Like many, I’ve worked jobs that often receive tips. It was always nice to put forth effort and then have a customer leave a tip behind in recognition. Even more so counting up the bills and change at the end of a shift.
Baltimore, like a great many other liberal havens, is buying into the Fight for $15 nonsense. The sales pitch in Charm City is no different than what it’s been everywhere else Fight for $15 has infested. Just raise the minimum wage they say, and every single socio-economic ill plaguing the city will go away – as if $15 an hour will cause Apple to change its entire business model, close it’s I-phone plants overseas, and build a new one near the CVS-looted and burned-by-Freddie-Gray rioters last April.
It’s impossible to talk sensibly with those that support Fight for $15. They aren’t just economically illiterate. They adhere so fanatically to a woefully uninformed worldview they can’t tolerate any idea other than “fighting” because corporations “have made billions of dollars in profit and pushed off costs on to taxpayers while leaving people like us – the people who do the real work – to struggle to survive…we can’t feed our families, pay our bills or even keep a roof over our heads on minimum wage”.
Baltimore city council proposes not only a $15 an hour minimum wage to help those who “struggle to survive”, they also want to make tipping illegal. That’s right. They want to make tipping, illegal.
How they plan to enforce it remains to be seen. Undercover inspectors could visit different businesses to see if any evidence of tipping occurs. Or, customers and employees could spy on one another and call the police if and when tipping is observed.
Who would bear the brunt of enforcement is also unclear. Would the customer plunking down $2.75 after enjoying lunch be fined for the gesture? Would the employee be sanctioned if he or she took the tip? Since the Fight for $15 people think business owners are Satan’s spawn, no doubt enforcement muscle would be used to punish the hapless grocery store owner that let the grocery baggers accept tips. And what about the serial tippers constantly leaving money behind for workers to grab at stores all over town?
Wouldn’t tips help “the people who do the real work” afford to “feed their families, pay their bills, or keep a roof over their head”? No doubt it would.
Liberal fascination with fairness – as sick and misguided as it is – is partially at the root of the Baltimore tip ban. In the liberal mind, if Sammy and Susie both work at the same place, and Susie ends up with $42.50 in tips at the end of her shift while Sammy only has $30.00, it’s unfair. Never mind that both individuals have an equal opportunity to make tips. In the liberal mind, the outcome must be fair and equitable.
It’s reminiscent of an old litmus test for Marxism: “which do you favor, equality of opportunity or equality of outcome?” – those answering in favor of the latter were Marxist in their economic orientation.
Are the Fight for $15 people, and by extension the Baltimore city council, a bunch of closet Marxists? Not in the sense of hammers and sickles, and murals portraying Lenin and Mao as happiness incarnate. More along the lines of Che T-shirts and clever but senseless social media memes.
Along with fairness, the Baltimore tip ban may represent a rare admission of guilt on the part of city council and Fight for $15 activists. It’s widely understood that if the minimum wage goes up, several things will follow:
– The increase in wage costs will be passed along to consumers at the cash register, making it harder for consumers to tip and more inclined to shop outside Baltimore city limits.
– Employees will lose their jobs, some to automation and some as a result of businesses that have to choose between reduced labor costs or going out of business for entirely.
So, if Baltimore consumers see prices increase as the minimum wage rises, they might not be able to afford to leave a tip. The city council may be favoring a tip ban as a way to soften the economic blow of a $15 an hour minimum wage. If so, it’s an egregious effort that reveals how deeply liberals put their agenda over the well-being of people – it’s proof that they understand the negative consequences of Fight for $15, but support the wage hike anyway.
For those workers that aren’t replaced by self-serve kiosks or otherwise let go from their minimum wage jobs, they won’t be able to look forward to tip monies on top of the $15 an hour they’re getting. The liberal agenda is worth more to Baltimore city council than the things tip money could have paid for. This point will be proven too when, years after the minimum wage rises to $15 an hour, Baltimore is still a mess and the left falls back on the same old boogeymen they’ve been blaming since LBJ was President.
Image: Courtesy of Scott Sanchez @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2_usd_gratuity.jpg
