Tipping is for racists

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“During his last year, Dr. King advocated for the Poor People’s Campaign. To honor his legacy we’re announcing that our minimum wage will now align with what’s widely considered a livable wage: $15/hr.

“How will this be possible? We are simultaneously eliminating tipping. While so many of you generously give, we would rather that our employees have a dependable wage than rely on compensation from our customers. Tipping has a unique role in our country and is often linked to racial oppression. It’s time for it to end.”

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Tipping, not unlike policing in America, can be traced to this nation’s history of enslavement, pursuit and control of Black bodies.

“After the Civil War, white business owners, still eager to find ways to steal Black labor, created the idea that tips would replace wages,” civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander wrote in The New York Times. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the nation’s first minimum wage into law, it excluded restaurant workers, whose ranks were heavily populated by Black people and women.

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Eric Spivack, owner of The Lab by Alchemy Coffee, is not the first merchant to sour on tipping. But the hardships of the pandemic, and its impact on business and his employees, left him asking questions about the practice of tipping at his coffee shop in the 800 block of West Broad Street near Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).

Historically, a third of his employees’ compensation came from tips, he said.

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