The Collegian’s Feb. 19 staff editorial, “Keep tipping student workers,” sounded a feel-good call to aid the beleaguered student employees of A.J.’s Cafe and Jitters Coffee Cart. Its haughty tone helped conjure an overblown dramatization: The fascist Bon Appétit curtailing the Hillsdale student’s right, privilege, and patriotic obligation to tip their barista — the latest in a long line of human (or natural) rights abuses visited on the suffering-yet-plucky student body. You can almost see the color draining from the cheek of coffee-addicted Chargers. The uncomfortable description of a coyly flirtatious fifth column of tippers is excusable; the central conceit — “as a cultural institution, tips affirm the humanity of the person across the counter” — is not.
The insistence that leaving a tip constitutes a genuine affirmation of humanity is distressingly narrow-minded. Leaving a tip may be a sign of acknowledged humanity, but to suggest that leaving spare change on the counter or in the jar is an affirmation of humanity, a ‘yes’ that fully encompasses the human nobility of the person across the counter, is ridiculous no matter how many eyes are winked or how firmly fingers are pressed to lips. Leave the formal definitions to the philosophy classroom, but it’s easy to see that any humanity affirmed by spare change is worth just as much. To claim the negative too, that rejection of tips is a denial of the humanity they buy, along with the gradual erosion of other tokens of humanity which the incomprehensibly reprehensible BAMCO supposedly scorns, is equally reductive. It’s a weak humanity that can be denied by removing a tip (or “not tip”) cup, and a cheap image of God that can be bought back with laundry money.
The editorial even notes that it does not matter “whether the tips of the socially-conforming college student living month to month add up to anything financially significant or represent a sentiment of genuine gratitude in the particular” — tips act through the sheer fact of their existence.
A classmate’s humanity is not something denied by not tipping, of all things, and it is irresponsible to suggest so. BAMCO seems to have very good reasons for its policy, a policy which is at any rate not the fault of our local management team. It’s possible to acknowledge that workers’ lives have been made on the margins more difficult without devaluing the humanity they possess into a battering ram for anything we don’t like. When faced with something that actually denies another’s humanity, what hyperbole will be left to run to?
Americans tip when they receive table service because those tips are an important part of the wait staff’s base income — in that case it really is offensive to skip the tip, and moral questions open up around the action. But here, BAMCO has simply forbid its employees a perk they enjoyed on top of their normal compensation. Local management may have handled the change in a confusing manner, but they were entirely within their right to enforce a long-standing policy, and accusing them of systemic worker oppression is the least-charitable way to understand their actions.
