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Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#81

Post by apsurd »

trowawee wrote: post #73
imgabe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most jobs don't have tips. People working in them still manage to do a good job and many of them make a lot more than people in tipped jobs do.

My PM doesn’t tip me when I complete a ticket quickly; I don’t tip QA when they catch a bug in my code; the on-call engineer doesn’t tip me when some docs I wrote save them a few hours of time fixing an issue I saw during my last on-call rotation. And yet! The company seems to keep making money and doing well, and we all seem to like each other (mostly, except for that one guy, but he doesn’t like anyone).

tip based jobs are overwhelmingly minimum wage. of course we can argue whether that’s cause or effect, but the point is, it makes very little sense to compare literally “the minimum allowable threshold for legal employment” to professional salaried employees.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#83

Post by endisneigh »

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #56
imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I'm kind of intrigued by the opposite idea: extend the system of tips to everything . I'd gladly add a tip to many things I buy if I knew that it would go entirely to the workers and not one penny would go to the owners, managers, or executives. Tips are a kind of direct income redistribution. If I think someone deserves more money, I can directly give it to them. There's no middleman, no politics, and no stigma abou…

My understanding is if what you proposed happened it would be regressive as less money would go into unemployment due to the substantially reduced payroll taxes collected.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#84

Post by nine_k »

lettergram wrote: post #53
imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I don’t think you’ve worked a job where you got tipped, have you? It’s actually one of the few ways people can make a lot of money for doing a good job. What you describe punishes hard work, the people getting tips would hate it.

I've actually seen how a restaurant is run. Waiters put the tips into a common pot, then split equally. It was their idea.

Drivers, who don't work in close proximity to each other, may have it differently, of course.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#85

Post by viraptor »

lettergram wrote: post #53
imgabe wrote: post #9

Just do away with tips. It's a terrible and stupid system. If you want to do it as a customer, go ahead, but it should never be considered as part of the employee's compensation. If people aren't willing to do the job for the hourly wage alone with no tips, raise the wage until they are.

I don’t think you’ve worked a job where you got tipped, have you? It’s actually one of the few ways people can make a lot of money for doing a good job. What you describe punishes hard work, the people getting tips would hate it.

Apart from other responses pretty much disproving this, consider which people you're rewarding. Not every place will share the tips with cooks / dish washers / owners / etc. It actually causes conflicts in those places (don't share -> kitchen hates front staff; share -> front staff hates kitchen).

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#87

Post by siquick »

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #74
siquick wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should never ever be a thing. Buyers already pay enough tax as it is without another stealth tax that employers can take advantage of.

It's something I wish I could do. It's not a system I would know how to implement. I certainly agree that the existing system of tipping doesn't work very well.

We don't have tipping in Australia but in most cafes, restaurants and bars you can expect good service.

A better thing to fix would be to improve people's general happiness by paying them a dependable wage and giving them good health care - you'll probably find they are happier at work and better at their job.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#88

Post by andrei_says_ »

viraptor wrote: post #85
lettergram wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you’ve worked a job where you got tipped, have you? It’s actually one of the few ways people can make a lot of money for doing a good job. What you describe punishes hard work, the people getting tips would hate it.

Apart from other responses pretty much disproving this, consider which people you're rewarding. Not every place will share the tips with cooks / dish washers / owners / etc. It actually causes conflicts in those places (don't share -> kitchen hates front staff; share -> front staff hates kitchen).

The people who steal the difference between a living wage and a tip-subsidized wage?

Subsidized by us, who pay twice?

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#89

Post by Noos »

adammenges wrote: post #22
bagacrap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the service industry there's a big difference between doing a job and doing a job /well/. Doing a job well is incentivized by tips.

That's true in more or less every job, it can be done well or done poorly. Incentive should be keeping the job at all. Tips are an infuriating hidden cost.

There's actually no incentive to keep low paid service jobs for any length of time. One of the saddest things in retail for example is the longer you work, the less you actually make; retail pay is so low that your raises will be less than inflation adjusted minimum wage or new hires if you work at a job long enough!

I've seen/had this happen. Bosses had to go to bat for their long term workers because even with raises, they wound up making less than people hired in the past month.

Re: Amazon shortchanged drivers $61.7M in tips

#90

Post by edgyquant »

nine_k wrote: post #84
lettergram wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you’ve worked a job where you got tipped, have you? It’s actually one of the few ways people can make a lot of money for doing a good job. What you describe punishes hard work, the people getting tips would hate it.

I've actually seen how a restaurant is run. Waiters put the tips into a common pot, then split equally. It was their idea. Drivers, who don't work in close proximity to each other, may have it differently, of course.

This isn’t every restaurant though. My ex-wife used to be a waitress and if there was a pooled tip jar she immediately began looking for a different place without one. Drivers, otoh, usually make at least minimum wage but then they need that money for gas as well.
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