Time Sept. 2–9, 2019always find a job waitressing,” she says.
This is true of many service jobs, says
David Autor, an economist at MIT who
studies the future of work. But as job seek-
ers are flooding into those fields, they’re
being met with low pay, few benefits and
no raises as they age and gain more ex-
pertise. In 1980, 43% of workers without
a college education were in middle-skill
jobs; by 2016, that number had dropped
to 29%, Autor says.
A raise for tipped workers, then,
could mean a raise for middle-class
families across the country, says Heidi
Shierholz, an economist at the left-
leaning Economic Policy Institute who
worked in the Department of Labor
under President Obama. In the seven
states where servers are paid the regular
minimum wage for those states before
tips, including Minnesota and Oregon,
the poverty rate for waitstaff and bar-
tenders is 11.1%, according to the Eco-
nomic Policy Institute. Where there’s a
separate tipped wage, the poverty rate
among waitstaff is 18.5%.
Under Pennsylvania’s $2.83-an-hour
tipped minimum wage, Baker’s colleague
Debbie Aladean, 74, says she can’t retire
because she has so little Social Security.
Olivia Austin, a 30-year-old waitress in
rural Pennsylvania, started driving across
the border to a restaurant in New York,
where there was a higher minimum wage,
because she couldn’t save any money as
a waitress in Pennsylvania. “Most of the
people I worked with could barely pay
their rent,” she says.
Of course, some do quite well in the
restaurant industry—especially white
men, who are more frequently employed
by fine-dining establishments. Accord-
ing to the National Restaurant Associa-
tion (NRA), a lobbying group that rep-
resents more than 500,000 restaurant
businesses, the median hourly earnings
of servers, including tips, actually ranges
from $19 to $25 an hour. Asking owners to
do away with tipping and pay workers a
$15-an-hour set wage puts too much bur-
den on business owners and could sink
one of the economy’s strongest-growing
sectors, they say.
“We need a common sense approach to
the minimum wage that reflects the eco-
nomic realities of each region, because
$15 in New York is not $15 in Alabama,”
says Sean Kennedy, the executive vice
president of public affairs for the NRA.
The owner of Broad Street Diner,
Michael Petrogiannis, is supportive of
raising wages. “If [the minimum wage]
goes to $15 an hour, then we’ll go to $15 an
hour, no problem. I support that,” he says.
He leaves reporting tips up to the waitstaff,
and his employees have not complained
about being shorted. “We want them to
make whatever they have to make.”the strength of the service sector
offers a sort of tenuous job security for
waitresses, but it comes with few pro-
tections. Sexual harassment is rampant.
The Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission receives more complaints
of sexual harassment from the restaurant
industry—more than 10,000 from 1995
to 2016—than from any other industry.
Many waitresses have come to expect it.
On a shift in July, Munce chirped back
at offhanded sexual comments as read-
ily as she dished out nicknames to regu-
lars. When a man called her “thick and
delicious” on his way out the door, shereplied, “I think you mean tiny and tasty,”
without skipping a beat.
After 12 years of waitressing, Munce’s
somewhat hardened to the disrespect, but
for her, the fickleness of the work is a big-
ger problem when it affects her family’s
well-being. Her daily income depends on
whether people decide to brave the heat
or snow to dine out the day she’s working.
It depends on whether customers order
the $5.29 breakfast special or the $16.99
New York sirloin strip with two eggs, and
whether they leave 20% of their bill. It de-
pends on how many other waitresses are
working that day, all hungry for tables.
This lack of certainty is stressful for
waitresses, but as more workers face this
reality, it has implications for the broader
American economy, which relies on con-
sumer spending to drive growth. Munce
has saved about $1,000 by putting aside
every $5 bill she earns in tips, but she can’t^
Munce cuddles with her daughter
in their apartment in southwest
PhiladelphiaEconomy