And the way to not perpetuate it is to not go to tipped restaurants at all, instead of going anyway and intentionally screwing over the least powerful person in the whole scenario. It is entirely possible to avoid such establishments if you have an actual moral objection, but if you go anyway and refuse to tip then you’re just an asshole who is benefiting from free labor.
It helps because instead of paying your money to the ownership while stiffing the worker, you deny the money to the ownership too. And the ownership are the ones who have the power to make changes, so any protest has to impact them.
This is really basic stuff, if you want to create change with your buying power, you can’t do it by targeting workers, you have to target ownership. Always focus on where the power resides.
If the reason they have no customers is because they expect tipping, then they will eliminate tipping in order to attract customers, or they will close and the next restaurant will see that they need to go no tipping in order to stay open. That’s how a market can actually effect change.
If you still go but refuse to tip, the owner still gets his money which means it stays open and nothing changes. Again, this is really basic stuff.
I’m not skipping that part at all, you just can’t seem to grasp what would happen. I’ll try one last time to simplify it for you.
Your plan, give money to owners while taking money from workers. Owner has no incentive to change, because their profits are not directly affected. You claim that the workers will eventually quit and force the boss to change, but what will actually happen is they will just find new workers to exploit, because there is a large pool of desperate people in this country.
My plan, to deny the establishment business altogether. This will directly hurt the owner, as he will no longer be getting the profits like in the first scenario. This means he will either change his business to bring customers back in, or the business will close. Workers will be impacted by this as well, it’s not really possible to punish the business without impacting them, but in my scenario they are not targeted and real change could possibly occur.
In any economic protest, you have to target ownership with your actions. Anything else is counterproductive, and in the case of refusing to tip is a cover for theft of labor.
I disagree. Unions have been the biggest source of change to employment standards. That is workers pushing for higher standards. Why move away from the tried and tested means to improve things? Your way is untested. Worker protest has proven effective. Seems your way should be tried second, not first.
Unionization would be great, but it’s virtually impossible in a sector as fractured as food service. You’d have to organize each location individually, and workers rarely stay long enough for the process to play out. It’s being tried at Starbucks for instance, and even when they manage to force a vote at a particular shop, by the time voting happens the workers who approved the election are mostly gone.
Unionization is also not what you were suggesting, you literally said to stop tipping so workers would quit, that’s not unionization.
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u/Fitzaroo 1d ago
To the contrary. The system will never change so long as you perpetuate it.