make even reasonable-sounding neoliberal proposals about improving the world of work, I keep my guard up.
UPDATE. Comments are very sharp; among the tales of woe from the New Workplace, derelict's:
But that, I guess, is not as bad as what one of my sister-in-laws put up with when she worked for Ameritech. They forced all employees to go on "retreats" at which the employee's personality was broken and remade into what the company wanted it to be--pliable, conformist, unquestioning. The "counselors" used the same techniques that cults use. The company did not simply demand that you do your job competently--it demanded your soul, the totality of your being in exchange for a paycheck, some meager benefits, and the knowledge that you could be terminated with no notice at any moment.
There are several references to
Taylorism and the cult of efficiency (I'm surprised no one brought up
Modern Times). The abovelinked article contains this apposite journal quote:
The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen an erosion of job security in both manual and professional occupation… employee involvement schemes in manual production and the growth of temporary employment, outsourcing and project-based teams in the professions have influenced working conditions in both settings… these practices represent not a departure from scientific management, as is often presumed, but rather the adoption of Taylorist principles that were not fully manifested in the era of mass production.
The authors refer to this revival as neo-Taylorism, but I'm more partial to the term neo-Feudalism, as it makes more vivid the respective roles and conditions of serf and baron.
A few commenters lingered over Trinko's claim that she yearned for relief from the awful burden of calculating a tip, which strikes them and me as rich. Commenter Gabriel Ratchet says he heard one of the
Freakonomics guys making a similar claim ("YOU'RE AN ECONOMIST FERCHRISSAKES!! FIGURING OUT PERCENTAGES IS PART OF YOUR FUCKING JOB DESCRIPTION!!"). I can find no evidence Megan McArdle has complained about tipping too (seems a natural, no?), but one of her summer replacement drones, Courtney Knapp,
got into it in 2010; she talked about the "complicated etiquette of tipping" as if a coffee-shop were the Court at Versailles, and sniffed that "there is little evidence that tips are related to objective measurements of quality service." Again, I'm open to reason, but the fact that libertarians feel the need to make such self-evident bullshit arguments on behalf of this idea is at least one strike against it.
