History of tipping in America: from crime to tip credit
Tipping in America was once so unpopular that several states made it a crime. A century ago critics called it un-American, a European habit that turned free citizens into servants. Today federal law lets employers count tips toward a waiter’s wage. One reason it survived, as a critic showed in 1916, is that employers saved a great deal of money by it.
“Essentially an aristocratic custom”
The best snapshot of the early fight is a 1916 book with an unforgettable title: The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America, by William Rufus Scott. Scott hated tipping and made no secret of it. “In Europe, under monarchical ideals,” he wrote, “a person could accept a tip without feeling the acute loss of self-respect that attends the practice in America, under democratic ideals. For tipping is essentially an aristocratic custom.”
He also tried to measure it. Using the 1910 census, he counted about 3.8 million Americans in domestic and personal service. With the population growing, he estimated that 5,000,000 people lived partly on tips, and that Americans gave them somewhere between $200 million and $500 million a year. His list of tip-takers ran from waiters and barbers to elevator men, manicurists, garbage men and, at Christmas, the policeman.
When tipping was against the law
Scott was not a lone crank. According to his book, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and South Carolina all had laws against tipping, and in 1915 six state legislatures considered tipping bills: Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and South Carolina. Iowa’s law targeted the takers, making it an offense for employees of hotels, restaurants and barber shops to accept or solicit a tip. South Carolina’s went further and also forbade employers to permit the custom. Tennessee, after earlier vetoes, had its law in force by 1916.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?The laws did not last. “The courts have negatived such laws on much the same grounds,” Scott admitted, “so that anti-tipping laws thus far have been, generally, short-lived.” Judges treated the right to give a tip as a matter of personal liberty, and the public did not care enough to fight for the bans.
Who really profited
Scott’s sharpest chapter is about the Pullman Company, which ran America’s sleeping cars. He wrote that its roughly 6,500 porters were paid $27.50 a month, with tips bringing their income to $100 or more. If the company had to pay a living wage, which he put at $60 a month, its payroll would rise by $2,535,000 a year. “In other words,” he concluded, “the company saves about two and a half millions a year through the tips given to its porters.”
When a federal commission on industrial relations questioned the Pullman general manager in 1915, he answered: “The company simply accepts conditions as it finds them. The company did not invent tipping. It was here when the company began.” Asked why the company recruited its Black porters in the South, he said the Southern porter was “more pleasing to the traveling public. He is more adapted to wait on people and serve with a smile.” The testimony showed what the tip was doing: it moved part of the wage bill from the employer to the customer.
Written into federal law
That arrangement is now built into the rules. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the US Department of Labor explains, an employer may take a “tip credit” for workers who regularly receive more than $30 a month in tips. The employer must pay only $2.13 an hour in cash, and the customers’ tips are counted toward the rest of the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Some states, including Alaska, California, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, require the full state minimum wage before tips.
Scott predicted that tipping, like slavery, would one day be uprooted. Instead, the custom he called un-American became a standard part of how Americans pay for service.