Restaurant Workers/Tipped Workers
Workers who earn tips in the United States include parking attendants, car wash workers, nail salon workers and barbers, baggage porters and bellhops. These workers are entitled under federal law to a minimum wage of only $2.13 per hour. While it was originally set at 60 percent of the minimum wage, the "tipped minimum wage" now equals only 29 percent of the federal minimum wage.
Demographics. No clear statistics exist on the size of the tipped workforce, but 2.9 million restaurant workers alone are in jobs classified as tipped positions. Sixty-two percent of these are women, most of them between the ages of 25 and 44.
Wages and Hours. Tipped workers like waitresses and waiters have triple the poverty rate of the workforce as a whole. A 2010 survey of restaurant workers in San Francisco's Chinatown found that 50 per cent suffered minimum-wage violations and only 5 per cent earned a living wage. Among tipped workers, women earn less—an average of $0.40 less per hour than their male counterparts. In restaurants, this difference is $0.70 per hour. According to a 2005 survey, 54 percent worked more than 40 hours per week, and 31 percent more than 50 hours.
Health and Safety. A recently-released report about the health and safety conditions for restaurant workers in New York City found that two-thirds of these workers had suffered burns or cuts at work. None of the immigrant workers interviewed were ever given paid time off for injuries, but majorities of kitchen workers and dishwashers had suffered burns and cuts at work. White workers at the "front of the house" were much more likely to have health insurance provided by the employer than "back of the house" workers, who tend to be people of color and immigrants.
Benefits. Only 10 percent of restaurant workers surveyed in a 2010 five-city survey indicated they had coverage provided by their employer. In San Francisco's Chinatown, only 3 per cent of workers had health care provided by their employers.
Discrimination. A 2009 New York study found that restaurant positions are highly segregated by race, ethnicity and gender. Employment outcomes for job applicants were very different depending on the worker's race, with applicants of color far more likely to face more intense scrutiny about their experience and knowledge and to receive less-favorable job offers after interviews.
Compliance with Labor Laws. Forty percent of restaurant workers surveyed in the 2010 five-city report were victims of overtime violations. The survey found that tipped workers such as beauty, dry cleaning and repair workers had a 49.6 percent rate of minimum-wage violations on the job, while cooks, dishwashers and food preparers had a 23.1 percent violation rate. When the New York Department of Labor did a compliance audit of car washes, it found tip stealing in 21 percent of car washes statewide and in 39 percent of these workplaces in New York City.
Legal Context. When the tipped-worker minimum wage was established in 1966, it was a fixed percentage of the full minimum wage, so workers who received tips did not fall too far behind other minimum-wage workers. But in 1996, when Congress raised the overall minimum wage, it froze the tipped minimum wage. When finally the minimum wage was again increased in 2007, the tipped minimum wage stayed at $2.13.
Projected Growth. The restaurant industry is the largest private-sector employer in the United States. Nearly all restaurant occupations are expected to grow at a 10 percent or higher rate from 2006 to 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs as manicurists and pedicurists, another tipped-worker group, are expected to grow by 27.6 percent.
Photo Courtesy of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
Shailesh's Story
I started working in the restaurant industry in 1997 and have made a career of it ever since. In the first few restaurants that I worked in, I noticed how much I was considered an outsider since I have an accent, but not a European one. In most restaurants that I worked in, the managers preferred to hire white Americans — those were the people who they thought were able to entertain guests in conversation. Many of my managers assumed that all immigrants, just because we were not from here, were not able to entertain guests, that we did not know the food, that we could not do a good job.
In one of the restaurants that I worked at, I believe the manager thought I was from the Middle East. He used to watch me extra closely, always observing my every move. He made me cut my mustache, and never gave me the opportunity to deal directly with guests even though I had adequate knowledge and ability of the food and service industry. Only the servers were able to deal with guests. This is the type of clear racial and ethnic discrimination that we face as immigrants.
In most places that I worked, it was very hard for me to get a promotion. They really do not see your talent and upgrade it properly, unless you were very close with the manager. Even the employee handbook had nothing about the proper way to get a promotion from, say, a busser to a runner or a runner to a waiter. One time when I asked for a promotion, the manager told me that I didn't have any experience to deal with the guests, even though I had been working there for years. Instead, he would only give me a back waiter job on a rotating and on-call basis. But this is not so surprising since the managers and the waiters were all white — I could not be selected or picked because I was not white enough. All the bussers were Bengali and Latino — and I was the only one from Nepal. This is the very common, yet hidden and untold story and pain of people of color.
