On Being and Doing, and How They Relate to #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen

There are two kinds of people in this world, people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and people who don’t. I’m generally the latter, and generally suspicious of binary frames as anything other than analytical tools to be picked up and put aside as they are useful, because in the world of lived actuality things are always more complicated than that. You have to be careful with them, because like many tools they convert easily to weapons. But when handled properly they can be used to adjust one’s perspective in way not dissimilar to the way a wrench adjusts the torque on a bolt.

One pair in tension that has much occupied me in recent months is that between being and doing. One takes as its basis a sort of existential status, the other actions and their result. Both are widely applicable as conceptual frames, and I think their deployment in the #YesAllWomen conversation speaks very clearly to the underlying problem, the thing so many men just don’t seem to get (John Scalzi did this better than I’m likely to, but bear with me).

One needn’t look hard to find the protestations of men aggrieved to be lumped in with the Eliot Rodgers, the Pick Up Artists and their seamy underbelly, or the endless ticker of women in America assaulted, raped, and killed by men over their sexual availability and, more importantly, their exercise of agency over it. Not all men are like that, they say. I am not like that, they say, sometimes explicitly. Indeed, the very existence of the above is the proof of their virtue, because they are not like the bad ones, the ones who hate women and speak and act on that hatred in obvious ways. They are not misogynists. Because they are not misogynists, their actions cannot be misogynistic. So stop judging them. Some of these men even have the gumption to claim some victimhood for themselves.

Either way, by this point we’ve been completely diverted from the discussion of misogyny, rape culture, and the culture of masculine entitlement that makes life for women everywhere so much more difficult and dangerous than it is for men. One suspects this was the unconscious intent of the speaker in the first place. Continue reading “On Being and Doing, and How They Relate to #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen” →

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.

My Two Cents on the Shutdown

Many people have said and written some very cogent, passionate words on the subject of today’s commencement of the 17th shutdown of the United States Federal Government, which is going to cause a great deal of unnecessary pain and suffering for a staggering number of people and likely derail whatever recovery our national economy has made since the bankers and sociopaths on Wall Street tanked the economy back in 2008. It is entirely the choice of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that it’s happening. They are, in effect, shooting the hostage to prove that they’re serious about stopping the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Why would they do that? It’s an important question to ask, I think, and one with a definite, if complicated, answer.

It begins, I think, with the election of Barack Obama. For a significant chunk of the population, that was a real shock, something heretofore impossible, and it represented not only a major electoral defeat, it signaled the emergence of demographic trends that meant the end of their way of life. America was no longer a majority-white, center-right nation. The son of a black man could ascend to the land’s highest office. The easy swagger of the Bush years were over, and had left such a bad taste in our mouths that we all tacitly agreed to forget them. This was not the America they grew up in, the America they loved and believed in with all their hearts, and it freaked them the fuck out. Think about the Tea Party’s early days, their eruption onto the scene as the result of an offhand comment by a finance pundit on CNBC. Remember their passion and outrage. They were (and are) fundamentally incapable of recognizing the election of Barack Obama (or the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) as legitimate, because neither of those things were allowed to happen in the America they believe in.

This was (and remains) an existential crisis for them. Extreme measures are not only permissible, but necessary. The United States federal government has become an occupying force, and invasion from otherwhere, and their duty as citizens of the real America is to resist with whatever means are at their disposal. Continue reading “My Two Cents on the Shutdown” →

The System Worked

“He has always feared for his safety.”

-Robert Zimmerman

I resisted writing about the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Sanford, FL when it happened seventeen months ago, though I had plenty to say about it. I grew up in Altamonte Springs, which is a couple towns over, closer to Orlando, and though I never spent much time in Sanford (there was rarely any reason to), I knew where it was, knew people from there, knew enough to know it was another one of those redneck towns that litter Florida’s sweltering interior, with gun-racks and Dixie flags on every pickup truck and a black folks’ part of town, where they stayed if they knew what was good for them. The notion that a lighter-skinned man could gun down a darker-skinned man without being arrested there was not surprising to me, given the racism embedded in Florida’s political and social culture (and, it now appears, legal precedent, but we’ll get to that later).

I used to joke, growing up, about Florida being the last state in the Confederacy to surrender. It was funny because, while technically true, the rest of the southern states do not consider Florida to be a part of the South, and neither do most Floridians. And, panhandle aside, there are plenty of cultural distinctions. Florida, as I think most people have figured out by now, has its own distinct brand of the crazy (click here for examples). But there are plenty of similarities between Florida and the South, and institutional racism is one of them. The main difference, as I remember it, was that in the South they were open, hell, even friendly about it sometimes, but in Florida we weren’t the South, and so no one talked about segregation or the rampant poverty and crime in black neighborhoods, because the consensus was that their problems were their problems and also their fault. We didn’t have to do anything about it as long as they kept to their part of town. Hell, they had to bus black kids in from across town so my lily-white high school could make diversity quotas and field a football team. We also had the requisite posse of skinheads, like every other high school in O-town.

The middle school I went to was a different story. Continue reading “The System Worked” →