"Today, the nation's working poor are 70 cents closer to the American dream," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a Capitol press conference. "And don't forget the economic stimulus this wage increase will provide— already we hear that discount stores nationwide are selling out their stocks of flip-flops and the stiffer kind of paper plates."

Yet Pelosi urged minimum-wage earners to be cautious in spending their windfall, as a raise of this magnitude only comes "once in a lifetime."

Oh, man, that's really too close to true to be funny.  But it IS funny. Ya gotta laugh.  I mean, what else we gonna do about it.

www.theonion.com/content/news/minimum_wage_hike_celebrated_with

                                                           J

Soloflecks wrote:
A lot pay by credit card and add in the tip.

I'm not sure what the problem is with that....all restaurants I've worked at in my life did that.

So does it end up on your W2 in that case?  That's what I was thinking.  That you'd have to declare it for income tax.

Glad you said something to those idiots.  I would have a hard time keeping my mouth shut.  My son's g/f also had a couple who ate their meal and then the woman complained that it was crap and didn't want to pay.  Didn't want to tip either although there was nothing wrong with either food or service.  I think some people do this everywhere they eat just to see what they can get for free.

When I went to Europe, there was no tipping, and people were paid "normal" wages.  I don't remember how it was in England.

In my perfect world, there would be no tipping, people would get a fair wage, and definitely profit sharing.  It the school systems of Florida, some local governments forced the issue of even giving their employees poverty level wages.  For example,  a bookkeeper (who had to have some definite education for skills) was making 11,000, a year for a 40 hour week when poverty levels were at the time 13,000 or so.  Dade County schools had declared that all employees would get "living wages"  newzspeak for that "poverty level wages".  It's so sad, the schools, the restaurants, etc. needs these people to keep it going and the best they can do is poverty level wages.  It's so weird, the guy who makes sure your yard is mowed (code enforcement) and only has to have a high school diploma makes $20 bucks an hour.  And that teacher with the 4 year degree, $24.00 an hour. 

Florida teachers, and all other government employees are not legally allowed to strike.  But it would be fun to watch what happens if all the support staff upped and stayed home.  South Florida is enjoying a 5% unemployment rate, so I don't think jobs are hard to come by if people would refuse to work for so little.

There are some progress, tho'.  At one local restaurant, the wait staff pools their tips, the company pays for health, 1 month vacation, sick days, and retirement plan.  The staff also gets normal minimum wage for the prep work.  The fancier restaurants now automatically include a 19% gratuity.

They still pay $2.10.  My son's g/f had a waitressing job before they moved back last month.  A lot of a-holes don't leave a decent tip.

Ha, yeah, I have an interesting crappy tip story from that one waitressing gig in Florida.  Admittedly I received very good tips and a lot of compliments, so the rare freak low tip stands out in my memory for that reason.  But I was waiting on a British couple - and British people btw are known for not tipping well to the point where I knew servers who refused to take a table once the found out they were British, as well as airlines supposedly, from what I heard, including a "Remember to tip 15%" speech announcement or something before landing, reminding British passengers about how it is here in the States because apparently they don't know, things are different in Europe or something.  So anyway, I'm waiting on this proper middle class, middle aged British couple, who were very polite and friendly the whole meal.  They were my only table for most of the time they were eating, so they had attentive service.  Order came out perfect, everything was fine, they cleaned their plates.  The bill was in the high 40's, almost $50.  I was looking forward to what should have been a nice tip, it should have been in the bag with an almost $50 bill and great service and no complaints.

Wrong!

They left me two dollars.  I was like, WHAT?!? when I saw what they filled in on their credit card slip.  In my younger years I would never have said anything, I would just have been all "grrr" and kept it to myself.  But now I was like 28 and didn't care anymore.  I'm making flippin' $2.10 an hour, the lowest base rate I've ever made in my life at any job, at a restaurant I was planning to quit anyway.   So I went over to the table and was all Hi!  I just wanted to know, was everything okay with your meal?  Was the food okay?  Were there any problems?

"Oh no, everything was wonderful!" they both piped up, smiling sincerely.

"Oh, okay.  Well I was just wondering because you left a two dollar tip on an almost 50 dollar check.  You do realize we only make $2.10 an hour here in Florida, right?"  I love the fact that I said the last part.   

