I think this is a very good analogy to the use of residuals--and, perhaps, a good argument for why they are, perhaps, taking the Mr. White position (as opposed to the Mr. Pink) position is a more ethical position in support of so-called economic justice given the current framework, even if it ends up murkying the categorical imperatives of some ideal world.
First, it is interesting to me that the framework of both tipping and residuals places the worker--whether the writer or the waiter--at the mercy of the consumer (or, if you prefer, the impersonal imperatives of the market.) This is not a universal situation. I have a German friend who, when we go out to eat, is equally annoyed as Mr. Pink about having to leave more than a symbolic tip on the table since, in his culture, providing a substantial tip is unusual. Service employees like waitstaff get the same minimum wage as other employees, if not more so the idea that the customer is supposed to supplement the income with tips is not there. On the other hand, the sort of uniquely American idea that the service will be improved if the server is subject to the judgment of the person being served is actually undermined if tipping is made a culture imperative.
Perhaps it is all a wash in the end--if waitstaff were paid more by the restaurant, that charge would be included in the food price and the consumer would likely end up paying the extra 15-20% anyway. But by making it almost a charitable contribution--the Mr. White feeling, which, while commendable, has its own sort of liberal oppressiveness to it by the expectation of a certain deference to the consumer--it creates a more subjective relationship between server and customer that, in the end, makes the job of managing waitstaff less of a problem for managers: instead it is up to the market. The other benefit is that it encourages waitstaff to work like salespeople as well, since their tip is contingent on the final bill. So it acts like a sort of commission and the definition of "good service" from the perspective of management is keeping the customer just happy enough to buy more stuff. Whether it is stuff they actually want or if it will benefit them, is not relevant. Then the policing role of management is to make sure that, for instance, people aren't getting 6 cups of coffee when they only paid for one.
In watching the Tarrantino clip, funny as it is, it's pretty obvious that he hasn't actually worked at one of these jobs himself. It could be attributed to making Mr. Pink seem like a doofus, but I don't think this is the case since the only person to correct him is Mr. White, who doesn't seem to know much more about the economics of the situation. The final little piece on tips being taxed comes out of the blue, no one having mentioned anything about taxes. When I was waiting tables, this was hardly the biggest problem since you are pretty much free to declare whatever you want in terms of your tips (so long, of course, as they aren't officially calculated by the restaurant). Maybe it's because of some basic bourgeois antagonism to taxes that Tarrantino focuses on this instead of the issue of wages, which is where the real problem lies. Pink makes the declaration--which no one corrects--that waitstaff make the same wage as McDonalds workers, whom we don't "deem tipworthy." This may be the case in most European countries (correct me if I'm wrong), but in the US, waitstaff, by law, only make 1/2 the minimum wage. Therefore, the idea that it is some twisted cultural practice, true as it may be, is not the case at the level of the interaction between workers and consumers. Therefore, John's declaration that...
> If you wish to support such a classist job categorization you are free
> to of course but that seems an odd position to take if one cares about
> economic justice.
...seems little more than an overly pure understanding of what economic justice would be. You're already in an establishment, presumedly, which has set up workers in this way. You've already patronized it and received your relatively cheaper goods in exchange: it's hardly reasonable to suddenly become a class warrior at the moment that you're asked to pitch in on the tip. It comes off as an attempt to shroud Mr. Pink stinginess in the rhetoric of Mr. White.
This "Mr. White-washing of Mr. Pink" is a standard kind of counter-intuitive libertarian re-articulation of liberal positions--i.e. the idea of welfare (in itself, i.e. apart from the specific problems in any particular system) is inherently dehumanizing and supporting it is actually the KEY contributor to the problem you set out to fix. On the other hand, it's deployed rather instrumentally and the rules can be suddenly reversed depending on the particular needs of the market in relation to the state.
