Browncoats IRL

The whole thing came out of the blue. I was talking with someone I met at a gathering about tv shows and we bonded over Firefly. He started talking about Browncoats and the police state, and next thing you know he’s telling me he’s got friends at the Bundy Ranch and starts alluding to the tragic necessity of some catastrophic/revolutionary upheaval that a better world might emerge from the ashes. What followed was one of the most unpredictable and enlightening conversations I’ve ever had.

I wish I could remember more of it. We touched on so many subjects. He brought up Ron Paul, which I expected, and Che Guevara, which I did not. He held up Cuba as an example, a place where, even if people didn’t have much, and there were some problems, nobody starved and everyone got taken care of, more or less. Of course, there had been that unfortunate necessity of revolution. But good had come of it. When I mentioned places like Scandinavia, where they’d achieved a much better version of the same thing through social democracy, he thought that sounded pretty good. Given our vastly different starting places, we achieved a surprising amount of consensus. Most people are pretty reasonable if you get them one on one.

But the whole thing spun me around pretty good.

Later that night, after we’d driven home, the gf and I decided to unwind with a little tv, and I suggested we watch Firefly. Suffice to say, my new friend had put a whole new spin on the show for me Continue reading “Browncoats IRL” →

On Tips, Wages, and Tips ARE Wages

It started on facebook. A friend from work posted about a meeting another friend at work had called, to be held in a spare room at a restaurant downtown. For weeks we’d been hearing that the proposed minimum wage hike in Seattle was going to ruin our way of life. Restaurants, in particular, were going to be hard-hit by the wage hike (half the staff makes the state minimum wage of $9.32/hour; bumping them to $15 overnight would eat what little profit our employers were making), leading to closures and cutbacks on hours available for people to work. We had to do something.

At the meeting was a handout someone had printed up. The first line said TIPS ARE WAGES. There was more, a pageful of redux telling us all the things we’d been hearing: the doomsaying, the worst case what-ifs, frightening-est among them: WHAT IF PEOPLE STOP TIPPING?!?. We nodded our heads; we’d heard this before, and we were worried, too. It was why we were here.

[disclaimer/disclosure: that was my last week as a tipped employee. I am currently on hiatus from the hospitality industry.]

The girl who’d called the meeting spoke, as did the man who’d helped set it up. A march was suggested, contact info taken. Six or eight of us caught a bug and stayed after, to start putting it together. Tips ARE Wages would be our slogan, our name, the thing we were arguing, because to people like us, who earn our living from tips, to say tips are wages is like saying ketchup is a condiment. It jibes with our intuitive understanding of the world. It’s just common sense. Tips are how we get paid. Wages are the monies you get paid for working. Tips are wages. Duh.

Things evolved very quickly in the week that followed, a whirlwind of events and epiphanies I’ll no doubt thrill you with some other time, once I’ve wrapped my head around it all a little tighter. But a week to the day after the first meeting (the day the march would have been held, had we gone forward with it), there was another meeting, at which what I would describe as a friendly parting of ways occurred. I was among the splitters.

That might seem a strange decision, seeing how much passion and work I’d put into the whole thing. And I respect those who stayed with it. Anytime a citizen actively engages in the political process, I count that as a win for democracy and just generally a good thing. But I couldn’t continue under the auspices of an organization with whose basic premise I’d come to disagree. As intuitively obvious as it is to say tips are wages, if you want to put it in legislation, you need something called a tip credit, which was abolished in Washington State in or around 1989 (said abolition being one of the reasons those of us going to all those meetings and doing all that organizing can make the money we do).

What is a tip credit? Here’s how it works. Everybody has to make at least minimum wage. But some jobs, like bartending, are understood to be tipped professions, meaning that it’s generally understood that some to much of the money earned practicing such a profession is paid by the customers in the form of gratuities. So for professions like that, the employer pays a much lower hourly rate (the federal tipped worker rate has been frozen at $2.13/hour since 1996; until then it was pegged at half the federal minimum), and the employee reports their tips as taxable income. So what happens if someone doesn’t make enough in tips to meet the federal minimum wage? The employer is required to pay the difference, but they get a credit for whatever tips the employee earned. Hence the term ‘tip credit.’ One of the reasons you can make grown-up money in Seattle as a server or bartender is that there is no tip credit here, so you make $9.32/hour, plus your tips. It means you get a substantial paycheck instead of the spare change left over after income taxes are deducted from your reported tip earnings (I have, in other states, received paychecks for two weeks’ work that totaled $20 or less). It’s great. It’s one of the reasons I bartended for as long as I did.