The wife looked at the husband, horrified, and admonished him with "You only left two dollars?!?" to which he began sputtering indignantly and got defensive and angry.  I just left the table at that point, like, whatever.  Ignorance.  And no, they didn't leave anything more for the tip, not that I was expecting it.  I knew going over to the table I'd never get a dime more out of them, it was just the principle of it, educating them about what the deal is in the U.S.  Like, HELLO people, we make $2.10 an hour here in Florida!  We ain't here for the base pay!  We're here for the tips.  But I've heard SO many stories over the years though from different servers I've worked with about low tips, servers confronting people who tipped really low or completely stiffed them.  One male server in California I worked with chased a couple out to the parking lot when they left him a dollar, and I think he threw it at them and told them to keep it because it was such an insult.  He'd rather had nothing than their measly dollar.  Lots o' stories. 

Reminds me of why I did a brief foray into cocktailing in my early 20s.  $5 for serving a corporate business guy a martini or a scotch on the rocks or a JD and coke at the hotel bar after his work shift....$5 for serving one drink.  hmmmmmmmmm..........HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.  !!!   Doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math.  Soon I was making like $70 an hour in tips during the after work happy hour rush, PLUS Cali's higher than national average server base rate, just for serving drinks, buffalo wings and keeping people's bowls of bar pretzel snacks filled and wondering why I ever bothered wasting my time waiting on tables doing full lunch or dinner for 2-10 people in order to get the same amount of money.

I'm not sure what the problem is with that....all restaurants I've worked at in my life did that.  After the people pay with their c.c. and fill in the tip it's entered into the computer by the server, then at the end of their shift the servers run a report that tells them what their total c.c. tips were, and then they're paid out by the manager.  That's how it's been for me anyway in several states, from the high end restaurants on down to the casual diner environments....

Yeah, that seems to be what the reason is.  Tom theorized about that last night but I figured I'd ask to make sure.  It really sucks too because like you mentioned, there are times when servers don't have tables and are doing things like....scraping gum off the underside of tables, or other physical labor, cleaning/stocking work.  (the infamous "side work," a part of table waiting life as any server knows....)   And for that reason alone they should be at the Federal minimum wage level, or whatever their particular State pays if it's higher than the Federal rate since they're not making tips but doing equally as much work. 

___

Some serious reform needs to be done, but how to even go about it?  It took them this long, 10 years, to even raise the rates a little?   Actually the quickest, most direct way is for people to refuse to work these jobs anymore, versus waiting for bills to be passed around Washington.  Cause a major labor shortage until these restaurant jobs get their act together and stop paying a reduced exemption minimum wage rate to the tip earners.  If tens of thousands of people quit and refused to work at those rates anymore, and others refused to fill in for them and take such low paying, exploitative jobs, then there you go.  But you know that there will always be people willing to work for pennies, either out of youthful naivete (like in my own case when I was younger...) or financial desperation.

But just reading this article tonight really pissed me off about how low the minimum wage rates have been for so long, how the hell they expected people to live on that.

The minimum wage in the United States is ridiculously low - it needs to go to at least $15 an hour for working people to begin to have a decent standard of living. $20 would be better given the cost of living these days.

It's not going to matter much, this minimum wage raise, when businesses do everything possible to make sure most of their employees are part time anyway.  That's a big problem with low wage earners.  They never get enough hours to stay even.

The upside is that employees who earn tips are able to 1) make more money than many of the regular wage-earners, and 2) can often do this without paying taxes on much of it.  The downside is that employers take advantage of these people, holding their jobs over their heads, when it's really the customers who pay their wages.   

If you were making $2.10 back in 2002, that means that tip-earners' wages haven't been raised since the late '80's, which is when I worked in restaurants!  I would have thought it would have been raised to at least $3.00/ hr by now, but I guess not.

Wage will rise in three steps, from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour, but advocates and critics still disagree on the benefits to low-wage workers.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The first minimum wage increase in 10 years takes effect Tuesday, to $5.85 from $5.15 an hour, with two more steps over the next two years taking base pay for millions of workers to $7.25.

But the increase in the federal minimum wage - signed into law in May after a lengthy battle between Democrats in Congress and President Bush and Senate Republicans - still sparks heated debate.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 raises the wage in the 18 states that haven't already boosted their minimum wage. The District of Columbia has also raised its minimum wage.

About 13 million workers, or 10 percent of the nation's work force, will benefit from an increase in the minimum wage, the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute said. Of those 13 million, 5.6 million would be directly affected, while 7.4 million low-wage workers will see the spillover effect on their wages.

Wage-hike advocates hailed the increase.

