How can you tell when Brad Ford is embarassing himself and Gordon Howie's Potemkin blog-village?
You see him typing. In a post where he pulls his head out of his typical garbling of talk-radio karaoke and addresses a specific South Dakota issue, Ford manages to...
- Dismiss the Teamsters, AFL-CIO, and South Dakota Democratic Party as "a few white liberals";
- Dismiss minimum wage workers as losers who waste time in school, party with friends, and watch trashy television (trashy television... isn't that redundant?);
- Dismiss dysfunctional families as losers sponging off welfare and not going to church;
- And, in a closing howler, dismiss taxes, tipping, charitable organizations, and perhaps the entire economic system of firms and wages:
Perhaps deserving minimum wage workers should all wear a badge that say “I’M A MINIMUM WAGE WORKER. TIPS APPRECIATED.” Why give automatic tips to already well-paid upscale restaurant waiters and waitresses? Giving should be direct, from person to person, not forced through taxation, coerced out of sheer habit at restaurants, or anonymously donated to some abstract charity organization.
Better yet, give some money directly from your wallet to anyone you spot who is deserving and seems to need it, especially those who aren’t asking for a handout [Brad Ford, "Should We Tip Minimum Wage Workers?" The Right Side, 2013.07.23].
Ford is right. Giving should be direct. This whole rinky-dink system where we go to a restaurant and distribute our cash to the workers making our meals possible through the middlemen of the credit card company and the management is an abomination. We should all give our money directly to those who serve us. When we finish supper with Brad Ford at the Firehouse Brewing Company, we should each get out our checkbooks and change jars and hand what we consider due compensation directly to our waitress, our hostess, the cooks, the dishwashers, the kids wiping tables and sweeping the floor, the manager, the gal in the office who designed the menu and the ad that got us there, and anyone else we can catch who was associated with providing our pleasurable dining experience. Surely it will be more fair and efficient for each consumer to determine individually how much each worker's labor is worth, rather than handing our money over to some coercive manager to make that decision for us. And if we aren't happy with our dining experience, why require us to pay anything? Why punish us for dining and dashing, if we really feel our meal wasn't worth a handout from our hard-earned money?
Um, Brad? Do you see the problem here? Our economy runs on the assumption that we don't force everyone to make those individual giving decisions. We also work together through government to ensure that every worker can count on some minimum compensation for his or her labor. And we agree that if you take advantage of goods and services, you have to pay something. A fair and efficient economy depends on some collective decisions.
Now don't be stupid, Brad... and don't be such a bad tipper.
Tipping should be illegal. They are the equivalent of a bribe. BUT, waiters, cooks, etc should be paid a living wage and that should be built into the food prices.
Also, then more people would see the benefit of eating healthy food at home.
Ford should try living on the minimum wage so he could speak from experience instead of accompanying his flatulence.
Interestingly, Ford cites the example of Laura Sumner, a Rapid City worker quoted in yesterday's RCJ article to support his argument. "Minimum wage earners should follow the example of Laura Sumner," writes Ford, "who appeared in the local newspaper’s article about possibly raising the hourly standard. She worked at the Pet Pantry store in Rapid City for six years on minimum wage. This lifestyle was apparently good enough back then. But when a son came along, she pulled herself up by the bootstraps to now own the store. Necessity itself was the motivating factor."
But in an e-mail promoting their online petition to show support for their minimum-wage initiative, the SD Dems quote what Laura Sumner actually says in the article: "I was young and single and I lived on a campground.... I was just living paycheck to paycheck. I don't know if you could even support a family or live in a house, or even a normal-sized apartment, on that amount of money.... Now that I'm older and I have a son, I can't imagine trying to survive off $7 an hour."
and also, she is a manager, not the owner...if only Brad Ford could read!
Brad Ford is a clunker of a poster that is for sure. As long as he is on to this, why not just tip the farmer for supplying the foodstuffs and if it is a meat product, tip the rancher. The worst part of this all is that Brad Ford is a voter, so now we all know why we are in the mess we are in here in South Dakota and the rest of the red states.
Not bragging but there is an old Dutch joke that says, "what might be a difference between three Dutchmen in a restaurant and three Dutchmen in a canoe? The three in the canoe might tip." Well some might not be paying for the service they are getting and that means someone did not get paid for their work. I think a tip should be an extra, not the base pay. Commissions the same.
Good point, VO!
As someone who has worked in restaurants for over 20 years and have served tables for 13 years, sometimes part-time, sometimes full-time, I like the tipping concept. Do I wish I was paid more then $2.13 an hour, well sure. But the tipping and the hourly wage is not the crux of waiting tables, it's restaurants forcing their servers to share their tips. If you want to pay me $2.13 an hour, fine. But I should be able to keep 100% of my tips. I worked full-time one year at a popular franchise restaurant in SF. I was the top hourly tip earner and top salesperson. In that year I had over $120,000 in sales. I paid out over $5000 in tip share that year to the hostesses, the bartenders and bussers. That was over 25% of my total tips I made for the year. So for 3 months of that year I worked for other people. The wages that servers are making are not the issue, or the tips, it's the restaurant owners forcing you to pay their support staff. I say outlaw tip share before you raise the wage for servers.