The Tipping System — Katy Osuna

Feb 18

Feb 18 The Tipping System

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PSA #psa #fyp #foryou #bartender #server #work #tips #chooseone #CleanFreshHype #photography101 #hardwork #viral
♬ original sound - f.aa.ded

This TikTok has been circulating around the internet over the last week. It’s a bartender, single mom, showing her paycheck. As a bartender who receives tips, her employer only pays her the tipped minimum wage, which is $2.13 per hour. So after taxes, a paycheck for 70 hours was a little over $9.

The tipping system in the U.S. is incredibly complicated and the entirety of the restaurant business is not only built off of paying tipped workers below minimum wage, but just paying obscenely low wages in general.

Over the last couple months I’ve been doing a lot of research into the tipping system for a couple episodes of my podcast, Copper & Heat. As I’ve gone through this, my mind has been changed several times as I uncovered more and more. I’m sure the more I dig into, it’s going to change again. I started out making an assumption - that people that work in the front of house make way more money than the people in the back because of tips. That was what I went into these episodes with, and that was the question I wanted to explore - why? But as I dug further, that was the wrong assumption to make. In national averages, back-of-house doesn’t make less than front-of-house. It’s actually the other way around, though only by a couple dollars.

When I saw the first post about that TikTok video, I read through the comments. The top responses were:

This is messed up
So what, she made $9 on her paycheck. She made $700 in tips, that’s plenty.
That’s just the way it is - If we paid tipped people minimum wage the repercussions for restaurant owners would be CATASTROPHIC

A lot of people were thinking about this woman’s situation the way I was approaching these episodes - from my own perspective without understanding the system as a whole. There are quite a few waiters who can make a living wage off of tips. The captains at the 3-Michelin starred restaurant I worked at were getting paid somewhere around $120-$150k with tips. 2 to 3 times that of any of us in the kitchen. So that was the perspective I was coming from. I think there are a lot of servers and bartenders who can make that work.

However, there are several things I learned while researching this episode that flipped all of this on its head:

There are several states (including California where I work) that do not have a sub-minimum wage. Everyone, even if they make tips, gets paid minimum wage. Here’s a chart of their average wages.
Women working as servers in states with a sub minimum wage are twice as likely to experience sexual harassment. Because they rely entirely on their tips, so they have to subject themselves to whatever the customer does. They are at the whims of the people who pay their wage, rather than being evaluated by managers for actually doing their job.
Black and other POC make far less in tips than white counterparts because they are also at the whims of the people who pay their wage and racism is alive and well. Plus the history of tipping is rooted slavery, so there’s that.
The laws and regulations of this system are funded almost entirely by big brands like Olive Garden, McDonalds, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jamba Juice, etc etc, who’s CEOs are making bank and who’s profit margins are very very high. The vast majority of restaurant workers are working in these kinds of restaurants, living under the poverty line, and relying on public assistance like food stamps.

So. All of this to say, the system is economically, socially, and culturally entrenched, and thinking about the issue from a purely personal perspective… means you miss some things.

If you want to learn more and go down some of the same rabbit holes that I did while researching, here’s a bunch of links. It’s overwhelming, I know. I’d love to hear what you think!