The duality of tipping

May 6, 2019 (615 words) :: The practice of tipping manages to be simultaneously highly capitalist yet weirdly outside the sphere of market relations.
Tags: ideology

This post is day 126 of a personal challenge to write every day in 2019. See the other fragments, or sign up for my weekly newsletter.

Another short fragment, building on yesterday’s fragment about Adam Smith’s mother. I’ve often thought that tipping (for service work) has a weird sort of duality. On the one hand, it operates according to an extremely capitalist logic: if you want to get someone to work harder, your best strategy is to pay them very little, so they have to get most of their paycheck through tips. The threat of not being able to pay their bills, or the promise of being able to afford a better life, is used to motivate workers to provide a “better” (more obsequious, more entertaining, more efficient) service for customers. Money is seen as the primary motivator here, rather than, say, personal satisfaction in wanting to do a good job, or caring about the people they’re serving.

On the other hand, in some ways, the practice of tipping relies on a rejection of capitalist rationality. Especially in large cities, a lot of tipping takes place under transactions where neither participant expects to see the other again. Sometimes the tipping occurs only after the service itself has taken place, long after the parties involved have parted: in an Uber or Lyft ride, you don’t even get the option of tipping until your ride is over, after which you get to choose a % tip (including $0) from the safety of your smartphone.

In cases like that, why do people bother tipping at all? It’s clearly not a matter of self-interest for you to tip, if it’s after the service is over and you don’t plan on seeing them again. Tipping more or less doesn’t do anything to ensure a better service for yourself in the past or future. If you do choose to tip, sometimes it’s because you genuinely don’t care about keeping that money (the multiple taps it takes to set the tip to 0 is not worth the savings), which is itself an indication of the limitations of the idea of capitalist rationality. Sometimes it’s because you care about the worker: you know that their wages are low, and while you can’t fix the system that has allowed their wages to be so low, you can at least do your bit to help them survive another day. Sometimes it’s because someone you know is watching, and you don’t want them to think you’re cheap, but that is itself a social norm which is outside the sphere of market-mediated relations.

The point is that tipping - on the surface, a highly capitalist practice - largely only functions because of non-capitalist social relations. Capitalism has co-opted societal bonds that make people care about each other and even give money to others without receiving anything in return, in order to use it as a tool to discipline workers.

Having service workers reliant on tipping for their wages is a political choice, not merely a matter of efficiency. Workers don’t need the carrot and stick of monetary incentives in order to be good at their job - the more humane alternative is to pay them well regardless, and create an environment that makes them want to do a good job on account of their social bonds with customers and co-workers.

In the US, the federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13. The resulting overreliance on tipping that this implies creates a system of intense workplace control, one that suppresses wages while squeezing more work out of workers - all under the guise of customer service. But it’s not a zero-sum game between customers and service workers. The real villain here is capital, i.e., anyone whose return on investment comes from extracting surplus value from service workers. Abolish tipping, sure, but also, abolish capital.

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