Sorry–more of a general request.
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4x15 or $60/hr is a significant living wage for someone with little monetary investment into an education. Living expenses are based on location and lifestyle which are personal choices
I am still not feeling the same specific outrage for waiters and waitresses. I mean. I get that major cities like SF are expensive to live in. I get it. I just don’t get why are we specifically worry about waiters and waitresses? Like you said, $60/hr is pretty high.
If we translate $60/hr into annual income, that will be about $126 K a year for a 8 hr shift per day. ($60/hr X 2087 hr a year)
A UC Berkeley grad student salary is about $31K annual. This 31K sounds much higher than when I was a student, so they probably count the salary before we pay into the tuition and count the healthcare as part of the compensation as well. I remember I was only taking about $1600-1700 per month into my pocket. I have a friend who worked as a waitress in a medium (not high end nor low end) sushi restaurant, and she told me that she made about $3000-4000 a month, but it wasn’t even full time. She just worked as a part time job while going to school (college).
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Harters, in this case I actually don’t think London benefits this time - I think you actually get a much better deal in the rest of the country if you are on minimum/living wage.
Living wage is only 14% higher in London than elsewhere. Yet many costs here (especially property rent/purchase) are much, much more than 14% above the rest of the country. The extra £1.15 per hour here wouldn’t go very far paying the hundreds of extra pounds rent, and it would be much harder here to make ends meet.
Dean
You may be right - my anti-London prejudice gets the better of my logic from time to time 
It’ll be very variable. Some “elsewhere” places are expensive, others not so. On the one hand, it might be relatively cheap living in, say, Bolton with its food market and good public transport but if you are working out in a more rural area, it’ll be different.
A little off topic but you would fall over if you knew what some college students make as exotic dancers.
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True! It would be a lot more manageable to be on living wage in Galashiels or Grimsby than Bristol or Brighton.
in 1978 graduate students in chemistry were making about 12K a year.
Why would we factor in what we think the waiter or waitress might be making in the decision of whether or not to tip?
Tipping is cultural provision meant to recognize service. We wouldn’t tip grad students because they aren’t in a service industry. Conversely, why would we say “You provided me good service and I would love to give you a tip, but I think your hourly wage is too high for your position, so I won’t do so”.
There is a separate issue of whether we should tip for service. I like the idea that some restaurants have of eliminating tips, considering service as part of the overall experience and factoring everything in an overall price. But in that model, the waiters know that the expected norm is different.
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Because tipping in restaurants has become a requirement of dining out, and it is recognized more as an income supplement than a gratuity. It’s no longer really optional. Restaurant servers have traditionally got a much larger tip as a percentage of sales than other service people because servers have always had a much lower minimum wage. Now that restaurant server’s wages are level with retail staff or taxi drivers or doormen, is an automatic 15 or 20% really justified?
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Absolutely . I wish there were wait staff chiming in here .No clue of what’s happening in the service trade . Let’s hear it from those people . Not our bull shit guess .
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Human nature being what it is, I fully expect them to say that continuing to tip 15 - 20% is entirely appropriate. Why would anyone wish to turn down the opportunity of extra income (although, as an aside, I oppose my government reducing taxes for middle class people like me, at the expense of poorer people - but that’s a different discussion)
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There are a lot of service jobs that provide significantly higher levels of personal service and attention to the customer than a waiter yet are not tipped. And they are not high paying jobs. Above minimum wage but under $15/hr. So if we are to assume it’s only about recognizing service and not because wait staff gets paid so little then why are we not tipping others that provide personal service. I think the fact that waiters have always been paid so little that it became customary to tip for that service.
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Is even $15/hour a “living wage”? That translates to about $30,000/year for full-time work.
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Because many here have already used this line of argument FOR tipping – e.g. they are not making enough for living a life. Thus I am raising the point if indeed waiters and waitresses are the one who are in most dire need.
That is the point. Should it be a cultural provision – in the future?
I think this is part of the discussion.
I think many British workers (not just restaurant workers) would be really pleased if they had a salary equivalent of $30K.
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If it is up to the graduate students to chime in, then they will also say they need a tipping too. To quote Hartes, why would an average waiter or (any professions) say “I am being paid too much. Please cut my income”
If anything, this is called “conflict of interest”.
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I can’t speak to the cost of living in the U.K., but a family of four – heck, a couple without children – would struggle to get by on a gross income of $30,000/year in the US. It would vary by geography, but still, it would be a challenge virtually everywhere.
So that’s a “living wage” in the UK?
Well the stark reality of things is that not every job pays a “Living” wage. Always been that way & always will be that way.
My oldest daughter works the counter at a friend’s pizza shop part time. Even if she worked 80 hrs a week she couldn’t live on what she would make. It has opened her eyes though about the importance of education and why we accept nothing less than Honor Roll.
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