I don't know if a careful examination might bear this out, but the cultural imperatives of the idea of residuals is virtually the same as tipping, only it has a longer, historical stretch. As the IP went to the corporation, the ability of writers to re-work their own stuff would be limited by their contract with the corporation. On the other hand, despite your insistence on not believing in IP, you basically say that in any transaction which you have as an artist, etc., the person who buys your work should have the absolute right to do whatever they want with it. Which seems to indicate that the thing you have a problem with here is the idea that the artist has any right to their work once it has left their hands, i.e. it actually seems to support exactly the absolute rights of the corporate owners of this property. Since I don't believe this is your position, I am a bit confused at the way this seems. Either way, the analogy to sculpture is not completely apt since it would be sort of like if you thought you'd like to do something on a certain sculpture or cabinet, but to do so, you'd have to go into the new owner's house or business and re-work it. As the length of time for this copyright is extended, the ability of a writer to go back and do something with stuff they've already worked on--particularly the stuff that has the most cultural resonance--is limited.
We can be critical of this situation as it now stands for not being radical enough, but pragmatically it makes some sense in the current institutional configuration. I am not sure where I stand on the issue of IPR in general--I think it can be of some use and, especially in a situation where there is some risk involved on the part of an initial investment--the problem that Michael Perelman discusses (and, of course, Marx) in _Railroading Economics_. It costs some money to publish a lot of books to be distributed before the sale can be assured. Likewise pressing CDs and producing something like a TV show or movie. It is fairly easy to think in terms of free culture if you are a single producer.
The earlier analogy of being a carpenter or sculptor is a bit skewed since it doesn't really take this into account. This is sort of separate though it would be a very different situation if, for instance, you were a contractor who had paid for other people to help you build those cabinets, or to make that sculpture, but then, before you had the chance to get paid by the person who had contracted the work, someone walked in, took that stuff and got paid for it. Obviously this is not exactly what would happen because, again, we're dealing with different kinds of stuff, but if we're making analogies the reasons for IP have to do precisely with the need to have return on your investment of time and, in some cases, money.
All of your examples of contract work presume that the complete cycle of M-C-M--at least for the producer, whether that producer is a cabinetmaker, a sculptor, or a teacher--has taken place. Obviously this is getting out of hand in terms of the length of time IPR is good for, the exclusivity of them as cultural products, and the concentration of these rights in the hands of corporate individuals, but there is a logic to the need for IPR precisely in situations where large scale productions are taking place which require a lot of upfront investment. Then again, maybe a critic would say that we would all be better off without blockbusters and special effects. Then again, the usually correlative to this is that we should just have some good, well written movies, which, in the current discussion, seems a bit nostalgic.
This brings me back to the issue of the idea that the impersonal market is used in the US culture is the place where people should be given their remuneration, i.e. the analogy between tipping and residuals. In short, the idea of residuals is supposed to reward work that is especially popular, especially that which has the kind of staying power that makes it popular long after it first appears. Again, I don't know all the negotiations that went into this, but the idea of giving artists--whether actors, directors, or writers (not to mention the artistic workers on set, most of which, I don't believe, get residuals)--a cut of the stuff earned by the corporate owner after the initial sale of their services, enshrines both a certain notion of creativity and a certain notion of how that creativity should be rewarded--i.e. through the market, where consciousness of what will be most "popular" is essential.
The long and short of it is that there is a sense that "better" creative work will result if creative workers are given some good market discipline instead of getting paid more upfront. And, on the other hand, since the creative workers most often given residuals--especially writers--are also the ones who will be most limited in being able to re-work their creative labors by copyright restrictions (as opposed to simply the removal of the circumstances of the production, i.e. closing the set) in ways that they COULD without copyright restrictions, there is also a logic there in exchange for the the idea of perpetual copyright to the corporation. I'm sure there was a complex negotiation to work all of this out, and as I said in an earlier post, the conjunctural reasons for these agreements being less valuable are manifold. But these are basically technical issues about the way the agreements function in this changed environment rather than a real opportunity for revolutionizing the whole system.
