Love, Hate and Tips: How Variable Earnings Are Rigged to Make it Risky to Work

Bottom Lines Top Dollars

In this episode the Ladies Who Crunch reflect on the coolest and best paid jobs that we all worked (or wanted to work) in our punk days, which were all strangely gigs that involved earning tips (bartenders, strippers, fancy restaurant workers), and ask, "was that shit actually as good as we thought?" And from that starting point, we go deep into the economics of tipping cultures: the good, the bad, the inequitable!

In this episode we discuss:

• How jobs compensated by tips create income precarity for the worker in the present and (potentially) in the future
• How employers use labor models like this to off-load risk from themselves onto their workers
• How handing over responsibility for part of your wage to customers invokes the curse of the million bosses
• How racism and sexualization impact earnings more blatantly when workers receive tips
• How these jobs have been impacted by the economics of COVID-19, including “maskual harassment” [pull down your mask and I’ll give you a tip], lowered sales volumes and decreased tips rates.
• How these models of variable pay rates are being replicated throughout the economy.

----

This episode is part of our second season. We are calling this season "Punks Not Dead and Capitalism Still Sucks" and it explores the question: how did 90s and 2000’s punk intersect with money, and what can that teach us today? What if you don’t “Live fast die young,” but have to meet needs over the course of your longer-than-expected life instead?

Listeners will hear stories -- from “the punkest way I ever made money,” to “the worst minimum wage job I ever had,” to “magic bullshit I did to try to avoid working” -- as well as learn facts about how the financial systems around us operate.

The show is written and produced by the Ladies Who Crunch: Queer femme artist/organizers turned financial professionals Laura and Hadassah, who explore the alternative ways of being that crafted the bedrock of who they are today to understand what they learned - and had to unlearn - from punk in order to figure out their money lives and to understand financial systems.

-------

The Ladies Who Crunch are Hadassah Damien and Laura Boo. More information about us and this podcast can be found at ladieswhocrunch.club.

Please follow us on Instagram (@bottomlinestopdollars) and if you want to send us questions or episode ideas, email us at [e-mail].