This Day in Labor History: June 8, 1909

On June 8, 1909 Washington’s pioneering anti-tipping law went into effect. A goal of a lot of Progressives, this law attempted to end a labor practice that for the middle class who supported it, was annoying. The law did not last long, repealed four years later. Unfortunately, that practice still continues today, stronger than ever despite growing grumbling about it. But there’s probably not much we can do about it.

Washington was a strong state for Progressives, as was Oregon. In fact, the most Progressive states then are quite often the most liberal states now, in case you think there’s any hope to ever turn the South or Great Plains liberal. Good luck with that one. Anyway, many Progressives saw tipping as a malicious practice. Progressives did not have a lot of subtlety in their politics, so tipping wasn’t just bad, it was evil. It needed to be eliminated. Not surprisingly for these Progressives, the real problem here was service workers begging for extra money. Said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“Men who rely on tips to support their families, instead of relying upon the value of the services they render the man who employs them, are going through life with the wrong idea.

“What is a tip? If a tip is a mere gratuity, it is beggarly for a man to accept it. If it is a reward for good service, it can be said that the waiters ought to give good service without exacting extra pay, and if it is a reward for the waiter’s special effort to give his patron a little [of] the best of it, the acceptance of a tip is indefensible on moral grounds, for the waiter who will given [sic] one patron the best of it, will give either his employer or some other patron the worst of it.

“Of course legislating against tips is at best rather freakish and it ought not be necessary; but giving and receiving tips has posed a problem of some importance, and the lawmakers of this state simply undertook to solve it. It isn’t a good practice to accept tips, and if waiters can’t make a living without it, they will probably find it to their moral advantage to enter into some other field of employment” 

The Washington legislature wasn’t messing around here. It criminalized tipping, making both tipping and accepting a tip a misdemeanor. The state hoped it would begin a national movement to criminalize the practice.

Now, tipping was and remains a problematic practice, but not for the reasons the Post-Intelligencer or the architects of this law believed. Tips exist so that you can pay workers next to nothing and then give them bits if they are obsequious enough. Like so much about American labor, this had it start in the United States with slavemasters and their slaves and then became part of the Black service economy after the Civil War, with the rise of sleeping car porters employed by the vile George Pullman as one prominent example.

The problem with the law of course was that this was unenforceable. Who was going to enforce it? The cops were going to bust up a place over $1? Like much Progressive legislation, this was enacted without really asking the workers what they wanted or thinking through the enforcement mechanism. Progressives were the ultimate middle and upper-class liberals who thought they knew what was best for the people and so just forced the law through without thinking through the consequences. Glad liberals never do that today……

Anyway, Washington repealed its law in 1913, after it was proven totally unenforceable and not worth having. Of all the states to follow Washington, the one you’d least expect is probably Mississippi, but it passed a similar law in 1912 and that remained on the books until 1926. Tennessee did the same in 1915 and that was repealed in 1925. In fact, I think the reason it became popular in the South was for racial reasons, another way to keep Black workers in poverty.

Tipping naturally remains a big part of our economy today. It never went away, despite the occasional freakouts about it. The 1916 pamphlet that I used as the picture to top this post is one example, but really, it continues today. People are increasingly angry and confused about the rapid spread of tipping culture outside of just restaurants and haircuts and into seemingly every transaction we make, especially since it’s almost all electronic today and thus semi-anonymous. Interestingly, this anonymity seems to lead to more guilt about not tipping than anything else, so it continues and grows.

For me, tipping is one of those things that simply exists. Yes, in an ideal world, we’d get rid of it. Yes, it has gotten out of control. The tipped minimum wage is an abomation and that $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage still exists in some states. So the first thing you have to do to get rid of tipping is get rid of the tipped minimum wage. But even that is not going to do it because who can live on anything close to the minimum wage? You need to raise wages significantly above that. I happen to love a place that has high wages and does not accept tips, but there aren’t too many of them and customers might blanche at the higher listed prices that work the cost of labor properly into the pricing.

The problem though is that both the customers and many of the workers like tipping. Customers like it because it allows them to hold power over workers and this is disgusting. But it’s also a fact of life. But workers tend to like it because they can make significantly more money than they would under a typical wage system. This is of course more true at high end restaurants and bars than it is at your local diner or burger job or dive bar. But what we have found is that restaurant workers themselves are often pretty active in opposing anti-tipping legislation. I don’t blame them. We are asking them to be the experiment in our desire to eliminate tipping. Fighting for what you know and works well enough for you seems to be a reasonable response to the situation, even if it less than idea policy.

In any case, don’t be an asshole. Tip your waitstaff and bar tenders and do so generously. You aren’t solving any problems by being That Guy. Never be That Guy.

This is the 567th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.