The Greed Over People Replutocraticans behind this sinister bill will proclaim it will allow restaurants to hire more people, since the GOP one-percenters are all “job creators”, right? In fact, here’s what the restaurant chains will do: With the dramatically lower minimum wage, they’ll pile even more “side work” and other normal minimum-wage grunt work onto the tipped servers’ duties, so they won’t need to hire anyone at all. Soon, as I’ve seen in some other restaurants, your $2.13 per hour server, who lives on tips, will also be mixing your table’s drinks, tossing your salads, plating your desserts, and staying two hours extra each night at cut-rate to clean up the restaurant.

If you’re a restaurant chain exec with a choice between hiring more people at $7.50 per hour, or just throwing those duties onto the backs of people making $2.13, what would YOU do, while you add up your bonuses and stock options?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Republican ideology sucks. I know it’s all about giving more to the “job creators” and sucking the working poor dry. Killing the Unions so that the working class lost its one lobbying strength it had and on and all so that the rich could win their class warfare against us. So ya I understand the big picture and read a lot of books by people like Thomas Frank and Michele Moore, etc. But having worked in a restraurant as first a dishwasher, then a cook, all during the time my girlfriend was a waitress there I have an inside appreciation and a bone tp pick about what waitresses make. First of all I’ll tell you the hardest and worst job to have is being the dish washer. It’s humid and hot as hell back there. It stinks and the smell seems to seep into your sink, and it destroyers the sink of your hands. Going out to bus up dishes was the best part of the job. I got out of the hell hole for a few minutes and into the nice air conditioned area my girlfriend got to work in. Then I moved to cooking almost as bad, but paid a bit more. Still was very hot and came with its own set of downsides. Well anyway, all the while I made $5.25 and hour for washing dished she made like a base of $3 plus about $10-30 an hour in tips. Then I got paid $8 an hour for cooking. Still I came nowhere close to what she made in a night. She had anywhere from $50 to $100 a day in tips. On top of that she did not have to pay taxes on it because the goverment has no way of knowing what she really made. She paid taxes as if she made the true minumun wage which was 5.25 back then. She did not pay like she made $20 an hour. Plus while I worked 8 hours to make barely 50 she could come in for 4 hours during lunch or supper and make twice as much as me in half the time! So in essence she made 4x what it did all the time. Is waitressing that much harder to do? I used to get real pissed that society does not reward the cook or the dishwasher for a job well done. Only the waitress got the tip. I never understood that. If a customer liked the meal why not tip the cook and throw a token amount in for the waitress who only carried it out to you. Of cause my girlfriend never say it that way because of coarse she benifitted from this unfair system of tips. Anyway, I always said that the boss could pay these girls zero per hour and they would still come into work. There is nothing in town that can compare to making that kind of money with no skills at all. Look around were else can a person make 20-30 and hours strait out of high school with out it being a technical or degree level job? I find it silly when people discuss the problems waitresses have and at the same time totally ignore the other people that were involuved in preparing that meal from them. As if the waitress magically makes the plates clean, and then puts food on it. What I really would like to see this bill do is reduce the base rage of waitresses down to near zero and then force the restrarant owners to transfer that wage savings and increase the cooks and dishwashers base pay. Or better yet just pass a law stating that all the crew splits the tip. In this way perhaps there would not be such turnover. Oh ya speaking of that we had constant turnover in cook and dishwashers because of the low pay and overly hard work. At the same time the waitresses never quit. I think that should speak volumes. They knew that had a good thing and would not leave to do something else. Food for thought.

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Funny. Outback is supposed to be Australian type food. Well, I know Australia well, and tipping is not common because…THEY GET PAID A LIVING WAGE!!!

This country is so effed up…