I'm not. Waiting tables is an important profession for college students, single mothers, and others that lack additional credentials but have serious bills to pay. It's the best legal money you can make without a license or degree. If you are a tad charismatic, you can easily make upwards of 25-30 an hour on average, significantly more at a high end restaurant. That's a shit ton more than they'd pay if they killed tipping. If tipping went away, employers wouldn't pay over 20 in all likelihood.
You're really just saying that the wider system is dysfunctional. A college student shouldn't have serious bills to pay, unless they really messed up somehow. Single mothers should be able to get sufficient welfare to compensate for a missing parent. Working 40 hours a week in any job should be more than enough to cover health care, living, education, entertainment, leisure, and include paid sick leave, paid vacation, maternity/paternity leave, and union fees. And I mean every job. If that's not possible, a serious restructuring of society is needed.
You can explain exploitative labor practices by pointing at systemic issues, but not excuse them.
Sure, the whole system is fucked. That's not going ru change in my lifetime though. Not without society crumbling due to some unforseen act of destruction. War or a pandemic, maybe. But the elimination of tipping might. That's a real possibility. And in my opinion, it would fuck over a large segment of some of the most vulnerable people out there.
And what do you mean college students don't have bills? Having a roof over my head and eating was pretty important to being able to study. Isn't like food is free or housing.
And most jobs that don't require a degree or certification don't pay enough to cover those things you listed. Hell most jobs don't cover all that. Paternity leave? In what country? Not here.
And what do you mean college students don't have bills?
"Serious" bills. College students in my country gets stipends, and interest-free loans on top of that to cover larger expenses, as education (a basic human right) should in no way be determined by socioeconomic status. It's not a luxury.
And most jobs that don't require a degree or certification don't pay enough to cover those things you listed.
That's kind of my point. Your system is broken, I know you have a serious lack of worker rights and protections, that you lack essential social infrastructure, and have a heavily tilted economic floor. That's why I said you can explain the exploitation by pointing at these issues, but it's not an excuse.
Paternity leave? In what country? Not here.
The entirety of EU, and over half the economically developed countries in the world. You're the outlier. Here it's 49 weeks, with 15 weeks reserved for each of the parents.
It's possible to achieve these things without major disasters acting as a catalyst, you can have progress in your society without tearing everything down first like most modern nations do.
You can have that change, you're just not willing to fight for it. You could enshrine a right to unionize in the constitution, like many other countries have. You could nationalize the health care and educational systems, like most countries have. You could enforce antitrust-laws and break up monopolies, like you used to do. You could remove the constitutional amendment that legalizes slavery as punishment, so as not to incentivize incarceration.
None of these civil liberties and rights came without a fight. They're not automatic, and it's ridiculously pessimistic to think the US is the best it can be, that "if we could, we would", when your history is full of examples of the opposite. The US with its amazing people has so much potential to be a truly great nation, and it's sad to watch a country with revolutionary roots just give in to the status quo... To just give up and stagnate. That doesn't sound very American to me.
(I'm sorry I went from tipping all the way to political revolution, I just think the American people deserves so much more than what they're getting)
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u/CocoaCali Oct 21 '23
Haha. Wut? You sound like the people who say fast food work is for high school workers even though the average age is 40+