Shortly before opening, Casa Bonita’s new owners Matt Stone and Trey Parker decided to eliminate tipping and instead pay workers a flat wage of $30 per hour.
Now I could be wrong, but getting a an hourly wage as a restaurant worker is FAR better than relying on tips. I feel like either workers in this situation are too obsessed with tips or there’s huge context missing.
I don’t understand how one can argue minimum wage + tipping is a better system than paying someone a living wage. There are very few and quickly decreasing places in the us where minimum wage = a living wage, and further the tipping system is often used by restaurant owners to justify paying less than minimum wage. So people’s incomes are wholly dependent upon their unique set of circumstances and attributes and how well they can milk money out of customers. It individualizes restaurant work, since suddenly you’re not making a low wage because your boss refuses to pay you, but because of your own failures in convincing your customers to give you more money.
Further this ignores two things. 1) according to the story they instituted this system because people weren’t tipping. Tipping as a system won’t work if individuals refuse to tip. 2) the crux of the issue seems more to be that they were promised full time work, but work is currently part time 3 days a week with no plans in place to open for full service, not the tipping.
I’m not against people working their way up to higher wages, nor am I against people getting payed differently based on seniority or something. But the way this story is written suggests a desire to return to a minimum wage+tipping system, which I am against. However reading the rest of the story and the workers’ petition, I’m not even sure that’s what the workers are suggesting.