Since ours in the US is generally a percentage of the bill, people in expensive restaurants can make more. Do they work harder? Do they have fewer tables so less checks are tipping? 20% tips on 5 hundred dollar tables is $100 every 60-90 minutes, but shifts are usually only a few hours. So maybe $3-400 for a 4-5 hour dinner shift? In a diner you’d are probably half that per table but for more tables and faster turnover. What’s a good wage?
Serving is an unskilled position. They should be able to make enough money to cover rent, bills, food, family and transportation…with at least something left over at the end of it that could be saved or used for leisure. In other words, they deserve to make as much as any other worker.
There is nothing that a server does that entitles them to a percentage of my bill. I was a server. On the whole, it sucks if you are not a pretty/hot/cute/desirable person.
Tipping in general is theft. Theft from the customer, and wage theft from the worker.
No disrespect meant, but the term unskilled in actually part of corporate propaganda. If someone who starts working there today is not as good at it as someone who has worked there for 2 years then there are skills which take time to acquire and thus it is a skilled job. Unskilled labour is an invention of capitalists who want to pay as little as possible and will use whatever weasle words they can to convince other workers that either they are better than the unskilled or that they themselves are unskilled and replaceable.
That’s fair. I was using the term to differentiate between someone who completes an apprenticeship, certificate, or degree program that is required before one can work in certain jobs/professions versus a newspaper ad. An honest days work is work, obviously.
The term usually means that the skill is something an average person could pick up easily and has a steep and quickly flattening learning curve, so while a person that has worked as a server for 2 years would be much better than someone just started, they will not be that much better than someone who’s at it for 1 year. And the difference between 2 and 20 years on that job is neglectible. Compare that with something like programming or medicine where the difference between 2 and 20 years of experience is absurd and you start to get a feeling of what the term means.
That being said, skilled or unskilled labor everyone deserves to have a basic income that covers all of their needs and at least some of their wants.
Correct, there is a meaningful difference between jobs with more or less time required to reach a high degree of competence, no argument there. The major issue is labeling something as low skill. Working in customer service requires skills around managing angry customers, managing time, following up issues, using complex ordering systems, handling payments and issues with payments, and all sorts of similar stuff. The emotional labour of working in direct customer service is high skill and high difficulty. Just because there is not a university degree in handling those situations doesn’t mean it is low skill, it is just not a skill we recognise and pay for.
The issue from my end is why do we ask whether a job is skilled or unskilled when thinking about pay rates? If a job needs to be done then someone should be paid to do it. If we label is as low skill we are justifying paying them less. This is wrong in a bunch ofbeays and ends up hurting lots of people.
I am reminded of the intelligence and genetics debate. People can talk all day about how you would design a study to tease out the difference between two populations in terms of intelligence while controlling for all other factors and how to reduce bias and so on, but the question keeps coming up. Why do we want this answer? What benefit would ranking the races for intelligence have? What societal changes would be informed by this research? In my opinion the question is not a good one, we should instead be looking more at how to support the development of any child to have their innate intelligence come to full growth without interference from things like stress and poverty. Knowing that people from one group or another have a theoretically slightly higher or lower ceiling won’t help actually improve outcomes for people, it will just help racists sound legitimate, and in the same way ranking the jobs will just help capitalists pay people less for the same work.
I think the counter argument is, should someone who spent decades training to do a job be paid the same as someone who just walked in off the street?
When you’re talking about justifying paying someone less, the people who think that way would be happy to see neurosurgeons paid $2 + tips, but they can’t make it stick because someone else would be happy to pay them whatever they ask for if it means they get to live longer.
However, I’m not in favor of the term, “unskilled labor”. I don’t think it really applies to any job. I prefer “entry level” when you’re talking about a job someone can do without any prior training.
Amen!!