Dialogue: Let's treat tipping as we do black widow spiders

Like other foreign pests, tipping is encroaching more and more into New Zealand society. It should be resisted, writes TIM DARE*.

If you have had a meal or coffee in Auckland lately and paid by Eftpos, you are quite likely to have been required to select not just the sum and the account the money is to come from, but also whether you wish to leave a tip.

The development is just another step in the apparently inexorable introduction of tipping into New Zealand. We should resist it. Tipping is another foreign pest to which we should close our borders.

Sadly, it may be too late. Like gorse, possums and the Varroa mite, tipping is inside the perimeters, breeding furiously and harming the services it infects. But perhaps we can still leave it in California with black widow spiders.

There are two common arguments in favour of tipping. First, tips are said to allow workers in low-paid jobs to earn an adequate income and to do so in a marvellously efficient manner. The users of the services pay directly, cutting out pesky middlemen such as restaurant owners (and perhaps the Inland Revenue Department).

Quite apart from the taxman, this is a bad argument. For one thing, it is scarcely less an import than tipping itself, assuming a foreign context that does not yet exist here and should not be encouraged.

Many countries that encourage tipping - especially the United States - do not set minimum wages for service workers. Such countries conceive of these workers as independent entrepreneurs, in the business of serving food or carrying luggage.

One should tip when in the US. The background makes a difference. If we do not tip there, we leave workers earning an inadequate wage.

But this is not an argument to tip in New Zealand. Tipping is wicked in the US, too. It is just that there it is less wicked than letting service workers carry the burden of a broader and pre-existing system of inequality.

This response does not assume that New Zealand service workers are adequately paid. Some of them certainly are not. But the argument that we should tip to remedy low wages seems to accept such wage levels as a given.

Indeed, in the US tipping is used as an argument in favour of low service wages, cementing inadequate wages into place (why increase wages if service workers already earn so much through tips?)

It is no doubt too late to do anything about the background system in the US - that's why the good person should tip there - but here the good person should rail against the introduction of the background system that makes tipping a necessary evil.

It is not clear that tipping is the proper response to low service wages anyway. The argument proceeds from a concern for service workers, but tipping places the risk of uncertain income on the very workers the argument assumes to be disadvantaged by low wages.

Furthermore, that risk is much higher in New Zealand than in a place such as the US, where tipping is already the default. Here there is a genuine risk that the users of services will not tip.

At least in the interim, and probably permanently, tipping is likely to drive down service wages without ensuring adequate replacement income.

Special problems attend the transition from a non-tipping to a tipping system and, if we have a choice, why place those problems on vulnerable service workers rather than on business owners who can plan for preset wage costs?

The second common argument for tipping links the practice to improved service. Tips, the idea goes, are an incentive for service workers to provide excellent service.

But this is also a bad argument. First, it ignores the fact that tipping - including the level of the tip - is in almost all tipping countries the norm rather than the exception, a preset charge rather than a spontaneous expression of satisfaction.

One tips in the US because it is expected and to avoid the censure of taxi-drivers, waiters, doormen, hairdressers and so on (and on and on), rather than because one is truly impressed by the level of service. And, as we see there, the more certain the tip, the less incentive to excel to earn it.

It might seem that this criticism is easily met by tipping only exceptional service. But that simply introduces another danger. If we make tips less certain - really giving clients a choice - we reduce the tendency of tips both to remedy poor wages (by increasing the chance they will not be forthcoming) and to function as an incentive to excel (if I excel only or mainly for the reward, why do so if there's a real chance it will not be given?).

This is not a purely theoretical dilemma. The US responds to it by favouring certainty over incentive with the costs noted. Requiring clients to choose not to tip - by, for instance, putting the question to them automatically when they pay by Eftpos as is increasingly common here - is an indication we are going the same way.

There is a better model that avoids these problems. In the normal case, the person we are expected to tip - our waiter, hairdresser, bellboy or taxi-driver - is already under an obligation to perform the service that our tip is intended to reward.

One sometimes hears that "tips" is an acronym for "to insure prompt service". But our waiter is already obliged to provide prompt service. The obligation is not to provide tardy service or to do a shoddy job.

The desire to do the job properly should be a sufficient incentive to do that job excellently. Ironically, tipping - justified by its tendency to improve service - in fact attacks the assumption that there is a standing obligation to do one's job well.

Rejecting tipping and promoting proper regard for professionalism encourages excellent service and places the burden of paying adequate wages where it belongs - on the entrepreneurs who ultimately profit from the efforts of service workers.

* Tim Dare is a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland's philosophy department.