Working Life

  The gall of greedy employers never seems to end, right? This time it shows up in the restaurant biz where the other NRA—the National Restaurant Association–was trying to get its hands on waiters’ tips. I talk to Judy Conti, a key leader in the successful battle to slap down that money grab. I, then, […]

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Workers are just human fodder, who just gum up the works and get in the way of the dreams of some tin-pot “small business” owner, just a glorified term for a guy running a restaurant. That’s the view of a low life who is whining about the proposal to raise the minimum wage for waiters, a minimum wage that was set much lower than the minimum wage for everyone else because of the power of the restaurant lobby. And it’s indicative of the philosophy underlying the opposition to hiking the minimum wage (a very meek and mild proposal, as an aside).

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Two sides of the planet. Two different systems. Two different realities for workers—and, therein, lies the lesson: economies are about power, and values. Over in the U.S., if you are a waiter in the food industry, you are screwed, as Mark Bittman outlined in his column a few days ago, on the backs of a […]

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