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This week on CounterSpin: While many folks go to family or friends for Thanksgiving dinner, somewhere around 15 million Americans have that holiday meal at a restaurant, with more millions ordering food to eat at home. What that means is that millions of restaurant workers don’t have a choice about where to have their Thanksgiving. And of course that’s only a small part of the things that make work in that industry difficult and, for many, precarious.
But change is afoot, with a movement to outlaw the “tipped wage” — the idea that a minimum wage of $2.13 is OK, because waitstaff get enough in voluntary tips to make up for it. The change is driven by persistent efforts of restaurant workers and their representatives, and eminent among those is our guest, Saru Jayaraman. She’s co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California/Berkeley. She’s also author of the book Behind the Kitchen Door and the upcoming Forked: A New Standard for American Dining.
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And our usual look back at the week’s press, including Donald Trump and the truth, and what you can and can’t say at CNN.
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SOURCE LINK:
- “Eliminating the Tipped Minimum Wage,” Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
If a business cannot afford to pay their workers the federal minimum wage (for whatever reason), then it should go out of business.
Disparity of wealth — Is it caused by disparity of intelligence?
For half of the workers in America are laboring-class as they do all the manual labor, while the other half of workers are of the educated middle-class or the rich ruling class. Problem is, the educated upper half is the voting majority and they always vote enslave the laboring-class lower Half by a starvation minimum wage.
Take for example my mom and dad, my brother, sister and I, during the 1940’s we lived in the slums of Milwaukee, Minneapolis and LA, which meant that if there was no meatballs in our spaghetti and tomatoes, surely it was a day when mom’s tips were poor.
Now, as all of my ancestors going back as far as my great grandmother could remember were laboring-class earning income by manual labor, as we all lacked the intelligence to do college level studies, how can we cure such slavery without acknowledging that Empire USA is an intelligence dictatorship.
Moral fabric of society — How the rich play us for a sucker
For the top 25% of society owns 75% of the wealth, the most intelligent one-forth owns three-fourths of everything with material value, and how they do it is really quite simple.
For the moral fabric of society is the compassion and pity we have for the impoverished lower half. A kindness which is made valid to ourselves and others by our charity given in a way that produces a grateful response. People giving with no hope of a personal gain, the result being that those less fortunate are so humbled by the charity as to admit that they could not save themselves, that charity was in no way a right that they deserved.
So, what High Society has done is to put a blackout on the word “gratitude” and a total elimination of the need to in anyway feel grateful. Forced tipping for example, the fake morality that we must give a waitress an amount equal to 15% of the bill. No need for the waitress to in anyway feel grateful as she had a right to the tip, a just payment for a job well done.
For gifts to those in your income class, this is mutual gratification as you expect something equal in return. And gifts to those in a higher class to gain favor, this is called worship.
For a giving action that produces a grateful response, this is the perfection that is achieved by everyone being born with a different level of intelligence. Ask anyone working in human resources and they will tell you, people who are under or over qualified for a job, hire them to do it and most miserable will they be.
All this while restaurant prices and cost of eating out are rising and generating record profits while their owners rely on tips to compensate their waitstaff’s starvation minimum wages. Their is a sick prevalent logic that these owners use to rationalize their antisocial behavior and where patrons of these businesses are oblivious to waitstaff’s real working conditions. If restaurants owners, restaurant chains and other starvation wages businesses cannot afford to pay their workers a living wage, then they should go out of business. Actually a nation that buys a record amount of cook books shouldn’t need all these restaurants and hence help clear the air of all these restaurants tripping over each other with precarious work and wages.