The “Marketplace Morning Report” is spending some time looking at tipping and how service work have changed since the start of the pandemic. Restaurant workers, delivery people and other service industry workers became essential when COVID was at its peak, and in general, people upped the gratuity they paid to reflect that.
Now it seems like the option to tip is popping up in more and more places, and expectations about when and how much to tip are changing. Whether or not you think new norms around tipping have gone too far, it’s important to understand how we got here in the first place.
Saru Jayaraman is president of the service worker advocacy group One Fair Wage. She’s also the director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour, and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: One often heard justification for the system of tipping that we have now is that you can pay workers less than minimum wage because, well, it’ll get made up for by the tips. But I can think of a few industries where one tips: tour guides, barbers, entertainers. In all those industries, they still pay at least minimum wage. So, why is the restaurant industry different?
Saru Jayaraman: Yeah, so it has a pretty ugly and sordid history that relates to our original sin as a country. So pre-emancipation of slavery, waiters in the United States were actually mostly white...
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