Dear Salty: Do you have any comments or thoughts you’d care to share on the pay disparity between the front and back of the house? Or is this situation endemic only in my area?
Servers where I live routinely make two to four times what the cooks make, once you take tips into account. This is not a fly-by-night observation, I’ve got about 25 years back-of-the-house experience.
我是我所在地区厨师的前3-5％之一。我做咸味的烹饪，做糕点，烤面包，制作硬糖和巧克力，我做配方开发，份量控制，定价和订购。我什至做了婚礼蛋糕。作为我们行业的成员，请考虑您知道的最后20个厨师，并询问其中有多少人可以做到这一切。我认为我的自我评估并不太慷慨。哦，我不喝酒或使用毒品，所以我避免了厨师掉入的一些最严重的陷阱。
然而，尽管如此，我实际上找不到一份烹饪工作，可以在没有食品券的情况下养活我的家人。我知道所有者喜欢以借口为借口，维特斯塔夫（Waitstaff）在其工资上有一个“机会”，而我的工资则可以保证，但是当对他们来说糟糕的一天意味着他们做得和我一样，这似乎是不合理的，尤其是考虑到工作量和工作量使他们交付到桌子的食物的技能。
I’d have long ago swapped into waitering, except that as a short, not especially handsome, male, I am disqualified from being waitstaff. The owners want pretty women, not experienced men. It has reached the point that, if I never cook again professionally for the rest of my life, I will be perfectly happy with that situation.
问题是，我所在地区的工作前景很少，而且我得到的$ 11/小时烹饪的$ 11略优于我作为便利店店员，我可以获得的7- $ 9/小时。我已经尝试要求加薪，但是无论我能做什么，大多数所有者都可以将厨师视为非熟练的劳动力，并且很容易被任何其他厨师所取代。我被告知要接受它或一遍又一遍地离开。
Most grateful for your insight,
破碎和破碎的厨师
PS: I know this will almost certainly never make your column, my missive is too long and most readers probably wouldn’t care about my issues.
Broke and Broken,
Your letter hurts my heart, BB. It sucks to hear from people in this industry who bust their asses, up their games, and still barely scrape by. It’s a crying shame, and I know it’s all too real. Now, few of the servers I know are millionaires, either, but depending where you live and what kind of place you work in, the gap between FOH and BOH can be major.
So—despite your P.S., ahem!—let’s look at how servers and bartenders are paid differently than cooks and dishwashers. The Bureau Of Labor Statistics says average pay for cooks in restaurants, schools, hospitals, etc. is每小时$ 12.12.For servers，是$ 12.42。但是，在那个小时的$ 12.42时，有一个小子池大小的星号，因为David Jordan, a Houston-based employment attorney, tells188betios下载国税局认为约有40％的技巧未报告。（（I当然，永远不会做这样的事情。）如果40％的提示未报告，那么$ 12.42的每小时17.39美元。
房屋前后之间的缝隙通常在高端餐厅中最大。如果两人的账单为100美元，而服务器的收入为15％，那么一张桌子上只有15美元。并且假设他们每小时提供几张桌子，现在我们说的是30美元，每小时45美元的提示。
Now you and I already know this, but a lot of my non-industry readers might not. Tipped employees can—by federal law—be paid less than the standard federal minimum wage, which is $7.25. Federaltipped最低工资仅为2.13美元，但餐馆可以提示信用额，并向前员工的小时工资应用小费，以达到7.25美元。谁是小费的员工? Any workers “who customarily and regularly receive more than $30 per month in tips.” So, if you regularly earn tips, you’re a tipped employee. Most cooks and dishwashers aren’t regularly tipped, so they make whatever the standard minimum wage is in their area. It gets even more headache-y when you factor in all the state and local laws that are different from federal laws. If a state or city passes a minimum wage law that’s higher than the fed’s version, the local ones is the law of the land. Someone hand me an aspirin and a margarita, already.
（（Before we go further—why is there even a tipped minimum wage, you might ask? Essentially, theFair Labor Standards Actcreated it to ensure a more-even playing field. The government didn’t think it was fair that servers like me could get a regular minimum wage加tips, and theoretically, this would make things more equitable.)
现在，服务器为什么不能只与您的后面分享其中的一些技巧，对吗？长期以来，从法律上讲，这是不可能发生的 - 有很多lawsuits在上面，相信我。因此，通常，服务器保留了技巧，而Boh工人每小时都会做任何事情。但是去年，国会摆脱了屁股，实际上通过了立法。我会给你一点时间，让您从冲击中恢复过来。律师里克·沃伦（Rick Warren），该公司的亚特兰大合伙人福特和哈里森, explains it like this: Under some new rules, federally speaking, if a company pays at least the federal minimum wage and does not use the tip credit, then the tips FOH gets能够be shared with cooks and dishwashers who participate in a tip pool.
This sounds like what you’d ideally want, right, BB? For BOH to get a share of the tips, right? But whether this could ever happen at your specific restaurant depends on where you live, the structure of your wages, whether you could persuade the staff and management to set up this type of tip pool, and on and on. If there’s anything I learned from talking to these friendly lawyers, it’s that I shouldn’t dispense legal advice and that everything varies based on where you live. But it could be worth looking into, depending on where you live—some exclusions apply, see store for details, yada yada.
一些餐馆尝试过的另一个选择是完全削减技巧，并改用强制性服务费。这意味着将标准利率添加到每笔账单中，并且客户不必留下小费。然后，所有工人都是未注满员工的，该服务费可以按照餐馆所有者想要的工资收费。现在，有些服务器根本不喜欢这个系统，有时客户也不喜欢。一些餐馆尝试了强制服务的事情，切换回. Still, depending on how fancy or progressive there restaurant where you work is, it could be worth floating that idea to management. Just be prepared to duck and cover.
At the end of the day, BB, only you can decide what’s right for you and your life and your family. If you feel like better pay just isn’t possible where you live, then that’s a shitty, hard-ass reality. It’s a reality with no good answer, no matter what kind of low-wage job you have. You might have to move. You might have to borrow money to start a small business of your own. You might have to lean on your family for money while you switch careers. You might have to take a boring, soul-crushing job that pays a little better. If it’s take it or leave it, and honestly can’t take it anymore, you might just leave it. Best of luck. I’m rooting for you. Keep in touch, okay?
有关于用餐礼节的问题吗？还是我们可以帮助您的生活的一般问题？给我们发电子邮件：salty@www.jaycn.org