In previous years, I have worked in the service industry as a barista, waitress and hostess. All of these positions brought their own forms of enlightenment, but especially when it came to the subject of tipping. Yet my stance remains that tipping should be reserved for traditional acts of customer service and, when performed lavishly, sends the wrong message to corporations about how employees can and should be paid.
Tipping began as a European custom and was brought to the United States by wealthy business merchants during the Reconstruction Era. In its early years, tipping was a method of exploiting newly-freed enslaved people for labor. Restaurants and other hospitality industries would provide a base pay of $0 an hour plus customer tips, escaping the technicalities of slave labor by a few patron-gifted cents.
The history of tipping has impacted modern day transactions in more ways than one. Firstly, many corporations rely on service charges to compensate for inhumanely low wages, a custom permitted by federal law under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Approximately 5.5 million service workers nationwide are paid a subminimum wage of $2.13 an hour, assuming tips fulfill the remainder of the standard minimum wage requirement. The most recent increase to the subminimum wage law, also called the “tipped wage law,” occurred in 1991, raising the average hourly pay from $2.09 to $2.13. With a cumulative inflation of 124.02% in the last 32 years, a raise of 4 cents is certainly...
In a statement, the organisation said the questions circulating on social media as 'leaked SSC question papers' are actually taken from model test papers. Its investigation found that these model ...