Part 7 (1/2)

XI

THE EMPLOYER VIEWPOINT

”We face a condition, not a theory,” a.s.sert those employers who defend their adaptation of wages to the tipping custom. ”The public seems determined to bestow gratuities, and if we paid full wages in addition, our employees would be the highest paid workers in the world.”

But two wrongs do not make a right.

THREE KINDS OF EMPLOYERS

Employers who profit by tipping are cla.s.sified as follows:

1. Those who pay living wages and positively forbid gratuities.

2. Those who pay average compet.i.tive wages and maintain a pa.s.sive att.i.tude toward gratuities.

3. Those who pay minimum, or no, wages, and aggressively exploit the propensity to give.

At present the first cla.s.s const.i.tutes almost an infinitesimal minority.

Here and there in large cities there are barber shops which advertise a ”No-Tip” policy, and occasionally a hotel or restaurant.

In the second cla.s.s are most of the moderate-price places catering to the public. The employers and employees welcome gratuities but do not make them the prime object in their relations with patrons.

The third cla.s.s includes the high-grade hotels, sleeping car companies, expensively conducted restaurants and like enterprises. This is the cla.s.s which sets the pace through the patronage of the socially or financially prominent.

A few of the more noteworthy employers who profit by the custom follow:

The Pullman Company, The Hotel Company, The Taxicab Company, The Transfer Company, The Steam s.h.i.+p Company, The Master Barber, The Apartment House Owner, The Restaurant, The Telegraph Company.

That an organized conspiracy exists between employers and employees to exploit the public is realized vaguely, if at all, by the average patron.

Proof of this allegation may be found at the cas.h.i.+er's desk of almost any restaurant or hotel. The waiter invariably is given change that will make it easy for the patron to tip. He returns with the change arranged in such a way on the tray that the patron must fumble over all of it if he wants the full amount. The employer's and the waiter's theory is that, rather than do this, he will leave a dime or a quarter in one corner. In a barber shop the patron always receives small change so that it will be easy to ”remember” the porter.

Yet, such a practice is the mildest indictment that may be brought against employers for entering a conspiracy to exploit patrons.

SELLING THE TIP PRIVILEGE

In New York and Chicago particularly, many employers went so far (and still maintain the practice) as to sell to outside persons and companies the privilege of collecting the tips in their places of business. That is to say, these outside parties were to furnish waiters, cloak room attendants and other employees to the hotel or restaurant and depend upon the tips for their remuneration.

So large was the sum realized from tips that the hotels and restaurants actually charged the outside parties thousands of dollars for the concession. In Illinois a law was pa.s.sed in 1915 aimed directly at this organized phase of the custom. It prohibited hotels and others from selling tipping privileges. The men who owned such privileges promptly went to law to test the const.i.tutionality of the act. To the tip-taker anything is unconst.i.tutional that interferes with his graft!

At the time the law went into effect, the situation was reported in the Chicago _Tribune_ as follows:

”The state will have a fight on its hands before the Chicago tip trust ... releases its clutch on the pocketbooks of hotel and restaurant patrons.

”At midnight last night ... there was no indication the largess was going anywhere else than it has gone before ever since a commercial genius capitalized the well-known generosity of the dining and wining public--straight into the coffers of the trust.”