Why worry about the hourly wages that waiters get paid by their employers – their real money comes in tips, right?  That’s the logic that has left the hourly wage for tipped workers at $2.13 per hour even as the national minimum wage has moved above $7.00.  My recent research makes it clear, however, that tip income is variable and not really in workers’ control.  The workers (mostly women) who do these jobs need real and reliable income, not just a pittance that can barely cover a meal after working an entire shift.

In my Study of Restaurant Employment[1], set in full-service restaurants at the low end of the industry, I interviewed owners and managers in a sample of 37 “ma and pa” independents throughout Washington State and sites of two “family” and “casual dining” chains in suburban Seattle, Chicago and Vancouver, Canada.  Focusing on the job of waiter, I found that their tipped income fluctuates a lot, and not just due to how pleasant or speedy or otherwise capable they were.  Rather, the control that restaurant employers retain over many aspects of waitstaff scheduling and tip sharing practices can have dramatic impacts on how much waiters take home in tips.

For example, it is restaurant owners and managers who often decide, even when they permit waiter input, what days and shifts their waiters work.  As you and I know from hovering in long lines during Saturday dinner rushes versus strolling right into a seat for a sudden 2pm Monday French fry craving (perhaps I’m projecting), restaurant shifts differ greatly in customer traffic. That means that tip earning potential differs across shifts, too.  Similarly, restaurant employers often retain control over which sections their waiters will work, and some sections are more popular – and thus populous – than others.  More tip differences.

Waiters can also lose out on tips by exercising their access to workplace flexibility, a sometimes-available workplace tool for alleviating the work-life conflict of American families.  When Sally can’t work that Saturday night dinner shift, it’s a good bet that a coworker will want to scoop it up, lucrative tip-generator that it is.  But in these tight economic times, Sally may get traded a far less appealing shift in return (serving a lonely me some French fries), or none at all, with her coworker adding rather than swapping hours.  All of these findings point to the reality that not all waitstaffing hours are the same, tip-wise.

But the story isn’t done there.  Restaurant employers also commonly oversee “tip sharing” practices at their establishments – meaning how much tipped employees, namely waiters, are expected to “tip out” to coworkers such as cooks, busboys, and dishwashers. This can be a helpful management tool for incentivizing teamwork and good performance, and it happens to help employers subsidize the wages they pay to their “back of the house” staff.  But in my study, I found that these expectations varied enormously from one place to another, and had substantial impacts on how much waiters took home in tips.

As a result of all of this, it appeared that some of the American waiters in my study did not earn the standard minimum wage even after tips, and many if not all of them experienced substantial fluctuation in their take-home incomes due to employer-driven variation in tip earnings.  These conditions are added to others increasingly faced by hourly workers in the U.S., including job schedules that frequently change at the impetus of employers, are set at the last minute (making it hard for workers to plan for dependent care) and vary week to week in total hours, as well as lack of access to key employment benefits like health insurance and paid time off[2].  It’s no surprise that in my study, waiters with primary care responsibilities for dependents were clustered in restaurants with higher base wages – in Washington State, which has not adopted a sub-minimum wage for tipped employees but instead pays them the standard minimum wage.  But troublingly, women waiters in both Seattle and Chicago were disproportionately concentrated in sites of a chain that offered neither health insurance nor paid time off.  Men, on the other hand, found their way to the other chain, which did offer these – though after a year-long wait.

Most minimum wage workers are employed in restaurants, and most of those workers are women.[3,4]  Further, many lower-wage workers in the U.S. become trapped in minimum wage “careers”; for women and those with primary dependent care responsibilities especially, it’s just not that easy to change occupations and industries as is often required to move into better-paying opportunities.#  At the low end of the restaurant industry especially, tipped workers are therefore sometimes a vulnerable and “stuck” group.  This group’s vulnerability makes it all the more taxing to impose such a high, fixed wage deduction – a lowly $2.13 tipped minimum wage – on such unsteady earnings.

Take a tip from the evidence, and ask our federal legislators to give Sally and her peers a more decent wage floor.

NOTES

1. Links to abstracts for articles based on the SRE study can be found at: http://socwork.wisc.edu/anna-haley-lock.  This research was graciously funded by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and West Coast Poverty Center at the University of Washington.

2. http://hum.sagepub.com/content/61/9/1203.abstract

3.  http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2010tbls.htm#5

4. http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/20lead2010_txt.htm

5. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/labor_markets_2005_05.pdf

Anna Haley-Lock, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin.
http://socwork.wisc.edu/anna-haley-lock