If TV producers get less revenue from actual over air broadcasts and, therefore, pass along a smaller amount of revenue to people who the system deems qualified* for residuals, but, at the same time, have found a way to supplement this on-air advertiser income by selling DVDs, digital downloads, or advertising on digital broadcasts, it seems like merely a technical question of squaring the numbers and expanding the original contract to take into account the range of venues in which the studio is making cash on the broadcasts. Presumably, this is not just a case on works that are going to be produced in the future, but would also apply to the back-catalog of programs every media conglomerate owns. So, if writers had previously been guaranteed a certain percentage of residuals on programs sold in syndication, this would no longer be the case if the practice of syndication was simply (or mostly) abandoned in place of some on-line, on-demand service.
*Again, though there may be serious cultural perceptions behind this (the i.e. the kind of thing that Mr. Pink, if he were correct, means in his analogy to McDonalds), the fact that some people are able to contractually receive residuals is also likely because of a certain set of negotiation circumstances in the past which, if we looked at agreements made between other unions in Hollywood, was something which was only partially the result of some inexplicable preference for certain kinds of creative labor over others, and more the result of the unions for the workers in categories that qualify for residuals being asked to take less money upfront and, in the case of writers, to agree to cede their copyright, (which would already exist for the work they had written, were it not written under contract for the studio), to the studio, in exchange for a percentage of the long term profits.
We can argue about whether any of this is just, whether it should be as it is, but the fact is that these particular workers were, by contract guaranteed a certain percentage of income gained from their creative labor at an earlier point. This agreement, again, was likely made in exchange for a smaller upfront fee and, again, this was supposed to create a situation where the worker produced better work because they were subject to the imperatives of the market.
What is at stake, then, is, to return to the analogy of tipping, is: this waitress, understanding that she is getting a smaller wage in exchange for submitting herself to the imperatives of the market, personified in this case by the punchy thugs of this Tarantino scenario, will then receive a tip. But instead of Mr. Pink and Mr. White debating whether we should actually leave a tip (which is, in IPR terms, the question one might argue about on forums for the deceased Demonoid or TPB) an alternative argument is adopted by the waitress's boss, who, halfway through the meal, decides that, because he owns the table at which these guys are sitting, he should actually get a portion of whatever tip she gets. It's not a very precise analogy in terms of what is being done to the current WGA, but the idea is that nothing all that substantial has changed in terms of the transactions with consumers that are bringing money to the studios--instead of selling advertising to advertisers to show the programs over monopoly controlled airwaves they will sell advertising to advertisers to show programs over (if they get their way) a two-tiered system of internet broadband or over the FIOS systems of AT&T or Verizon or over whatever other wireless distribution systems emerge after the spectrum auctions at the end of the month: if the studios and media conglomerates get their way, the main transaction between the studio, its advertisers, and the consumers will not change substantially, but the fees they will owe to writers (for work already done as well as work they will do soon) will change because these venues aren't covered.
We can get upset about the fact that nothing structural will necessarily be changing, but it seems rather recalcitrant in terms of labor solidarity to fault one set of workers for trying to continue to benefit from the terms of their contract simply because it fails to overturn the whole system. If nothing else, it is a fairly proactive approach to showing these conglomerates that, in spite of their belief that they will simply be able to cross promote everything they own willy nilly, they will still owe something to the people who actually work on these products--and have worked on them in the past. Maybe it will make them re-think their belief that they can just turn the internet into another thick pipe that pours money into their banks and IP libraries as some sort of past investment which they can transform into capital at any point in the future, with no consideration of what, under their original contracts, they might have owed to the people who worked on them. The suits' fantasies (and possibly their projections of future income) are obviously calculated on something like this otherwise they wouldn't be playing such hardball here. In that way, if no other, I'm pretty pleased to see the strike continuing, even if I'm not yet confident that its success would necessarily do much for anyone but these workers.