Abigail Peterson
IWC 100
Professor Steinwand
Research paper
The Customer is Not Always Right: Why Tips Should Not Provide an Excuse for Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry
Regan VanAvery works a typical night shift at a golf course bar in her hometown. She’s eighteen years old, and just started working behind the bar. One of her regulars–and her highest tipper–drops a glass, and as VanAvery is sweeping up the mess he laments over her lack of prom this year. He makes a few more comments, staring at her breasts and telling her he would bring her to prom. Despite his uncomfortable behavior, VanAvery is dependent on his tips to pay for college, so she continues to serve him. Her experience is not uncommon. Bryce Covert explains in his March 2018 article “When Harassment is the Price of a Job” that the restaurant industry is responsible for the “largest share of private-sector sexual-harassment charges filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” (14). The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United links this idea to tips in their article “Take Us Off the Menu: The Impact of Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry,” stating that tipped workers are twice as likely to experience sexual harassment on the job than non-tipped workers (2). Because tipping culture perpetuates sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, it is crucial that two solutions take place: the federal minimum wage for tipped workers needs to be raised and education programs need to be implemented in schools to attack the problem at the root.
In the restaurant industry, tips tend to act as a manifestation of a customer’s power over servers. And, since restaurant jobs can be considered what Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor,” the power held over servers becomes commonplace (qtd in Good and Cooper 450). Emotional labor is the concept that certain jobs require keeping customers happy and satisfied–for the restaurant industry, this includes providing customers with satisfactory service and maintaining an established relationship throughout the course of the transaction. In many cases of providing emotional labor, bad behavior is encouraged. A study done by Meridith F. Small finds that female servers will often wear red lipstick to garner more tips from their male customers–a trick proved to be effective by Small’s look into the visual appeal of the color red to a human eyeball (Small). Donning tight shirts, short skirts and–of course–red lipstick are different ways in which servers attempt to maximize their tips, appeal to the emotional labor of their job and simply make a living.
But making a living in restaurant industry jobs is difficult. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United finds in their article “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry” that the average hourly income for tipped workers is about nine dollars, and that is including tips (1). What most restaurants use to gauge how much they pay their employees is the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, otherwise known as a sub-minimum wage. According to the article “Living for Tips,” the federal sub-minimum wage is set at just $2.13 an hour (“Living For Tips”). Servers who make this wage are placed in an even more vulnerable position, where they have to decide if their income outweighs their safety at their job.
However, there are differing approaches to the federal sub-minimum wage between states. Sylvia Allegretto and David Cooper, writing for the Economic Policy Institute, explain that the federal sub-minimum wage was established in 1991 in order to equate tips and the normal minimum wage (Allegretto and Cooper). Rather than receiving tips as an added bonus for good service, servers are now dependent on the generosity of others to make a livable wage. Allegretto and Cooper also reveal that nineteen states still employ the federal sub-minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, twenty three states have tipped wages set above $2.13 but below $7.25 an hour, and seven states set their tipped minimum wage at the same level as the regular minimum wage (Allegretto and Cooper).
While minimum wages are typically set state by state, every state must pay at least the amount of the federal minimum wage. Having a sub-minimum wage set at $2.13 means restaurants do not have to pay their tipped employees more than $2.13, although they have the choice to pay them as much as they want as long as it is above that sub-minimum wage. In Allegretto and Cooper’s findings, states like Minnesota, Montana, and Washington made the choice to pay their tipped employees the same amount as their regular employees, eliminating the sub-minimum wage in that state (Allegretto and Cooper). However, forty three states either follow the standard sub-minimum wage or have a slightly higher sub-minimum wage, but there is still an income difference between tipped and non-tipped employees.
Catherine Bryant faces the struggles of making a sub-minimum wage daily. As a
bartender, Bryant continually experiences harassment from her customers, and she continually overlooks it to maintain her tips. Bryant tells Washington Post reporter Lydia Depillis, “I know I should have my dignity, this is a professional job, I shouldn’t really have to whore myself out, but if he’s buying 12-year-old whiskey, it could be a very precarious situation. If I say ‘Hey, treat me with respect,’ and he says, ‘What a bitch, I’m just not going to tip her,’ … you lose all of your money” (Depillis). Similarly to Bryant, Brittany Gilbert tells Rachel Abrams and Catrin Einhorn in their New York Times article “The Tipping Equation,” “It was a woman, a man and their two children. She had walked their daughters to the bathroom. He grabbed my hand and said: ‘I want you to know you are so beautiful. Take this.’ And there was a piece of paper in my hand. He said: ‘You can call me any evening after 9 p.m. She goes to bed.’ I wanted so bad to go tell his wife, but he was the one filling out the credit card slip. I needed the $20 tip” (Abrams and Einhorn).
