Since ours in the US is generally a percentage of the bill, people in expensive restaurants can make more. Do they work harder? Do they have fewer tables so less checks are tipping? 20% tips on 5 hundred dollar tables is $100 every 60-90 minutes, but shifts are usually only a few hours. So maybe $3-400 for a 4-5 hour dinner shift? In a diner you’d are probably half that per table but for more tables and faster turnover. What’s a good wage?
AFAIK here in Europe it’s minimum wage or slightly above, possibly much higher for high end restaurants. But it is a job like any other, they work fix hours and receive a fix wage, if they need to stay late they get overtime. In Brazil it’s a job that gets paid minimum wage but there is an expected 10% tip that is almost always put on the bill by the time you get it.
Here in Europe it’s not customary to tip, the expectation is that people earn enough to live well regardless of the job, and if a waiter is not earning enough we should change the minimum wage and not rely on people willingly paying extra. Imagine if you applied the same logic to any other job, no one would be willing to depend on tips from random people to pay their wages, but company owners would be very happy if they can convince people that it’s better for them to not get paid.
If they were paid minimum wage in the US, they would get $8-20, depending on location. With the current system they’re paid $2/hr but take home $20-50/hr per responses here. Also taxing is different on wage vs tips.
In Australia you would be looking at minimum wage under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020. Under this award you can be one of three types of employee, a full time worker, a part time worker, or casual.
A full time employee is defined as
An employee who is engaged to work an average of 38 ordinary hours per week over a period of no more than 4 weeks is a full-time employee.
A part time employee is defined as
A part-time employee is an employee who: (a) is engaged to work at least 8 and fewer than 38 ordinary hours per week (or, if the employer operates a roster, an average of at least 8 and fewer than 38 hours per week over the roster cycle); and (b) has reasonably predictable hours of work.
If you don’t meet either of those you are a casual employee, which means less guarantees and protections but a higher pay rate.
If you are a casual you get paid 25% more than full time and have a maximum of 38 hours in a week, averaged over 4 weeks, and a maximum of 12 hours on any day.
A casual employee must also be engaged for at least 2 hours per instance of work, so you can’t have single hour shifts here and there, it must be 2 hours minimum.
If a casual works over 38 hours in a week they are to be paid overtime rates, and breaks are still required for casual workers with penalties (increased pay rates) for situations where breaks are not possible.
The base rate is $26.44 Australian so $18.69 USD. The casual will earn 25% more per hour, so $33.05 AUD or $23.37 USD. This is the minimum for a casual server at a restaurant or similar venue. The casual does not get leave or similar but gets paid more, the part or full time workers get leave and regular hours with the lower pay rate.
We don’t do tipping here. The very rate occasion someone does it is generally seen as showy and a little gross. We sometimes have a tip jar at the counter which is split between all staff on a shift, but usually people only drop a bit of change in there and most people pay by card anyway.
You absolutely can’t live here and buy a house on that income. You can survive on it if you are living with other people, but living on your own is not really an option at that pay rate. Also we don’t have to pay for medical insurance here, we have Medicare which is actually really good, and we also don’t have to pay for school for kids, the fees are optional and you can say no. It isn’t perfect, there are tonnes of issues, but it is better than the US system of paying as little as possible and relying on the kindness of strangers and social obligation to keep people alive.
If someone serves me food and my food needs to cost a little more for them to be able to actually live a dignified life I am happy to pay that. Instead corporations find every way of cheating workers out of the fruits of their labour to increase profit. Nobody should live in poverty and without dignity, working or not, and no work is below respect, excluding exploitation of others. I personally think they should be paid more than they are by a significant margin, maybe 50% more, maybe more than that. If we raise the floor we raise everyone above them and live in a society without abject poverty, win win in my book.
at a minimum, the normal minimum wage that everyone would normally get in their country, like any job.
Why is this job being looked at or treated differently then other employment?
If minimum wage is $8/hr and a server earns $2 plus $40 in tips, why would servers want to change that system?
I was gonna say, the minimum at minimum. That’s around 13€/h for my country. Now I would hope depending on the restaurant they would also be paid more, maybe 16€/h or something, because being a server can be extremely taxing. Depending on the place, people can be awful.
