He is right: whenever I have been in the States I have found the whole
tipping thing makes me both uncomfortable but also angry because I know that
I am being asked to subsidise the skinflint wages of a mean employer. I
know that I would have to pay for it through higher prices if it was
incorporated in wages but to make workers dependent on tipping is to make
them reliant on the goodwill of others, some of whom may themselves be
skinflints, others of whom may be ignorant of what is required. It does, as
Engel says, poison social relations.
Perhaps the unions should take up a struggle for a minmum wage that is
actually enough to live on.
Bruce Robinson
----- Original Message -----
From: "N" <vygotsky@charter.net>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: 10 September 2002 11:32
Subject: The forgotten anniversary
> *he forgotten anniversary*
>
> *Matthew Engel
> Tuesday September 10, 2002
> The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*
>
> America is entirely obsessed with The Anniversary this week, so it seems
> right to honour the spirit of the moment. Perhaps, though, it would make
> a change to look at a different anniversary, one being almost entirely
> unmarked. We might also consider why so many Americans hate the British
> and all other Europeans. It has, believe me, nothing to do with
> September 11 or Iraq.
>
> This autumn is the centenary of the "great strike" of 1902, the
> five-month shutdown of the anthracite coalfields which threatened to
> paralyse the country. Theodore Roosevelt's biographer, Edmund Morris,
> described it as "the greatest labour stoppage in history". A visiting
> British economist, Alexander Lowen, predicted that if the strike were
> not settled, it would cause "such social consequences as the world has
> never seen". There is a two-day conference being organised by some
> museums in Pennsylvania next month. Apart from that, no one seems to
> have noticed.
>
> About 150,000 men, mainly Slavic immigrants on the Pennsylvania
> coalfields, went on strike, demanding a nine-hour day, a 20% pay rise
> and union recognition. This was a response to conditions generally
> recognised even at the time as disgusting. The mines themselves were
> unspeakably dangerous; the company towns were tyrannically run; child
> labour was normal.
>
> The owners' leader, George Baer, was not what you might call a
> conciliatory figure: "The rights and interests of the labouring man will
> be protected and cared for, not by the labour agitators," he said, "but
> by the Christian men of property to whom God, in His infinite wisdom,
> has given control of the property rights of this country, and upon the
> successful management of which so much depends."
>
> The strike was bitter and murderous (on both sides). In October 1902,
> President Roosevelt - exasperated by the "wooden-headed" owners and
> fearful of the consequences of a winter without coal - called the two
> sides to the White House and eventually persuaded the owners to send the
> case to an adjudicating commission. The adjudicators heard the great
> attorney, Clarence Darrow, representing the miners, proclaim: "They are
> fighting for slavery. We are fighting for freedom." And six months
> later, they gave the union most of what they wanted, though not,
> crucially, full recognition.
>
> It was an early and significant breakthrough in the "progressive era".
> It was, thereafter, no longer automatically assumed that if government
> intervened at all in industrial matters, it would intervene only on the
> side of capital. Four years later, Roosevelt read The Jungle, Upton
> Sinclair's ferocious exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, and
> initiated legislation against adulterated food. (Sinclair was actually
> arguing for socialism, but over the years has probably produced more
> converts to vegetarianism.) When the Triangle blouse factory in New York
> burned down in 1913, with 146 deaths - mostly of migrant women workers
> who were effectively incarcerated inside - factory legislation followed.
>
> Still, there was no golden age for the American union movement, and
> never has been. The contest between labour and capital has been nasty
> and violent. Collective action is supposedly frowned upon in a country
> of individualists. Perhaps more to the point, in a country formed by
> migration, uppity workers are always at the mercy of the next wave of
> incomers.
>
> Still, it is assumed that, in the richest, most powerful (etc etc)
> country the world has ever seen, that nothing like 1902 could ever be
> repeated. Actually, people still live much like the Pennsylvania miners
> all over the US, under the noses of everyone else.
>
> Vaguely under cover, the writer Barbara Ehrenreich went out into
> low-wage America a couple of years back, and did a series of menial jobs
> - waitressing, scrubbing, selling - for wages above starvation levels
> for anyone who didn't care what they ate or whether they had a home or
> not. As a waitress in Key West, Florida, she was paid $2.15 an hour
> (about £1.40). What finished her off was an especially faddy and
> irritating British party of 10.
>
> Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed, is a bestseller. It has been an
> eye-opener for many Americans, but especially for outsiders. The
> European view of tipping is that it is some quasi-optional extra, a
> reward for pleasant service. In the US, a country with no health
> service, it is (and sometimes this may well be literal) seen as a matter
> of life or death.
>
> Many Americans now habitually tip 20-25%. European visitors get hurt
> when their 10-15% largesse is greeted with a filthy look. The whole
> system makes us feel deeply uncomfortable. But maybe it helps to see the
> modern American waitress as the spiritual heir of the Pennsylvania
> coalminers.
>
> matthew.engel@guardian.co.uk <mailto:matthew.engel@guardian.co.uk>
>
>
> --
> There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms
of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the
phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists.
To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the
limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into
the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of
human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find
the soul it is necessary to lose it.
> A.R. Luria
>
>
> vygotsky@charter.net
> http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/vygotsky/index.html
> http://marxists.org/subject/psychology/index.htm
>
>
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