Yes, the workers are wrong. This is a better way to do it. Unfortunately, many waiters really do come out ahead with tipping, especially those working at higher end restaurants, conventionally attractive by euro standards, or just really good people skills, so they argue tipping is good actually. It benefits some individually, but collectively a lot do not end up with more money this way. It’s part of the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology - yes you theoretically could do better with tipping, but how many do, compared with the many who don’t? But of course restaurantbusinessonline would prefer business owners still be paying less than minimum wage, so they find those workers whose interests for whatever reason line up with theirs.
I don’t understand how one can argue minimum wage + tipping is a better system than paying someone a living wage. There are very few and quickly decreasing places in the us where minimum wage = a living wage, and further the tipping system is often used by restaurant owners to justify paying less than minimum wage. So people’s incomes are wholly dependent upon their unique set of circumstances and attributes and how well they can milk money out of customers. It individualizes restaurant work, since suddenly you’re not making a low wage because your boss refuses to pay you, but because of your own failures in convincing your customers to give you more money.
Further this ignores two things. 1) according to the story they instituted this system because people weren’t tipping. Tipping as a system won’t work if individuals refuse to tip. 2) the crux of the issue seems more to be that they were promised full time work, but work is currently part time 3 days a week with no plans in place to open for full service, not the tipping.
I’m not against people working their way up to higher wages, nor am I against people getting payed differently based on seniority or something. But the way this story is written suggests a desire to return to a minimum wage+tipping system, which I am against. However reading the rest of the story and the workers’ petition, I’m not even sure that’s what the workers are suggesting.