I think part if the issue is that it’s not a normal 8 hour shift, especially in nicer restaurants that may be open 11-2 and 5-10 plus prep/cleanup.
But people get paid per hour?
So part time work?
It’s just a very weird schedule and servers that I’ve known sometimes end up working 11-2 and then 6-11, or something like that, if they want the hours. They send you home when business slows down so a planned 6 hour dinner shift can switch to much less if it’s a slow night.
agreed, I’m not saying it should be minimum but it shouldn’t be any lower because minimum is the law. that’s up to negotiations on however baseline wages for every job were set.
Serving is an unskilled position. They should be able to make enough money to cover rent, bills, food, family and transportation…with at least something left over at the end of it that could be saved or used for leisure. In other words, they deserve to make as much as any other worker.
- Take down the order of what I want to eat
- Give that info to the kitchen
- Return with Food
- Ask if the food is good, and if a second round of ordering is needed
- Occasionally recommend the same dish, over and over
There is nothing that a server does that entitles them to a percentage of my bill. I was a server. On the whole, it sucks if you are not a pretty/hot/cute/desirable person.
Tipping in general is theft. Theft from the customer, and wage theft from the worker.
No disrespect meant, but the term unskilled in actually part of corporate propaganda. If someone who starts working there today is not as good at it as someone who has worked there for 2 years then there are skills which take time to acquire and thus it is a skilled job. Unskilled labour is an invention of capitalists who want to pay as little as possible and will use whatever weasle words they can to convince other workers that either they are better than the unskilled or that they themselves are unskilled and replaceable.
The term usually means that the skill is something an average person could pick up easily and has a steep and quickly flattening learning curve, so while a person that has worked as a server for 2 years would be much better than someone just started, they will not be that much better than someone who’s at it for 1 year. And the difference between 2 and 20 years on that job is neglectible. Compare that with something like programming or medicine where the difference between 2 and 20 years of experience is absurd and you start to get a feeling of what the term means.
That being said, skilled or unskilled labor everyone deserves to have a basic income that covers all of their needs and at least some of their wants.
Correct, there is a meaningful difference between jobs with more or less time required to reach a high degree of competence, no argument there. The major issue is labeling something as low skill. Working in customer service requires skills around managing angry customers, managing time, following up issues, using complex ordering systems, handling payments and issues with payments, and all sorts of similar stuff. The emotional labour of working in direct customer service is high skill and high difficulty. Just because there is not a university degree in handling those situations doesn’t mean it is low skill, it is just not a skill we recognise and pay for.
The issue from my end is why do we ask whether a job is skilled or unskilled when thinking about pay rates? If a job needs to be done then someone should be paid to do it. If we label is as low skill we are justifying paying them less. This is wrong in a bunch ofbeays and ends up hurting lots of people.
I am reminded of the intelligence and genetics debate. People can talk all day about how you would design a study to tease out the difference between two populations in terms of intelligence while controlling for all other factors and how to reduce bias and so on, but the question keeps coming up. Why do we want this answer? What benefit would ranking the races for intelligence have? What societal changes would be informed by this research? In my opinion the question is not a good one, we should instead be looking more at how to support the development of any child to have their innate intelligence come to full growth without interference from things like stress and poverty. Knowing that people from one group or another have a theoretically slightly higher or lower ceiling won’t help actually improve outcomes for people, it will just help racists sound legitimate, and in the same way ranking the jobs will just help capitalists pay people less for the same work.
That’s fair. I was using the term to differentiate between someone who completes an apprenticeship, certificate, or degree program that is required before one can work in certain jobs/professions versus a newspaper ad. An honest days work is work, obviously.
Tipping in general is theft. Theft from the customer, and wage theft from the worker.
Amen!!