The folks who stayed with Tips are Wages believe that introducing a tip credit (maybe permanent, maybe phased out) will help cushion the blow on small business when their labor prices (and, most likely, the price of most everything else) go up. If restaurants and bars, at least, can keep their tipped employees at the state minimum wage, then maybe they can weather the storm and the citizens of Seattle won’t lose too many of their favorite hangouts. It’s not unreasonable, and the certified policy wonk I talked to said that a workable policy for raising the minimum wage could be made to include a tip credit, if need be, and still do what it needs to do. But myself I can’t support it.

It’s possible the sky is really falling — I believe the small business owners I’ve spoken to believe that it is — and that transitioning to a higher minimum wage, even with a phased implementation for small business, will cause such a shock to the economy, at least that part of it concerning the service industry, that places will close and jobs will get scarcer. The legislation on the table is more ambitious than anything that’s ever been tried before, at least in the States, and if poorly managed or too sudden could cause serious upheaval. Anybody who says they know how it’s going to pan out is selling something. And I think it’s really generous that a whole bunch of folks are willing to take a pay cut to keep their employers afloat.

The problem, for me, is two-fold. First off, the city has no pre-existing apparatus for enforcing compliance. There’s no tip credit in Washington state, so why would they? That means building a bureaucracy, writing rules for it, hiring administrators and compliance officers, paying them with monies either from new tax revenue or diverted from existing programs. All that costs money and effort on the part of city government, with its limited resources and cornucopia of fires to put out and problems to solve, and it seems like a lot of effort to go to just to give business owners a break they could probably catch just as easily some other way. Making a tip credit temporary would only make it more expensive, since said enforcement apparatus would have to be taken back apart once its mandate expired.

The second problem is more nebulous, but also, I fear, more nefarious as well. It is, quite simply, that reintroducing a tip credit opens up some very troubling possibilities for abuse. For one thing, I could see a lot of people getting new job titles (one need only make $30/month in gratuities to qualify as a ‘tipped worker,’ after all), dropping them back down to $9.32, plus tips that employers are responsible for reporting. Without a strong, established enforcement apparatus, who’s to stop them from fudging the accounting? I’m not saying everyone will get up to shenanigans, but opening up this kind of loophole creates an incentive to figure out just how much can be snuck through it. Myself I’m willing to bet that more than I can think of offhand can be.

I’m all for obviating the impact of a wage hike on small business (big business can probably take care of itself, is my thinking). I just don’t think reintroducing a tip credit is the way to go about it. Attractive as it might seem (indeed, it seemed quite reasonable to me until very recently), actually implementing it causes as many problems as it solves. There are better ways to accomplish what it would accomplish that don’t come with that baggage. Let’s concentrate on those things.

The Work Itself Has to Be the Reward

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus

This is one I wrestle with a lot. I want a career so bad I can taste it. I want to spend all my working time writing and get paid enough to keep doing it. I want people to read my work and be moved by it. I want the years and the effort I’ve put into my writing to pay off. I daydream about it constantly, smiling to myself at how I imagine it’s going to be.

It’s going to be awesome. I’m going to quit bartending, and travel, spend more time in the shop making things, and being a writer is going to pay for all of it. Yeah.

The problem is that I’m supposed to be using that imagination for my work, and no matter how bounteous it must still be a finite resource. Time certainly is, and the time I spend imagining being a successful writer is time I am not spending imagining new worlds and different people and the things that happen when those things are made to collide.

The other problem is the little jolt of neurochemical satisfaction I get from the fantasy. Sure, it’s just a shadow of the satisfaction you get from actually accomplishing something, but it’s free. You don’t actually have to do any work, just imagine that you have done (I spent most of my twenties doing this, imagining being a writer instead of actually writing, much). Do it too much, and you end up never actually doing any work, because actually writing is hard at the best of times and gut-wrenchingly, soul-clenchingly painful at the worst. Don’t even get me started on revising. And that’s before you ever show it to anybody.

