The fragility of low pay

The other day I was in a nail salon (not the New York variety I hasten to add) and didn’t have a great experience. It took all the courage I had to pipe up and complain to the manager. And cut the technician’s tip. As I walked out, I wondered why I was so afraid of giving a little feedback? Or of tipping a little less?

Two things occurred to me.

The first was that, for people not on a fixed employment contract like a nail technician, a complaint can be the difference between having a job tomorrow or not. They can be hired and fired in less time than it takes a package to arrive from Amazon. And the nature of low-paid work means that for every person fired, there are many more waiting to be hired. Rather than investing time (and therefore money) into supporting an employee’s development, it is simply easier to fire them and replace them with an identical model (albeit one that makes fewer mistakes). So I might have just cost someone their job.

The second was, life is tough on low wages. That’s just in California, where all workers, tipped or otherwise, receive at least the minimum wage. Imagine if this was Texas or New Mexico or any of the other 17 states where employers can pay as low as the federal tipped wage of $2.13 an hour. In theory, employers should make up the difference between tips and the minimum wage. In practice, the process is complicated and full of errors. So I might have just contributed to the irregular pay that is the reason tipped workers are more than twice as likely to be in poverty as the average.

In both cases, the employer is protected at the expense of the employee. That seems lopsided. Shouldn’t employers be taking care of the very people who generate their profit? And why would people put effort into something that could be taken away tomorrow? Surely job security and decent pay generate better productivity. Henry Ford thought so. Perhaps we should adopt the same attitude today.

Originally published at tellingtimes.me on May 29, 2015.