On 21/11/2013, at 1:16 AM, Mike Ballard <mbbtraven5 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> When I first moved to Australia, I still tipped for awhile. But then,
> I found that nobody else did. Must be the better labour laws we have
> down here. That's what I reckoned and still think. There's much more
> union power in Australia than in the USA. The Democrats basically
> ignore the unions whereas here, they have substantial input in the
> Labor Party and to some extent in the Greens in Australia.
The unions in this industry are not very powerful, membership is mainly in the big hotels. Though they do have some institutional power through the wage-fixing system.
Hospitality is a crappy industry to work in. The conditions are dreadful, split shifts and irregular hours are all too common. My then 15 year old daughter worked as a waiter in the local Bracknell pub until she got jack of the irregular hours. Which interfered with both her schoolwork and social life. She only got the job because they could pay her a lot lower (junior) wages. Mind you, minimum wage for a15 year old schoolgirl in the hospitality industry in Australia was about $11/hr plus applicable penalty rates for weekend work. Making that $2.13/hr min. wage in the "generous tipping" USA look totally laughable.
When I was a kid that age, I had a job selling afternoon newspapers after school. (That was back in the dark ages. Obviously people these days wouldn't even know what an afternoon newspaper was.) I would collect my bundle of newspapers from the newsagent and hawk them around the local pubs in a roughly 3 block area of Launceston, frequented by people getting off work and downing a few drinks on the way home. Those were the days when being a publican was a licence to print money, the pubs were packed, standing room only in the bars for those few hours. There was then, almost literally, a pub on every corner of my round. I didn't get paid at all by the newsagent, not a cracker. Jeez that bloke was a miser, but his tiny little news agency probably only survived because he was. When he died, it died with him. Tips was all I got. I did that for a couple of years, every day after school, then I would head to the pinball parlour and waste the lot. ;-)
So I have a vague idea what its like to work for tips., I guess a bit more idea than the average Australian. It didn't bother me then, because being a kid you expect to get patronised. But its no life for a grown man, or woman. Its a degrading thing.
Frankly, I suspect that George Orwell was right back when he summed up his experiences in the restaurant industry in 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. His conclusion was that, in a just society, restaurants should simply not exist. There is no room is a just society for an industry where people go and expect to be waited on as if they are somehow better than others. Something like that anyhow, can't remember exactly what he said, but I think his sentiment was spot on.
But tipping does make it a lot worse for the exploited servant, robbing them of the little dignity that even the wage labourer has a right to expect.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas