Clodagh Finn: Don’t tip? That’s your right but you must never have waited on tables

Tipping is not just about paying for a service; it's about expressing gratitude and showing respect

The Payment of Wages Bill gives waiters a legal right to their tips and is designed to stop employers using tips to make up basic wages.

AS a former pizza waitress, I always tip. And in cash. When I don’t have any, I ask the server — in hushed tones — if the credit card gratuity will go to them. Their reaction tells you all you need to know. If there’s an uncomfortable silence or a backward glance to see who might be listening, it’s a firm ‘no’.

All that will (hopefully) change now thanks to new legislation that ensures your small token of gratitude will reach its intended destination. The Payment of Wages Bill, which passed in the Oireachtas last week, gives pizza waitresses everywhere — and tens, nay, hundreds of thousands more — a legal right to their tips.

The legislation is also designed to stop employers using tips to make up basic wages. And it prohibits businesses from describing mandatory charges as “service charges” unless they are treated as tips or gratuities.

The fact that there is a need for such a law at all clearly shows the range of bad practices that continue in the hospitality sector. It would be interesting to see an industry-wide study of where tips actually go. In the past, they have found their way into the pockets of owners, boosted payroll, gone to revenue — and occasionally even gone to the waiter too.

The issue, however, is never too far from the headlines. Every so often, you’ll hear about a failed bid to unionise, or a high-profile restaurant that denies staff their tips. I always make a mental note never to go to those restaurants. Or to the ones that charge their workers for their own lunch.

Waiting tables is a skilled job, but the staff rarely get the credit they deserve.

While these rows often reveal widespread support for the workers, too often any discussion on tips dissolves into a bogus debate about whether we should give them or not.

Those who are against tipping make many fine arguments, such as the practice is likely to perpetuate low wages, but I wonder how many of them have ever thanked the restaurant gods for a good tip night when pay day was still days/weeks away?

I will never forget how much I depended on those fickle tipping gods while doing (badly) one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. It wasn’t just the work itself, though that was more demanding than you might ever imagine.

Waiting tables is a highly skilled job whatever the public perception of it.

You have to be a multi-tasker, a forward-thinker, an agile mover, and a competent administrator.

You need to think on your feet and keep several jostling ideas in your head: an extra knife here, a pitcher of water there, a nonchalant avoidance of eye contact as you go, otherwise you’ll get nowhere.

You also need to learn on the job. Try holding a tray of nine full glasses with one hand. It doesn’t come naturally, let me tell you, and there is no experience more humiliating than experiencing time slow to a glacial crawl as your first effort crashes to the floor in a full restaurant. Liquid doom.

Mind you, there is nothing quite like the collective spirit of restaurant staff which swings into action when there is a disaster. Still, you need a thick skin. (For now, we’ll leave the blistered, blotched, and desiccated end-of-shift skin out of it).

The hardest part of being in the service industry, though, was (and, I think it safe to say, still is) being treated as if you somehow didn’t/don’t count.

Perhaps only those who have waited tables know what it is like to be, by turns, invisible, dismissed, devalued, harried, objectified, and, it is true, on occasion even appreciated.

A customer who treats you as a fellow member of the human race is not exactly rare, but it is astounding to see how quickly people adopt a feudal mindset when they sit down to eat at a restaurant. If this new legislation does nothing more than remind the lords and ladies at the top table that the waiting staff are not serfs, it will be a win.

It might also render them visible, but not too visible. There is a precarious balance to be struck between entirely dismissing waiting staff and treating them as if they are an object for your amusement. Anyone who has waited tables in a busy restaurant will tell you they have been on that tightrope, with the possible exception of those gloriously dignified cafe waiters in France who take no nonsense.

It would be interesting to see an amendment to the new act requiring everyone to spend at least four weeks in the hospitality sector. There might be riots, of course, but low-paid services jobs might look very different if everybody had to do a stint in one.

They would no longer be low-paid, for a start, because we would begin to value not only the work people do in the service industry, but the people who do it.

Cheers: But while you enjoy the food and wine, remember the waiting staff.

In the meantime, though, expect a new debate on tipping. The new legislation will no doubt put a renewed focus on what is, in truth, a curious thing.

Why, for instance, would we pay more for a service that we seek to get as cheaply as possible? It doesn’t really make sense.

Tipping is not just about paying for a service; it is also about expressing gratitude. That became visibly apparent during the various phases of lockdown when people tipped for things they had never tipped for before: take-away coffees, for instance. And when people stopped carrying cash, they were willing to scan or tap at one of several digital tipping stations that began to pop up everywhere.

It was, you could say, our way of acknowledging the risk faced by those who remained open when Covid-19 was at its peak. A kind of danger money, as one observer put it.

Now as the tourism season hots up, a little too literally this week, it will be interesting to see if tipping keeps pace. It certainly won’t stop because several surveys tell us that people tip for other reasons too. One of them is simply because it is a long-standing social norm. We will continue to do what we have always done.

The other poll-topping reason we tip is that people know that waiters depend on them. So, we are back where we came in, with the pizza waitress who lived on her tips.

Of course, it would be infinitely preferable if those working in all aspects of the service industry, from beauty salons to bars, were appreciated and well-remunerated. Here’s hoping that day will come.

In the meantime, though, just leave a tip.