This week, the House of Representatives will have a chance to end a
pernicious legacy of slavery. Lawmakers will vote on the Raise the Wage
Act, which would boost the minimum wage across the country to $15 an
hour by 2024. This would be a crucial step toward the first federal
minimum wage increase in more than a decade.
A just-released Congressional Budget Office report finds that a $15 minimum wage would have tremendous benefits
for low-wage workers of all races and ethnicities. Yet the stakes are
particularly high for black workers. The share who would benefit from
the Raise the Wage Act is far larger than the share of white workers who
would benefit—38 percent compared with 23 percent.
There’s another provision in the legislation—eliminating the
subminimum tipped wage—that corrects a wrong that goes much further back
than the previous federal minimum wage increase. For workers regularly
making more than $30 a month in tips, employers can currently pay as
little as $2.13 an hour. That subminimum wage has been frozen at this
level for decades. Should the Raise the Wage Act pass the House, it will
mark the first time that either chamber of Congress has moved to
eliminate the subminimum wage, which not only deepens economic
inequalities but also happens to be a relic of slavery.
You might not think of tipping as a legacy of slavery, but it has a
far more racialized history than most Americans realize. Tipping
originated in feudal Europe and was imported back to the United States
by American travelers eager to seem sophisticated. The practice spread
throughout the country after the Civil War as U.S. employers, largely in
the hospitality sector, looked for ways to avoid paying formerly
enslaved workers.
One of the most notorious examples
comes from the Pullman Company, which hired newly freed African
American men as porters. Rather than paying them a real wage, Pullman
provided the black porters with just a meager pittance, forcing them to
rely on tips from their white clientele for most of their pay.
Tipping further entrenched a unique and often racialized class structure
in service jobs, in which workers must please both customer and
employer to earn anything at all. A journalist quoted in Kerry Segrave’s 2009 book, Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities,
wrote in 1902 that he was embarrassed to offer a tip to a white man.
“Negroes take tips, of course; one expects that of them—it is a token of
their inferiority,” he wrote. “Tips go with servility, and no man who
is a voter in this country is in the least justified in being in
service.”
Read more:
The Racist History of Tipping - POLITICO Magazine
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