Naturally, dependence on other people’s generosity places servers like Bryant and Gilbert in vulnerable positions. On one hand, making a livable wage is vital to these employees, but on the other, personal safety is a priority. Laura Good and Rae Cooper highlight the way financial power is wielded over restaurant employees in their article “‘But It’s Your Job To Be Friendly’: Employees Coping With and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector,” stating that this power imbalance is the deciding factor for how servers react to sexual harassment (452). Rebekah Frank, a bartender in Brooklyn, says it best in Covert’s aforementioned article, “None of this is about sex, necessarily—it’s all about power. They’re not necessarily getting off on it; they’re showing us how small and insignificant we are and how our bodies aren’t ours. Even our ear canals aren’t ours” (13).
However, financial power isn’t the only kind of power held over restaurant employees. Abrams and Einhorn explain that servers will avoid telling management about their experiences because sexual harassment is part of the job description–reporting problematic customer behavior is reserved for the truly dangerous individuals who engage in threats or excessive groping (Abrams and Einhorn). In this case, the power imbalance between customer and employee only partially caters to financial power, and tips the scales towards the age-old dispute over gender.
Power imbalance due to gender is perhaps most notable in the restaurant phenomenon “Breastaurants,” where women’s bodies become the main attraction of the restaurant. Anne Kingston reports on multiple trends within the breastaurant in her article “Get Ready for the Breastaurant,” explaining that establishments such as Tilted Kilt and Hooters have clientele at about 80% male (42). Kingston goes on to explain that these breastaurants are rooted in irony–they utilize gender roles as a “harmless, even fun” tool (42). However, what Kingston fails to recognize in her article is that breastaurants encourage the idea that women, particularly vulnerable waitresses, exist only to exert power upon. These establishments inadvertently support the concept that women are objects, meant to be used.
Power imbalances within restaurant transactions are also exacerbated by the type of employees working in food service. Covert explains that the food service sector employs many young people, so inexperienced employees are often put in charge of both handling an incident of sexual harassment and reporting it to management (14). Abrams and Einhorn further this, including arguments presented by professor at Cornell Michael Lynn. Lynn argues that tips are not used to just reward good service, but rather to appeal to attractive waitresses. His research found that customers tip “large-breasted, slender and blond, white servers” more often and more generously (qtd. in Abrams and Einhorn).
The idea that conventionally attractive servers are tipped better plays directly into
traditional gender roles. Lisa Adkins explains in her 1995 book Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and the Labour Market that service industry jobs are rooted in gender roles, which is thought to impact the way employees react to sexual harassment within these transactions (found in Good and Cooper). In Chauntelle Anne Tibbals’s article “Doing Gender as Resistance,” she explores how waitresses conform to gender roles in order to resist social standards. Essentially, gender takes on a performative persona–much like camp or drag–and is used to maximize rewards within the system, in this case tips (733). The article “Living For Tips” furthers this, acknowledging that managers encourage their employees to highlight their gender by wearing skimpy clothing and appealing makeup to both increase their tips and keep customers coming into that particular restaurant (“Living For Tips).
In order to solve this extensive issue, the federal sub-minimum wage needs to be
eradicated. The article “Living For Tips” explains that The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is an organization whose primary goal is geared towards getting rid of the sub-minimum wage (“Living For Tips”). Their thinking is that getting rid of the sub-minimum wage will lessen servers’ dependence on tips, and therefore give them the freedom to combat sexual harassment on a personal basis. However, Abrams and Einhorn express that getting rid of the sub-minimum wage can have some adverse effects on the financial status of certain restaurants (Abrams and Einhorn). In fact, some restaurants are adopting programs to help combat sexual harassment in their establishments, both with raising the sub-minimum wage and without.
Abrams and Einhorn report on several restaurants that have alternative solutions to sexual harassment instigated by tips, citing some restaurants that have taken on no-tipping policies (Abrams and Einhorn). Removing the advantage of deciding an employee’s wage gives that employee the opportunity to report problematic customers without consequences. Abrams and Einhorn also report on one restaurant in Oakland, California, where “a restaurant called Homeroom devised a color-coded system to monitor customer behavior: a yellow flag if a server senses a potential problem, an orange one for inappropriate comments and a red flag for overtly sexual comments or touching, at which point the customer is asked to leave” (Abrams and Einhorn). While Homeroom did not get rid of tipping as a whole, they came up with a program to better counter sexual harassment, protect their employees, and have minimal adverse affects
on that employee’s tip.