"Yes, I'm glad it's back up, but it's too late now for all sorts of working poor who couldn't pay the rent, or had to cut back groceries for the kids," said author and labor advocate Thomas Geoghegan. "It's a disgrace that we let the minimum wage drop, in real terms, for so long."

The EPI's Liana Fox conceded that the increase doesn't affect 90 percent of the nation's workers but said it was important because the minimum wage is at a 52-year low when adjusted for inflation.

"It's a basic wage floor," said Fox, who noted that other costs have risen since the federal wage was last increased in 1997. The minimum wage was first enacted in 1938.

Steven Davis, of the Chicago School of Business, who is also a visiting scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said increases in the minimum wage can cause employers to respond by looking to reduce labor costs.

"If you subsidize employers to use low-skill workers, they'll seek to use more," he said.

Davis suggests reducing the payroll tax on earnings for both workers and employers.

The "biggest tax paid by low-wage workers is payroll tax not income," said Davis, who noted that the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to level the playing field for low-wage workers.

"I view that program as a better way of achieving the goal" of easing the burden on low-wage workers.

Fox, however, said the increase in the minimum wage was necessary. "We know there are situations where the free market failed and the low-wage labor market is one of those situations," she said.

"You may be able to get someone to work for 10 cents an hour, but we've decided as a society that that's not a desirable situation," she said.

Geoghegan is more blunt: A raised minimum wage "means, if people live better, there is less disorder and public-squalor blowback. Instead with the drop [in low-end wages], we had a very slow motion Katrina type disaster, a wreckage that the media can't video so we can see it."

http://money.cnn.com/2007/07/23/news/ec … tm?cnn=yes

As somebody who's made minimum wage at all the waitressing gigs I've had over the years this is interesting to me. 

Something that always puzzled me however, and I'm looking for anybody who might have the answer why, is how come the state of Florida was paying wait staff only $2.10 an hour when I worked there back in 2002??!   If the Federal minimum was/is $5.15, how were they allowed to pay people 2 bucks an hour??   It was SHOCKING to me when I arrived in Florida and landed a waitressing gig only to be told that the minimum is $2.10.  If it has something to do with being a server and making tips, then I'm confused because back in California as a waitress I made $5.15 an hour, plus tips, in 1997.   

The weird part was I didn't get angry about it all back then.  But just reading this article tonight really pissed me off about how low the minimum wage rates have been for so long, how the hell they expected people to live on that. 

I'll leave off with an amusing anecdote about my waitressing gig in Florida...

So there we were, me and about four or five others servers at 11 a.m. at this particular restaurant attached to a hotel on the A1A.   The place is dead, nothing happening, so the GM named Jeff has everybody running around in the meantime, cleaning up the kitchen, stocking up on all the dishes, stocking up the deserts and salad bar, making silverware roll up things where you wrap the fork and knife in a paper napkin and then use this sticker thing with the restaurant name and logo to seal it, etc.  Etc.   Everybody bustling about, to and fro, cleaning and stocking like this for an hour.   Not Jeff though, of course.  He was hiding somewhere, maybe in the back office, I don't know.   And the place looked great too, it's amazing what five or six people can do when there's no tables interrupting.  At 12 p.m. Jeff comes into the kitchen and announces, well, it's dead.  Okay, time to cut the floor!  And he sends everybody home save for two people.  (I was one of the ones he kept on.)

Everybody's casual and mellow, wiping their hands, taking off their aprons, getting ready to leave, totally understanding of the situation.  These things happen you know.  Sometimes it's just dead like that. 

Meanwhile I look around at everybody getting ready to leave, like, "WAIT A MINUTE!!!   WTF?!?!"  And I protest to everybody....

"Hey!   Do you realize what just happened here?!?"

They look at me, puzzled.  Apparently not.  So I explain.

"Jeff just brought all of you in here and had you running around for an hour cleaning his kitchen for him.....for $2.10!!!!  And now he's sending you home!"

Looks of "heeeeeyyyyy....wait a minute...." dawned on their faces.  None of them had even seen it that way.  And a few got mad!  As they rightly should have been.   Not that they said anything to Jeff about it, most wouldn't out of fear of losing their job (a total bunk job that's not worth it) but I at least felt better that they finally realized how they'd - knowingly - been exploited.  For a total of $2.10.

At the time I wasn't pissed about it, only because I was one of two that Jeff kept on the floor so I did go on to make some tips later in the afternoon, but had I been one of the ones that was cut, I probably would have been very aggravated.   I ended up quitting within a month anyway once tourist season died and moved on to an office gig where everybody was underpaid and exploited by three Canadian pod people.  But that's another story.