Freelance Restaurant Workers: a Modest Proposal

Promo still from the award-winning 2007 indie film Waitress

As the “labor shortage” drags on, both sides blaming each other for America’s struggling service industry, maybe it’s time to reevaluate the market. Our service industry remains beholden to a 19th-Century model of employment, where workers are obligated to management, and management in turn dispenses pay, benefits, and task assignments. But maybe Americans’ growing unwillingness to accept that model at today’s pay scale, suggests that model has outlived its usefulness.

Sure, I know, millions of Americans will insist it’s the pay scale that’s shuffling on, zombie-like, beyond its productive life expectancy. Our minimum wage hasn’t changed since 2009, while rent has increased by over half. And for tipped workers—meaning mostly food-service workers—the minimum wage hasn’t shifted since 1991, during which time rents have nearly tripled. Okay, by that narrow, prescriptivist model, our wage structure is egregiously out-of-date.

But clearly, with today’s governmental structure, proposals to update the wage base are a dead letter. Three Administrations, representing both major parties, have essentially shrugged and admitted their options are few: nobody will support higher wages for America’s underserved, they say, so let’s not even try. The Biden Administration campaigned explicitly on improving working pay for Americans, then surrendered three months into their term. Stop wishing on a star.

It’s time to admit: tipped staff don’t need management anymore. Businesses which hire tipped staff, which again means mostly restaurants, should stop hiring staff altogether, and staff should stop applying for these jobs, like Oliver Twist with his bowl, begging: “Please, sir.” If waitstaff’s absolute wage floor hasn’t increased since my high school days, they clearly don’t need wages at all. They’re already living on tips; why stop there?

Since over two-thirds of tipped workers’ pay has to come from tips just to equal the federal minimum wage, a number that’s already absurdly low, why not the rest. Most food-service work is wholly standardized: the numbering arrangement of tables, digital requirements to enter orders, the dress and behavior codes. Unless your waitstaff wears company-branded clothing, there’s little to distinguish the crew at one restaurant from nearly any other in America.

Restaurateurs should simply maintain a bulletin board with available tables. Aspiring waitstaff simply arrive during peak hours, claim as many or as few tables as they feel comfortable serving, and voila! The staffing problem resolves itself, because waitstaff no longer work for the restaurant. They work for their individual respective customers, get paid in tips, and keep everything they make. Restaurants are off the hook altogether.

Edmonton, Alberta-based chef Serge Belair at work

Owners should embrace this change, because it means they needn’t hire, train, or schedule staff anymore. Workers simply arrive, and work until they believe they’ve earned enough. Workers should favor this because they needn’t feign any particular loyalty to restaurants that provide lousy pay and benefits. Letting waitstaff go completely freelance, frees owners and workers alike from the burdens which employment (as opposed to work) brings.

Moreover, freelance status will give waitstaff more authority over the “I don’t tip” clientele. Under current conditions, some people excuse their refusal to tip by saying “it’s the restaurant’s responsibility to pay workers.” If servers go completely freelance, then customers who refuse to pay their servers have literally stolen services. Customers who don’t pay waitstaff under the freelance model would be thieves, exactly like customers who skip out on their tab now.

I can anticipate the likely counterarguments arising. What if not enough waitstaff want to work during lucrative meal rushes, and restaurants find themselves pleading for help? What if workers only want to freelance at posh restaurants where customers are subdued and respectful? For every objection, I have the same response: that sounds like a “you problem,” and you should work to cultivate a more polite, better-paying customer base.

Indeed, changing the service industry’s worker-employer model would, arguably, expose the roots of problems that make such work undesirable now. If some minority of customers behaves boorishly, making work unbearably nasty, maybe ask yourself what you’re doing that rewards such behavior. And if workers are so reluctant to arrive during peak hours that you can’t plan ahead effectively, we return to the same solution everyone offers: pay better.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing many waiters, bartenders, and coffee baristas; all tell warm tales of regular customers with whom they became friends. Restaurants, coffee shops, and bars often become the beating hearts of local communities. Yet people leave the industry with disheartening frequency, usually for one reason: bad relationships with management. We can solve this problem by removing management completely.