On December 1st the Payment of Wages (Amendment) (Tips and Gratuities) Act will come into effect. This means that from December all tips including service charges will go to staff and can’t be used towards making up basic wages.
Until recently there has been a great deal of obliqueness regarding where service charges go, as well as variation among establishments. The assumption among consumers is often that the service charge they pay goes to service staff as a tip, which, however, is rarely the case in Ireland. The law will also ensure that all tips paid electronically will go to staff – another one of those things that consumers often believe to be happening but isn’t. Furthermore, establishments will be required to clearly display information about how tips are distributed.
These are all good things, guaranteed to provide some small financial relief to a portion of people in some of the worst paid jobs. It is easy to say this: these are good things. It is harder to say: these are measures of justice. Tipping is important, and we should all tip. Tipping is an act of decency. Tipping is also, however, a measure of inequality.
Tipping originated in feudal times when masters would give their servants a tip if they thought the servant had performed particularly well. In Victorian England it was a sign of class to tip, which Americans soon began to mimic in an attempt to appear aristocratic.
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But after the civil war in the US tips became a new kind of wage – that afforded to former slaves who still were not allowed to do any but the most menial kind of work. Instead of paying a newly-freed slave, employers could exploit free labour on the basis of their workers receiving small sums from customers.
This led to the beginning of an anti-tipping movement, which argued that tipping went against the American ideals of egalitarianism and the eradication of class. While the anti-tipping movement spread into the labour movement in Europe in the early 20th century so that tipping became less prominent here, its impact was fleeting in the US where tipping went from being a nominal form of income for ex-slaves to a way of avoiding paying service staff adequately at the same time as incentivising them to sweat harder for every dollar.
Happily, tipping is less a part of wages here and more a display of good will, respect and an acknowledgment of the fact that we are not paid enough. However, there is a new kind of worker whom tipping is much more a moral obligation as opposed to a decency: delivery drivers for apps like deliveroo.
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Deliveroo provides no service whatsoever above what a regular restaurant website offers, but makes billions out of loopholes which allow their employees to work for well under the minimum wage. This isn’t just a slide in the direction of Americanism, it’s a slide away from the idea of fundamental human rights. The advertising page for deliveroo jobs promises, horrifyingly, that “the harder you work, the more you get paid”. As if we were not all, regardless of how fast we can cycle in the rain, entitled to a wage which ensures a basic standard of living.
What is worrying about the new legislation coming into effect in December is that it might encourage us to think more about tipping and less about the minimum wage. While we have imported a system which allows people to work for under minimum wage, the minimum wage is itself, when adjusted for inflation, dropping. Thus we are making great strides towards increasing inequality.
We are talking about tipping while most people on minimum wage don’t get tips anyway (eg in cleaning jobs or retail). The amendment of the Payments and Wages Act is not actually the sort of change we need to see even if it has an immediately positive impact. While it may enact a kindness upon service staff we need to consider the meaning of tipping and then ask the question about this legislation: who is it for?
The main thrust of this amendment is towards increasing transparency for consumers – customers must know exactly where their money is going. In this sense it is a provision for consumer rights and consumer control. Consumers may now feel more comfortable that they are spending their money as they choose to spend it.
I’m not so sure this law is about safeguarding workers’ rights. It feels more like a matter of safeguarding capitalism, like continuing to bind individualism to consumerism. Consumers are assured that money remains a tool for self-expression, not to mention for disciplining workers: I like you, I don’t like you, I am good, I am rich, you are bad, you have pleased me.
Let us just be wary as the Silicon Valley moguls dictate more and more of not just how our country is laid out but also how we think about labour. Let us be wary as owls.
Rivkah McKinley is a Dublin-based writer