Min wage, of course, like any other entry job. Not that I think it’s “enough” or that they’re properly compensated for their contribution, because the profit is almost always split amongst those who have never worked for it, but in Western Europe it’s a “livable wage”, IME. For instance, you can rent a studio apartment in the center of Marseille for about 500 euro, and min wage is like 1400 for 35h/week. With the “prime d’activité”, which is some money the government can give you for having a job, you can get an extra 250-100 euro. It’s manageable (without kids ofc)
Minimum wage in Western Australia for a server back when I was one (15 years ago) was $22.50.
I worked my way up through restaurants to high end cocktail bars. My last casual job before I moved to salaried management paid $37 minimum to the bartenders. Salaries range from $65k for bar/floor manager to $90k for venue manager.
The one corporate owned bar I worked in liked to promote from within so if you were there long enough and worked your way through the management roles you would eventually work up to area manager then corporate roles earning $125k+. That wasn’t for me though so I left that before moving up.
Local normal minimum wage and up. The up depends on the kind of restaurant and additional qualifications.
At fancy restaurants, diners sit for longer and have more if an experience, and we’re not going to rush them at all. So, 20% on four (because each table needs more attention) $100 tables, two or three times a night.
Except $100 is low for even two people, and tables will often be four or even six. Figure $2K a night in sales and you’re closer to reality, $3K on the weekends or for a brunch shift. So at 22% (because anyone who can serve at that level pulls more than the 20% baseline) you’re looking at $450-650 in gross tips.
But because no one works alone at that level, expect that a third to half of that will go to tipping out the bar staff, bussers, food runners, and backwaiters, so more like $250-400 in a six-hour shift, or about $50/hr… plus wages. At a fancy place. Based on my experience.
If you’re slinging eggs at a diner you’re much more subject to walk-in traffic but less subject to high rollers. You’re also much more subject to the local cost of living, so here in Chicago you’re probably still making $20-40/hr in tips after tipout, but in South Dakota a lot less… and your wage will be lower, too.
I have to quibble with the idea that a fine dining server works no harder than an egg-slinger, though, as someone who’s done both. Fine dining takes a lot more attention, patience, and training; a lot of the work is preparation and goes unseen by the patrons — as it should be.
On our honeymoon, where we stayed we got a credit that we could use towards the spa or the high-end fine dining restaurant on the site. We chose the restaurant and even with the credit I think our bill was over $200, before tip. It was by far the best meal I’ve ever had, though, and our waiter was excellent, far beyond anything I’ve ever had before or since. He had extensive experience in fine dining, previously working many years in New York City at famous places, I think the Waldorf Astoria or something like that. That was when I understood the level of skill that can be attained in that career and how important that is to the fine dining experience.
What are they paid outside the US?
I mean, that’s going to depend radically on the country. Eritrea and France are not going to look very similar.
Here in bc the minimum wage(most likely the starting wage for a server) is 17.85 an hour but I’ve seen up to 25 I believe
This is only as of June 1, 2021.
Directly prior to this if was $13.95/hr for “liquor servers” when regular min wage was was $15.20/hour.
Ontario had a different rate until Jan 2022. I think they still have a “student” minimum wage.
It’s not as stark a difference as it is in some states but it has been part of the reasoning for tipping here as well, in the past.
In nz its generally 22-32$ an hr. Shifts are 6-8hr 5-6 days a week.
For US I’d say whatever wage is required for them to make close to the median wage with 35-40 hr work.
I see median wage at $1200 per week (dam Americans are fucking rich) so id say they should be on $25-30 which puts them at around $1000 a week with 30-40hr work.
If we are just looking at median food/service wage its at $700 a week. So I’d say $17-$23 to reach that $700 a week with 30-40hr work is fair wages. A slight increase for most food/service roles compared with their current median. I’d expect it to be high in the expensive places like NY.
So what I’m seeing from salary websites, in USD, Japan is about 15K, France about 24K, Poland a bit above 6K, India about 4K.
When you ask what a good wage is things get more complicated. The cost of living varies dramatically between these countries and regionally.
Fancy restaurants do pay more but also have more effort per table.
A diner is running closer to $10-50 per table meaning 2-10$ tips a table. Means theyd have to turn 10-40 times the tables in the same amount of time for an equivalent tip earning.
Fancy places also tend to have fewer patrons not tip, it still happens of course but it is less common.