Take a step back and look at it, and the whole damn thing’s a slog with no real end in sight and a spoonful of heartbreak with each uphill step. Even if you get to the top there’s no guarantee anybody’s going to want to publish or even read this thing you made, and even if they do it’s likely never going to pay your bills entire, necessitating some other line of work to fill out your expenses. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why anybody would want to go through all that, and that’s speaking as someone who’s spent the better part of his adult life doing it.

And there’s plenty further to go. Further enough, at any rate, that the end exists only in my imagination, which makes it even nicer than it’ll likely actually be.

But I am happiest when I don’t even think about it, when the work itself is my reward. When my focus is less dilute, my ambition banked. When I think about my writing practice and not my (thus far largely non-existent) writing career. I might someday have those problems. From where I sit now they look like they might be okay problems to have. But they’re not the problems I have now. Right now (and always) I need to be writing, and content with that.

Best to align what rewards me with the things that are in my power, is what I’m trying to say. It makes life a lot happier when you can.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the reward of a thing well done is having done it. Look at it that way, and the hard work always pays off.

How’s the Writing Going?

I get this question a lot, and it’s a hard one to answer. Usually I go with something innocuous, like “It’s going alright” or “It’s kicking my arse” or “I hate it with the passion of a million white-hot suns.” Sometimes, if circumstance permits, I might go into a bit more detail, but I have to stop myself from opening the can up too wide, because I could literally talk for hours and most people don’t have time to hear, much less digest, the full report. I’ll give you an example.

There’s a story I wrote last summer, about woodworking and a zombie apocalypse, among other things. Call it Story X. I worked on it for a few months, did some research, got it banged into what I thought was a pretty good shape, and went ahead and submitted it a couple of times, receiving (relatively) quick rejections. I knew the beginning, vivid and prettily-worded though it was, wasn’t accomplishing enough, so I went over it again, basically rewriting what I’d written before in a way I hoped would be more compelling. As I learned when I submitted it to my writers’ group (which is what I should have done in the first place), I was not particularly successful, and every one of my estimable colleagues saw through my prosaic hand-waving and called me out on it (for which I thank them). At the time I’d started in on a novel, so I set Story X aside and tried not to think much about it. A month or two later I took a hiatus from writing altogether, and have been slowly easing myself back into it for the last month or so. Since I’m not quite ready to get back into novel mode I decided to bang my head against Story X for awhile and see which cracked first.

So far I’m slightly ahead.

Continue reading “How’s the Writing Going?” →

A Failure of Enlightenment

I’m both proud and ashamed of myself this morning, because last night I did evil in the service of good, or so it seems to me. It was my girlfriend’s company holiday party (usually well after the actual holidays for those of us in the Industry, for obvious reasons), and though I had a soccer match that kept me away for the first half, I tagged along for the latter part of the evening while she and her co-workers got silly and cut loose, as folks will do in such situations. Having run for most of ninety minutes, I wasn’t in much of a mood to join in, and spent the evening on the fringes conversing with friends and watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the tv behind the bar. I had a total of three drinks over the course of three hours.

Around 1am, it was decided that there should be karaoke, and the party absconded to the closest bar where karaoke was known to occur. I shan’t say which, only that if there were a French Quarter for hipsters, this joint would be in the heart of it. Garish, lurid, and loud as absolute fuck, though the staff was friendly and fun.

Except for the karaoke guy.

Now, one thing about my girl, she loves to sing her some karaoke. And she absolutely kills it. She’s got a beautiful voice, and inhabits the stage as if it were her natural environment (really, she’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known personally). So of course first thing she does when we get there is go try and sign up. But karaoke guys blows her off. She mentions it’s her company party, that she bartends around the corner. Offers him fifty dollars cash. He calls her a dumb bitch and tells her to fuck off. He spat so much contempt into her psyche it nearly derailed the good feeling the whole party had going.

So I called him out. Continue reading “A Failure of Enlightenment” →