Perhaps the biggest downfall of getting rid of the sub-minimum wage and copying
Homeroom’s system is that it doesn’t get rid of the problem as a whole. Sexual harassment will still exist within the restaurant industry, albeit become better monitored. While contesting sexual harassment would become infinitely easier, the behavior exhibited by problematic customers will still exist.
However, if sexual harassment training and education programs are improved, there may be a more noticeable change in the extensive issue of workplace harassment––both within restaurants and within workplaces across the country. Kathy Gurchiek, writer for The Society for Human Resource Management, explains that one of the most effective ways to convey the damages of sexual harassment within a training program is to personalize the problem (Gurchiek). Gurchiek details a program tested at Portland State University, where where each trainee was given an assignment: to go home and ask a close female relative, friend, or family member about a time where they experienced sexual harassment. Not only did this trigger anger and sadness in the employees that completed the assignment, but it helped male employees realize how their own behavior feeds into the pervasive problem of sexual harassment (Gurchiek).
Vanavery never told her manager about the incident at the bar, where her customer made disturbing comments about taking her to prom. While her experience was never resolved and she still experiences harassment on a regular basis, hopefully in the near future sexual harassment will become more regulated within the restaurant industry. The proof exists that tips and service sector jobs contribute to increased sexual harassment, now it is time for legislators and government organizations to take this proof, and push solutions into actualization.
Works Cited
Abrams, Rachel, and Catrin Einhorn. “The Tipping Equation.” The New York Times, 12 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/11/business/tipping-sexual-harassment.html.
Allegretto, Sylvia, and David Cooper. “Twenty-Three Years and Still Waiting for Change: Why It’s Time to Give Tipped Workers the Regular Minimum Wage.” Economic Policy Institute, 10 July 2014, www.epi.org/publication/waiting-for-change-tipped-minimum-wage/.
Covert, Bryce. “When Harassment Is the Price of a Job.’” Nation, vol. 306, no. 6, 5 Mar. 2018, pp. 12–20. Academic Search Premier, cordproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mat&AN=127864447&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
DePillis, Lydia. “Does the Culture of Tipping Make Waitresses More Vulnerable to Sexual Harassment?” The Washington Post, 22 Aug. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/10/17/does-the-culture-of-tipping-make-waitresses-more-vulnerable-to-sexual-harassment/.
Good, Laura, and Rae Cooper. “‘But It’s Your Job To Be Friendly’: Employees Coping With and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector.” Gender, Work & Organization, vol. 23, no. 5, Sept. 2016, pp. 447-469. Academic Search Premier, doi:10.1111/gwao.12117.
Gurchiek, Kathy. “Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Should Involve Real Conversations.” SHRM, 16 Aug. 2019, www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-and-cultural-effectiveness/pages/sexual-harassment-prevention-training-should-involve-real-conversations.aspx.
Kingston, Anne. “Get Ready for the ‘Breastaurant.’” Maclean’s, Apr. 2012, p. 42. Academic Search Premier, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mih&AN=74602280&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
“Living for Tips.” Slate Magazine, 8 May 2015, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/uc2/2015/05/why_waitresses_put_up_with_sexual_harassment.html.
Small, Meredith F. “Why Red Is Such a Potent Color.” LiveScience, Future US, 15 Aug. 2008, www.livescience.com/5043-red-potent-color.html.
The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United Forward Together. “The Glass Floor: Sexual harassment in the Restaurant Industry.” 7 Oct. 2014, https://forwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/The-Glass-Floor-Sexual-Harassment-in-the-Restaurant-Industry.pdf.
The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. “Take Us Off the Menu: The Impact of Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry.” May 2018, https://forwomen.org/wp-content /uploads/2015/09/The-Glass-Floor-Sexual-Harassment-in-the-Restaurant-Industry.pdf.
Tibbals, Chauntelle Anne. “Doing Gender as Resistance: Waitresses and Servers in
Contemporary Table Service.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 36, no. 6,
Dec. 2007, pp. 731–751. Sage Journals, doi:10.1177/0891241607303508.
VanAvery, Regan.